Studying International Relations

What are the skills required to study international relations?

To be an academic in international relations?

Yes, that's right.

That's a very good question. If we knew the answers to this, we would be able to select our Ph.D. students with a lot more intelligence. Political science, and even to some extent international relations, is not a unified discipline. Certainly it's possible to do international relations, and do very good work, working with existing datasets and testing existing propositions.

Looking at my colleagues who have been the most successful -- first of all, the ones that I know well had a passion for what they were doing, they really cared about it. They cared about issues as matters of policy and they also had strong ethical concerns. International relations has not just been an intellectual exercise for them. That's the first thing.

The second thing, and this is not a very helpful answer, but you need to pick out a problem that's important, first of all, and then to find a way of reaching an effective articulation between the problem that you're dealing with, the theoretical or causal arguments available, and the empirical data that you can work with. And that is very hard, because the problems do not always present themselves in a way in which that can be readily tested by alternative causal arguments. So working back and forth between theoretical propositions and empirical data is a real challenge in a discipline like international relations, where it's quite open-ended, where information is imperfect, where you don't necessarily get a lot of repetition, where you don't necessarily have large datasets that will help you for a lot of the things that you're interested in studying.

Is history important for a political scientist?

History was very important for me, but I don't want to say that it would be important for everybody. There are a lot of different ways to study things. One thing you have to do if you're a scholar is to figure out what you like to do. I like to learn things, and I like to learn about history. I'm perfectly happy to read secondary sources, to develop my database. But there are other people who would approach things more from a statistical perspective or might only be interested in contemporary events. I wouldn't say, necessarily, that history is important. It has certainly been important for me. I think it can yield insights but not so readily or obviously.

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