most recent published scenario is entitled “World Without the West,” supports the a Non-Western reinvention of the liberal
order, and concludes that “This argument made a lot of people uncomfortable, mostly because of an endemic and gross
overestimation of the reach, depth and attractiveness of the existing liberal order”
()
Over the past decade, the “cult of irrelevance” in political science
scholarship
has been lamented by a growing
chorus
(Putnam 2003; Nye 2009; Walt 2009).
Prominent scholars
of international affairs
have diagnosed
the roots of
the gap
between academia and policymaking,
made the case for why
political science
research is valuable for policymaking
,
and offered
a number of
ideas
for enhancing the policy
relevance of scholarship in international relations and comparative politics (Walt 2005,2011; Mead 2010; Van Evera 2010; Jentleson and Ratner 2011; Gallucci 2012; Avey and Desch 2014). Building on these insights,
several
initiatives have been formed
in the attempt to “bridge the gap.”2
Many
of the specific efforts put in place by these projects
focus on providing scholars
with the skills, platforms, and networks to better communicate
the
findings and implications
of their research
to the
policymaking community
, a necessary and worthwhile objective for a field in which theoretical debates, methodological training, and publishing norms tend more and more toward the abstract and
esoteric.
Yet enhancing communication
between scholars and policymakers
is only one component
of bridging the gap between international affairs theory and practice.
Another
crucial component of this bridge
is the
generation of substantive research programs that are actually policy
relevant
—a challenge to which less concerted attention has been paid. The dual challenges of bridging the gap are especially acute for graduate students, a particular irony since many enter the discipline with the explicit
hope of informing policy.
In a field that has an admirable devotion to pedagogical self-reflection
,
strikingly little
attention is paid to techniques for generating policy-relevant ideas
for
dissertation and other
research topics
. Although
numerous articles and conference workshops are devoted to the importance of experiential and problem-based learning, especially through techniques of simulation that emulate policymaking processes (Loggins 2009; Butcher
2012; Glasgow 2012; Rothman 2012; DiCicco 2014), little has been written about the use of such techniques for generating and developing innovative research ideas.
This article outlines an experiential and problem-based approach to
developing a
political science research
program
using scenario analysis
. It focuses especially on illuminating the research generation and pedagogical benefits of this technique by describing the use of scenarios in the annual New Era Foreign Policy
Conference (NEFPC), which brings together doctoral students of international and comparative affairs who share a demonstrated interest in policy-relevant scholarship.3 In the introductory section, the article outlines the practice of
