What Is the Social Responsibility of Social Scientists to Influence National Security Affairs?

Abstract

Mainstream scholars of IR favor policy-relevant research, that is the agenda to influence government policymakers by offering policy recommendations. In this article, I offer a different perspective by presenting alternative arguments about social scientists’ responsibility to influence. By drawing on themes of public sociology and critical sociology, security studies and public policy, I argue that the core of this responsibility is to seek to influence policy via engagement with the public rather than with policymakers.

Keywords

public policy democracy deliberation critical sociology public sociology

In his insightful book, Cult of the Irrelevant, Michael Desch (2019) assumes that scholars (he refers to the United States) should aspire to influence government policy makers by offering policy recommendations. He assumes rather than argues, and only two pages (pp. 247–48) are devoted to substantiating this assumption. Informed by this tacit assumption, Desch makes the case that, since the 1980s, a growing scholarly/policy gap has developed as the result of the professionalization of political science. “[A]s the number of scholarly articles using sophisticated quantitative or formal methods increased since 1980,” he writes, “the percentage of them offering concrete policy recommendations—the core of policy relevance—has declined” (p. 3).

Thus, Desch favors policy-relevant research. My intention is not to argue against his assertions but rather to offer a different perspective by presenting alternative arguments about social scientists’ responsibility to influence. In this regard, it is the essence of responsibility that is of concern, not necessarily its impact. I will argue that the core of this responsibility is to seek to influence policy via engagement with the public rather than with policy makers.

This article begins by making two distinctions to clarify the complexity of scientists’ responsibility and proceeds by determining the democratic imperative to engage with the public. From this imperative derives the role of social scientists in policy debates and its fulfillment, which may also improve policymaking despite the rising bar to influence.

Types of Knowledge

Sociologist Michael Burawoy (2005) famously offered a typology of the broader division of sociological labor. He identified four types of sociologists that can be applied to social scientists at large, by asking “knowledge for whom?” and “knowledge for what?” The responsibility advocated by Desch is similar to what Burawoy categorized “policy sociology,” namely:

[S]ociology in the service of a goal defined by a client. Policy sociology’s raison d’etre is to provide solutions to problems that are presented to us, or to legitimate solutions that have already been reached. (p. 9)

But we have to highlight the roles and responsibilities of three other types of sociologists. While professional sociology “supplies true and tested methods, accumulated bodies of knowledge, orienting questions, and conceptual frameworks” (p. 10), most important, in my view, are the roles performed by public and critical sociologists. The public sociologist “strikes up a dialogic relation between sociologist and public in which the agenda of each is brought to the table, [and] in which each adjusts to the other” (p. 9).

He distinguished between traditional and organic public sociology. Traditional sociologists “write in the opinion pages of our national newspapers where they comment on matters of public importance…[while] the publics being addressed are generally invisible in that they cannot be seen…[The] traditional public sociologist instigates debates within or between publics, although he or she might not actually participate in them” (p. 7). Alternatively, organic public sociologists work “in close connection with a visible, thick, active, local and often counterpublic…[such as] a labor movement, neighborhood associations, communities of faith, immigrant rights groups, human rights organizations. Between the organic public sociologist and a public is a dialogue, a process of mutual education” (pp. 7–8).

Critical sociology’s role is:

[…] to examine the foundations—both the explicit and the implicit, both normative and descriptive—of the research programs of professional sociology.…Critical sociology attempts to make professional sociology aware of its biases, silences, promoting new research programs built on alternative foundations…. (p. 10)

Critical sociology is inclined toward reflexive knowledge, concerned with a dialogue about the ends of society rather than instrumental knowledge, that is, knowledge for problem solving (p. 11).

Of most relevance to the issue of influence is the combination of public and critical social science. The question, “knowledge for whom?” and the aim of asserting influence over policymaking do not necessarily lead to Desch’s type of “policy social science.”

Burawoy’s thesis drew criticism. However, much of it is irrelevant to my interest in the issue of influencing policies of national security rather than, for example, social policies. So, too, the critic regarding his distinction between the traditional and organic work of public sociologists and the division of labor between the categories of sociology (Goldberg & van den Berg, 2009). For the purpose of this article, suffice it to draw on his call to put a premium on the engagement in dialogue with publics rather than with policy makers or academic audiences.

Another distinction was provided by international relations (IR) scholar Robert Cox (1981). He famously argued that “Theory is always for someone, and for some purpose” (p. 129), and therefore, he distinguished between two purposes of research. The first is problem-solving, similar to Desch’s orientation and to Burawoy’s policy sociology. This approach:

[…] takes the world as it finds it, with the prevailing social and power relationships and the institutions into which they are organised, as the given framework for action. The general aim of problem-solving is to make these relationships and institutions work smoothly by dealing effectively with particular sources of trouble. (pp. 128–29)

As James Bohman (2002, p. 506) asserted, this purpose “models the social scientist on the engineer, who masterfully chooses the optimal solution to a problem of design.” This purpose reflects the mainstream in current IR studies.

The second purpose leads to critical theory, which is similar to Burawoy’s critical sociology:

It is critical in the sense that it stands apart from the prevailing order of the world and asks how that order came about. Critical theory, unlike problem-solving, does not take institutions and social and power relations for granted but calls them into question by concerning itself with their origins and how and whether they might be in the process of changing. (p. 129)

By nature, critical theory is a less policy-oriented approach, but it may still have policy implications, as we shall see.

Engagement With the Public

Following these distinctions, the core of social scientists’ responsibility is to influence policy via engagement with the public. Robert Putnam opened his presidential address at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in 2002 by asking his colleagues to think about their professional responsibility. He claimed that “an important and under-appreciated part of our professional responsibility is to engage with our fellow citizens in deliberation about their political concerns, broadly defined” (Putnam, 2003, p. 249).

In my opinion, this responsibility prevails over the agenda to influence policy makers directly. Why? Because this responsibility is part of the democratic imperative. As political theorist John Dryzek (1989, p. 100) warned, “most policy analysis efforts to date are in fact consistent with an albeit subtle policy science of tyranny…[which is] any elite-controlled policy process that overrules the desires and aspirations of ordinary people.” This is especially so as the complexity of public problems increases bureaucratization and technocratization at the expense of democratic politics.

Dryzek, together with Douglas Torgerson (1993), further argued that Harold Lasswell’s proposal for “the policy sciences of democracy” (1951) contains the potential to encourage participatory democracy by encouraging deliberation. This involves:

[…] a free discourse among political equals in which interests and values are subject to scrutiny - in contradistinction to the simple registration and aggregation of preferences typically characterizing liberal conceptions of democracy. (p. 132)

In a more moderate but still progressive manner, Robert Dahl (1985), for example, proposed to deal with the inability of citizenry to cope with complex issues, such as nuclear strategy, by utilizing the mass media to foster politically competent citizens.

Social scientists have a role in informing this deliberation. The issue is not information about policies, which is more accessible than ever, but rather, as social critic Christopher Lasch (1995, p. 181) noted: “What democracy requires is public debate, not information.…Information, usually seen as the precondition of debate…” Here, social scientists have the task of simply educating the public or at least helping it to transform information into a knowledgeable discourse.

Furthermore, encouraging participatory democracy also constitutes an attempt to reduce the distinction between citizen and expert; or as political scientist Charles Lindblom (1986, p. 361) famously put it, “Instead of serving the needs of officials alone, help for the ordinary citizen.”

Furthermore, and following Habermas’s Discourse Ethics (1999), exclusion from political participation by restricting the ability of affected parties to voice claims, diminishes the legitimacy of policymaking (Forester, 1995, p. 387). Therefore, the idea of deliberation embraces not only the range of issues discussed and the openness required but also the imperative, informed by critical scholars, to give voice to the voiceless, powerless, and unrepresented, “placing the experience of those men and women and communities for whom the present world order is a cause of insecurity rather than security at the center of the agenda” (Jones, 1999, p. 159). Here, public sociology and critical studies coalesce. This imperative is not necessarily fulfilled by direct unmediated relation to the public, in terms of Burawoy’s organic public sociology (and the concerns this raised about harming scholars’ autonomy [McLaughlin et al., 2017, p. 294]), but by raising issues that can facilitate wider policy debates. Therefore, using tools informed by critical studies when performing public labor has analytical advantages in informing deliberation by challenging or undermining presupposed assumptions, even if one rejects the normative commitment of public labor (which Burawoy [2017] reiterated). To emphasize, the issue is not about finding the best strategy to gain the most influence but rather determining the supreme commitment of social scientists.

Scientists’ Role in Policy Discourse

This brings us to the overall role social scientists should play in policy discourse, provided that they assume the role of “public” rather than “policy” scientists. According to Weber (1958 [1922], p. 125), the role of an academic teacher is to expose “inconvenient” facts and compel the audience to accustom itself to their existence. This is similar to what sociologist Robert Merton later termed “organized skepticism” (Turner, 2007, p. 170). For Dryzek (1989, p. 117), it is the role of providing critical contributions to policy discourse which challenges established and entrenched ways of thinking. Critical policy analysts view their role as shying away from mainstream rationalistic policy analysis, seeing it as an ideology that masks elite political and bureaucratic interests. As an alternative, scholars call for more participatory policy analysis to encourage deliberative interactions between citizens, analysts, and policy makers by providing access and explanation of data to all parties in order to facilitate choice between policies (Fischer, 2007, pp. 100-103). A more radical, albeit less scientific, approach was taken by Noam Chomsky (1967) in his famous Vietnam-era article, The Responsibility of Intellectuals. There, he asserted, “Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions.”

Noncritical, problem-solving social scientists can assume this role as much as their critical colleagues, but critical scholars would depart further from the task of identifying solutions to problems defined by policymakers. In this spirit, following Cox, IR scholar Chris Brown (2013) described the combination of “critical problem-solving”:

This would be “problem-solving” theory in so far as it directly engaged with the pressing social problems, but it would also be ‘critical theory’ in so far as it did not take the definitions of such problems for granted. (p. 494)

Similarly, the aim of critical policy scholars (motivated to solve policy problems, not just to criticize power relations) is “to deconstruct ‘taken for granted’ regimes of policy practices and objects, while exposing their particular exclusionary logics and proposing alternative counterlogics” (Howarth & Griggs, 2012, p. 310). To this end, analysts problematize the problematizations of the public issue under study. They ask what the problems inherent in an issue really are by evaluating the current problematizations and explaining why that issue is problematized or framed in a specific form by specific actors (Fairclough, 2013, p. 185).

Take, for example, the peace democracy theory. It is a problem-solving approach in the way it was used, and even misused, to legitimize the United States’ overseas military interventions (see Ish-Shalom, 2006). But a critical social scientist may challenge policies when this theory is practically involved, not only by asking what the historical roots of the linkage between peace and democracy are, which is a purely critical reflection, but also by asking more policy-relevant questions relevant to the desire to democratize specific regions. For example, “…with the market restraining the sphere within which democracy can operate…how [can] the capitalist system…shape or constrict any Democratic Peace in existence?” (Hobson, 2011, p. 1919). In a similar vein, a critical policy scholar would question this “regime of policy” that highlights the centrality of peace democracy and seek alternative framings of the problem of how (if at all) to stabilize nondemocratic regimes in which the West is invested.

In this context, asking whose interests the security discourse serves might be another contribution to the policy discourse. As Browning and McDonald (2013, p. 238) argued, unlike traditional approaches to the study of security, where the focus is on the study of the threat and use of force, critical approaches “serve to point to the normative preferences inherent in…choices [between policies] and the political implications following from such choices.” In this spirit, critical theory “must bring to consciousness latent interests, commitments, or values that give rise to, and orient, any theory” (Devetak, 2005, p. 168).

Furthermore, critical and noncritical scholars alike can provide new perspectives to IR studies to energize deliberation and stimulate new questions. For example, we can assume that expectations of military success matter most in enhancing casualty tolerance (Gelpi et al., 2009). However, when informing a policy debate and assessing the capacity to mobilize, social scientists may question the extent to which success is also subject to political interpretation rather than simply determined by public opinion polls. All the more so as, owing to different lived experiences, different groups perceive the same policy in different ways, and thus, we expect multiple meanings or interpretations (Yanow, 2007, pp. 113–15). Therefore, success is intersubjectively interpreted by different social groups according to their identities and the derived concept of security, as well as their exposure to security risks and varying abilities to translate their perception of success or failure into antiwar collective action (see Levy, 2013).

Another critical task that informs deliberation is to expose unintended, potential consequences produced by proposed policies. It was the sociologist Alejandro Portes (2000) who (following Robert Merton) called on the community of sociologists to focus on the unanticipated consequences of purposive actions. He proposed questioning the linear process representing the straight arrow between the avowed goal of actors (state agencies being relevant to our case) and the achieved end-state. He identified several conditions that interrupt the routine implementation of this linear relationship.

For instance, a policy-oriented study mapped the unintended consequences of peacekeeping operations. To give one example, it found that the intervening humanitarian community and other external actors distorted the local economy (where the intervention took place) and stimulated the development of a dual economy, worsening the conditions of the local population (Aoi et al., 2007, p. 270).

In this spirit, a group of Israeli sociologists and political scientists initiated a few sociology-informed scenario workshops, focused on different aspects of conscription policies in Israel. The goal was to inform public debates. For example, one workshop was dedicated to the issue of drafting ultra-Orthodox males. Historically, this group had been exempt from military service for religious reasons. However, in tandem with the growth in rates of exemptions, the Supreme Court of Justice has been intervening in this policy since 1998. In a series of decisions, the court limited the authority of the government and the Knesset to exempt ultra-Orthodox males and, in response, the military made more efforts to enlist them voluntarily by developing special tracks. Against this background, one of the insights that emerged in the workshop was that proposed attempts to coerce conscription would be counter effective. They may have the unintended consequence of inciting extreme responses among the ultra-Orthodox leadership and disrupting the trends of pragmatism which have led to the voluntary integration of a few thousand ultra-Orthodox males into the military (Harel, 2012). Nevertheless, this insight-turned-policy recommendation was disregarded by public-opinion leaders and policy makers, though it proved correct over time.

To alleviate concerns about negative impacts of such engagements, it is worth emphasizing that inasmuch as social sciences are contested fields, scientists might not present their knowledge in the public arena as unquestioned but rather encourage dialogue and debate (see Holmwood, 2007), including among experts and scholars. Abiding by this imperative mitigates the inequality inherent in the participation of scientists in the public arena (see Tittle, 2004). Nevertheless, it is precisely the alternative way—engagement with policy makers—that increases political inequality, by working in the service of the “elite-controlled policy process,” in Dryzek’s words.

Democratization Improves Policymaking

This proposed form of democratizing the policy sciences is not only a democratic imperative; it can actually improve policymaking. First, democratization may improve the results by increasing deliberation. As Chaim Kaufman (2004, p. 5) concluded, “…the strong civic institutions and robust marketplaces of ideas in mature democracies [that allow]…debates in which their reasoning and evidence are subject to public scrutiny” should protect democracies from severe mistakes. However, this structure failed to deliver any benefits in the lead-up to the Iraq War. Second, regardless of the policy preferences, citizens may have more confidence in a policy about which they were consulted (DeLeon, 1992, p. 127).

Third, keeping scholars at a distance from policymaking enables innovative ideas to arise. As Charles Lindblom (1986, p. 363) urged his colleagues: “Instead of a preoccupation with feasible solutions, [prefer] a variety of studies to free the mind from its impairments.”

Alas, Desch does not properly consider the cost of engagement with policy makers that is the cost of conservatism. For good reason, the public policy scholar Aaron Wildavsky (1985, p. 31) concluded that, “policy analysis is profoundly conservative,” and much of it is derived from the analysts’ engagement with policymaking. All the more so, as governments encourage the establishment of think tanks that have proliferated since the 1980s, functioning at the intersection of academia and politics. Nevertheless, because of their close engagement with policy makers, public policy scholar Diane Stone (2006) concluded that:

[…] it may be less the case that think tanks have an impact on government and more the case that governments or certain political leaders employ these organizations as tools to pursue their own interests and provide intellectual legitimation for policy. (p. 155)

To better illustrate the conformity bias, it is important to examine the type of policy recommendations once they have been offered. Let’s take North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s attack on Libya (2011) as an example, focusing on the debate about whether the United States should have been militarily involved in Libya to help the rebels against Gaddafi and stop the perceived atrocities against civilians. After the attack started, IR scholar Stephen Walt (2011a) argued that leaders didn’t “bother to ask what recent social science tells us about the likely results of our intervention,” and he cited a few studies showing why interventions are most likely to fail.

However, I reviewed the debate in Foreign Policy magazine, during the weeks leading up to the campaign (January–March 2011). They were mostly focused on issues such as legality and multilateralism (Rothkopf, 2011), how to achieve the goals (e.g., Vandewalle, 2011), responsibility for casualties in case of action versus inaction (Feaver, 2011), the United States’ limited interests in Libya (Walt, 2011b), and the criteria for a humanitarian intervention (e.g., Traub, 2011). I saw no significant attempt to deal with the long-term implications of foreign-imposed regime change by using (among other sources) the body of knowledge mentioned by Walt. Surely, such an attempt might also have necessitated an in-depth analysis of the structure of power in Libya to evaluate the likelihood of success. The result was that the intervention failed, and Libya has devolved into a failed state with mounting violent deaths (Kuperman, 2015).

In other words, social scientists largely refrained from sharing their knowledge with the public in one of the major forums where the policy debate took place. They refrained from waking the public up to the likely devastating outcomes of the intervention agenda. Moreover, it was precisely the type of discourse that could correspond with policy makers’ conceptions—the one which was employed by the above-mentioned social scientists—which failed to challenge the assumptions underlying the policy agenda. As Torgerson (2007) generally concluded, “[I]f experts…engage directly in the politics of expertise, they can be drawn into the prevailing discourse, speaking on its terms and thus reinforcing it” (p. 12) rather than changing the discourse and challenging policy makers.

The Rising Bar to Influence

To further understand the role of social scientists, we should realize that it is not only (if at all) that social research became less policy-relevant, as Desch identified, but that policymaking became more autonomous in the domains of foreign affairs and military policies. As students of IR and civil–military relations have argued, by deploying volunteer, technology-intensive militaries with the partial integration of contractors, governments reduced the level of social mobilization, allowing them to bypass the popular will when they initiated war, and to defuse antiwar protest (see, e.g., Eikenberry, 2013; Starr, 2010; Vennesson, 2011). In other words, policy makers acquired more freedom of action. Furthermore, it is not only that policy makers increased their autonomy, but the public, as in the case of America, lost faith in expertise as part of an assertion of autonomy and demonstration of independence from the elites (Nichols, 2019).

Therefore, this process raises the bar of the academic community’s professional commitment, as much as it increases the challenge that this commitment entails to foster deliberation. This challenge is even further complicated, to the extent that representation of existential threats may remove the issue from the sphere of “normal politics” into the sphere of “panic politics,” curtailing deliberation in favor of urgency and secrecy, against which proponents of securitization warn (Browning & McDonald, 2013, p. 241). The challenge faced by social scientists is to repoliticize threats as a means of bringing them back to deliberative democracy. This challenge is not met by locking analysis of the threats and how to remove them into partisan debates but by exposing latent interests, unmasking the ideological biases of security experts, and bringing norms and values back into the debate (see Fischer [2007] and also Browning and McDonald [2013], and Devetak [2005], cited above).

In Closing

As an alternative to the policy-oriented approach taken by Desch, I have tried to advance the concept of public social science combined with a critical approach. As Burawoy argued (2005, p. 18):

[C]ritical and policy sociologies are at odds—the one clinging to its autonomy and the other to its clients—but if each would recognize parts of the other in itself, mutuality could displace antagonism.

This article was aimed at mitigating such antagonism.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Yagil Levy

References

Aoi

de Coning

Thakur

(2007). Conclusion: Can unintended consequences be prevented, contained and managed. In Aoi

de Coning

Thakur

(Eds.), Unintended consequences of peacekeeping operations (pp. 268–79). United Nations University Press.

Bohman

(2002). How to make a social science practical: Pragmatism, critical social science and multiperspectival theory. Millennium, 31(3), 499–524.

Brown

(2013). The Poverty of grand theory. European Journal of International Relations, 19(3), 483–97.

Browning

C. S.

McDonald

(2013). The Future of critical security studies: Ethics and the politics of security. European Journal of International Relations, 19(2), 235–55.

Burawoy

(2005). For public sociology. American Sociological Review, 70(1), 4–28.

Burawoy

(2017). Third-wave sociology and the end of pure science. In Nichols

Lawrence T.

(Ed.), Public sociology—The Contemporary debate (pp. 317–35). Routledge.

Chomsky

(1967, February 23). A Special supplement: The Responsibility of intellectuals. The New York Review of Books. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1967/02/23/a-special-supplement-the-responsibility-of-intelle/

Cox

R. W.

(1981). Social forces, states and world orders: Beyond international relations theory. Millennium, 10(2), 126–55.

Dahl

(1985). Controlling nuclear weapons: Democracy versus guardianship. Syracuse University Press.

10.

DeLeon

(1992). The democratization of the policy sciences. Public Administration Review, 52(2), 125–29.

11.

Desch

M. C.

(2019). Cult of the irrelevant: The Waning influence of social science on national security. Princeton University Press (Kindle).

12.

Devetak

(2005). Critical theory. In Burchill

Linklater

Devetak

Donnelly

Nardin

Paterson

Reus-Smit

True

(Eds.), Theories of international relations (pp. 162–86). Palgrave Macmillan.

13.

Dryzek

J. S.

(1989). Policy sciences of democracy. Polity, 22(1), 97–118.

14.

Dryzek

J. S.

Torgerson

(1993). Democracy and the policy sciences: A progress report. Policy Sciences, 26(3), 127–37.

15.

Eikenberry

K. W.

(2013). Reassessing the all-volunteer force. The Washington Quarterly, 36(1), 7–24.

16.

Fairclough

(2013). Critical discourse analysis and critical policy studies. Critical Policy Studies, 7(2), 177–97.

17.

Feaver

P. D.

(2011, March 10). The Libya debate needs to be a bit more rigorous. Foreign policy. https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/03/10/the-libya-debate-needs-to-be-a-bit-more-rigorous/

18.

Fischer

(2007). Policy analysis in critical perspective: The epistemics of discursive practices. Critical Policy Analysis, 1(1), 97–109.

19.

Forester

(1995). Response: Toward a critical sociology of policy analysis. Policy Sciences, 28(4), 385–96.

20.

Gelpi

Feaver

P. D.

Reifler

(2009). Paying the human costs of war: American public opinion and casualties in military conflicts. Princeton University Press.

21.

Goldberg

van den Berg

(2009). What do public sociologists do? A Critique of Burawoy. Canadian Journal of Sociology, 34(3), 765–802.

22.

Habermas

(1999). Moral consciousness and communicative action. MIT Press.

23.

Harel

(2012, September 9). Despite recent furor, Haredi men are hardly feeling the draft. Haaretz.com. https://www.haaretz.com/amos-harel-hardly-feeling-the-draft-1.5158321

24.

Hobson

(2011). Towards a critical theory of democratic peace. Review of International Studies, 37(4), 1903–22.

25.

Holmwood

(2007). Sociology as public discourse and professional practice: A Critique of Michael Burawoy. Sociological Theory, 25(1), 46–66.

26.

Howarth

Griggs

(2012). Poststructuralist policy analysis: Discourse, hegemony and critical explanation. In Fischer

Gottweis

(Eds.), The Argumentative turn revisited: Public policy as communicative practice (pp. 305–342). Duke University Press (Kindle).

27.

Ish-Shalom

(2006). Theory as a hermeneutical mechanism: The Democratic-peace thesis and the politics of democratization. European Journal of International Relations, 12(4), 565–98.

28.

Jones

R. W.

(1999). Security, strategy, and critical theory. Lynne Rienner.

29.

Kaufmann

(2004). Threat inflation and the failure of the marketplace of ideas: The Selling of the Iraq war. International Security, 29(1), 5–48.

30.

Kuperman

A. J.

(2015). Obama’s Libya debacle: How a well-meaning intervention ended in failure. Foreign Affairs, 94(2), 66–77.

31.

Lasch

(1995). Journalism, publicity, and the lost art of argument. Mediation Studies Journal, 9(1), 81–95.

32.

Lasswell

H. D.

(1951). The Policy orientation. In Lerner

Lasswell

H. D.

(Eds.), The Policy sciences, (pp. 3–15). Stanford University Press.

33.

Levy

(2013). How military recruitment affects collective action and its outcomes. International Studies Quarterly, 57(1), 28–40.

34.

Lindblom

C. E.

(1986). Who needs what social research for policymaking? Knowledge, 7(4), 345–366.

35.

McLaughlin

Kowalchuk

Turcotte

(2017). Why sociology does not need to be saved: Analytic reflections on public sociologies. In Nichols

L. T.

(Ed.), Public sociology—The contemporary debate (pp. 289–316). Routledge.

36.

Nichols

(2019, August 13). How America lost faith in expertise and why that’s a giant problem. Foreign affairs. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/1119262

37.

Portes

(2000). The Hidden abode: Sociology as analysis of the unexpected. American Sociological Review, 65(1), 1–18.

38.

Putnam

R. D.

(2003). APSA presidential address: The Public role of political science. Perspective on Politics, 1(2), 249–255.

39.

Rothkopf

(2011, March 10). Libya is a crucial test for Obama the multilateralist. Foreign policy. https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/03/10/libya-is-a-crucial-test-for-obama-the-multilateralist/

40.

Starr

(2010). Dodging a bullet: Democracy’s gains in modern war. In Kier

Krebs

R. R.

(Eds.), In war’s wake: International conflict and the fate of liberal democracy (pp. 50–66). Cambridge University Press.

41.

Stone

(2006). Public policy analysis and think tanks. In Fischer

Miller

G. J.

Sidney

M. S.

(Eds.), Handbook of public policy analysis theory, politics, and methods (pp. 149–157). CRC Press.

42.

Tittle

C. R.

(2004). The Arrogance of public sociology. Social Forces, 82(4), 1639–1643.

43.

Torgerson

(2007). Policy discourse as dialogue: Emergent publics and the reflexive turn. Critical Policy Studies, 1(1), 1–17.

44.

Traub

(2011, March 11). Stepping in. Foreign policy. https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/03/11/stepping-in/

45.

Turner

(2007). Merton’s ‘norms’ in political and intellectual context. Journal of Classical Sociology, 7(2), 161–178.

46.

Vandewalle

(2011, March 10). How not to intervene in Libya. Foreign policy. https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/03/10/how-not-to-intervene-in-libya/

47.

Vennesson

(2011). War without the people. In Strachan

Scheipers

(Eds.), The Changing character of war (pp. 241–258). Random House. Oxford University Press.

48.

Walt

S. M.

(2011a, March 24). Social science and the Libyan adventure. Foreign policy. https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/03/24/social-science-and-the-libyan-adventure/

49.

Walt

S. M.

(2011b, March 8). What should we do about Libya? (Updated). Foreign policy. https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/03/08/what-should-we-do-about-libya-updated/

50.

Weber

(1958). Science as a vocation. Daedalus, 87(1), 111–134.

51.

Wildavsky

(1985). The Once and future school of public policy. The Public Interest, 79(1), 25–41.

52.

Yanow

(2007). Interpretation in policy analysis: On methods and practice. Critical Policy Analysis, 1(1), 110–122.