international relations

Should the National Science Foundation stop funding research in political science? Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) thinks so, and the American Political Science Association is predictably upset. I can't say that I think Coburn is right, but I'm finding it hard to get too exercised about it. I say this in part because I think a lot of NSF-funded research has contributed to the "cult of irrelevance" that infects a lot of political science, and because the definition of "science" that has guided the grant-making process is excessively narrow. But I also worry that trying to use federal dollars to encourage more policy-relevant research would end up politicizing academic life in some unfortunate ways.

With respect to the first issue, NSF support has undoubtedly facilitated a lot of useful data collection, especially in the field of American politics, and that the availability of this data has contributed to our knowledge of voting behavior, electoral processes, and other aspects of democratic politics. (See Paul Krugman's blog post for more on this). What's less clear is whether that additional "scientific" knowledge is actually helping real democracies perform better, or helping policymakers devise solutions to real policy problems. And in the field of international relations, I suspect that most of the NSF-funded research has been by-academics-and-for-academics, and hasn't had a discernible impact on important real-world problems.

But I haven't done a comprehensive survey of NSF funding in this field, and it's entirely possible that I missed something important. (The work of Elinor Ostrom, who just received the Nobel Prize, might be a case in point). Here's a suggestion: why doesn't the NSF put a link up on its website, listing all the grants that it has made to political science since 1995 and then listing all the research products that these projects produced, along with hyperlinks to the books or articles? That way, we could easily examine the results and debate if they were useful or not. Or if NSF doesn't want to do that, the APSA could provide this information itself. If the field has a lot of accomplishments to be proud of, surely it won't take long to compile a compelling list. And by the way, it would be interesting to compare the results of NSF-funded projects with research that was either unfunded (i.e., done without outside grants), or funded from other sources. 

But please don't just give me a citation count, because all shows is that some academic has managed to get cited by his or her fellow scholars. In other words, incest. Demonstrating real-world value will require some serious process-tracing outside the ivory tower, to show how new knowledge and ideas are actually shaping policy in positive ways.

My other concern has to do with the relationship between government funding and policy-relevance. Much as I would like more academic research to address real-world problems, I worry that it would inevitably become more politicized once the government gets involved. It is hard to imagine how a serious study of counterinsurgency, the global financial crisis, human rights, or counterterrorism policy would not have important implications for current policy debates, and some of that research would be explicitly critical of key government policies. Senator Coburn is eager to cut off political science because he thinks it is wasteful, but other politicians are bound to try to fund projects that conform to their own political prejudices. Or they will go after government-funded research that they think is "unpatriotic," just as politicians once attacked a major RAND study on the dynamics of surrender by suggesting it was encouraging "defeatism." Academics are human, and some of them are bound to start tailoring their topics and their conclusions to fit the perceived preferences of funders. That's ok in the think tank world, but universities really ought to aim for a higher standard. The other danger is that academics will be encouraged to make their research as bland as possible, so that it doesn’t offend anyone. We hardly need more of that.

As I've written elsewhere, political science ought to place more value on its ability to contribute to solving real-world policy problems, but that will require a shift in the norms and standards that the field sets for itself.   Ironically, that rethinking might happen faster if the NSF gravy train were smaller, or if academics started to worry that ideas like Coburn's might catch on.

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Stephen Brooks of Dartmouth has written a response to Justin Logan's guest post from last week in unipolarity (which challenged some of the arguments advanced in Brooks and Wohlforth, World Out of Balance). You can read it (and Logan's response) here. A smart exchange.

President Obama has decided to increase the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan by roughly 17,000 troops over the next few months. The increase will begin with an initial deployment of 8,000 Marines in the next few weeks, to be followed by subsequent deployments of an Army brigade of 4,000 troops and about 5,000 support troops next summer.

This is a fateful decision. Yes, I know; he promised that he would do this during the campaign, but ignoring campaign promises is a time-honored tradition and I can't help feeling like this was one issue where a rethink was called for. Instead of being just another one of George Bush's mishandled legacies, Afghanistan will now become Obama's war. If increasing U.S. forces doesn't work, he will face pressure to do still more, and he will incur the political costs of any subsequent failure.

As other commentators have noted, what's missing in the announcement is a clear statement of U.S. strategy. To begin with, as William Pfaff notes here, it is not clear what our present goal is. Are we trying to bolster President Karzai, and do we still hope to build a stable democracy there? Is our real objective to defeat the Taliban once-and-for-all and eradicate poppy growing while we're at it? Is the objective the long-term delegitimation of the central Asian strains of Islamic extremism, and the encouragement of more moderate forms of Islamic observance? Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has already told Congress that we are not trying to create "some kind of Central Asian Valhalla" (which is both realistic and smart), but that still leaves a lot of other possibilities open.

In fact, we have only one vital national interest in Afghanistan: to prevent Afghan territory from being used as a safe haven for groups plotting attacks on American soil or on Americans abroad, as al Qaeda did prior to September 11. It might be nice to achieve some other goals too (such as economic development, better conditions for women, greater political participation, etc.), but these goals are neither vital to U.S. national security nor central to the future of freedom in the United States or elsewhere. Deep down, we don't (or shouldn't) care very much who governs in Afghanistan, provided they don't let anti-American bad guys use their territory to attack us. As I recall, President Bush was even willing to let the Taliban stay in power in 2001 if they had been willing to hand us Osama and his henchmen.

Second, it is not clear what the additional troops are going to do once they get there. In Iraq, we faced a mostly urban-based insurgency, and the so-called "surge" focused primarily on stabilizing Baghdad. By contrast, the Taliban is a rural movement, and an additional 17,000 troops (or even 30,000), won't be enough to provide reliable protection for the Afghan people. And as Juan Cole and Rory Stewart have warned, using U.S. and NATO troops to eradicate opium poppies or to engage in other forms of social engineering is likely to provoke a local backlash and make the Taliban even more popular.

Going forward, here are some critical things to watch:

1. Do the United States and its allies devote more resources to training the Afghan national army, and do these efforts succeed? If so, then we ought to follow the Iraq model and turn the country back to the Afghans as quickly as we can.

2. Is Obama able to persuade our NATO allies to increase their own efforts there, or will they mostly free-ride on Uncle Sam? (And watch out for token deployments intended to signal that the rest of NATO is with us on this one, but that have no real effect on the ground).

3. Can Obama (or more precisely, Richard Holbrooke) get Pakistan to do more to deny safe havens in Pakistan's frontier areas? If not, more U.S. troops on one side of the border won't have much effect. Does the recent ceasefire in the Swat Valley generate a backlash against the extremists who are imposing Shariah (as my FP colleague Thomas Ricks hopes), or do these groups continue to extend their sway? 

4. President Karzai is increasingly seen as the weak leader of one of the most corrupt regimes in the world. Was this new commitment of U.S. troops linked to specific changes in Karzai's policies, or did we just do this on our own? My understanding is that the surge in Iraq also involved pressuring Prime Minister Maliki to crack down on both Shiite and Sunni militias (rather than just the latter), a decision that helped reduce violence and may even have enhanced his own legitimacy somewhat. Before we decided to up the ante in Afghanistan, did we get some a clear commitment to reform from Karzai, and do we think he has to backbone to pull it off? If not, we're in trouble. Do the names Ngo Dinh Diem or Nguyen van Thieu ring any bells?

Given Central Asia's potential to become the bottomless pit of American foreign and military policy, I hope Obama's decision pays off. But it's hard to have much confidence at this stage, until we know what the objective is and why he thinks adding more troops is going to get us there.

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Rounding up my first day at the International Studies Association annual meetings, in beautiful midtown Manhattan:

Began by chairing a panel on the forthcoming book Balance Sheet: The Iraq War and U.S. National Security, edited by John Duffield of Georgia State and Peter Dombrowski of the Naval War College. This collection will be out from Stanford University Press in June, and is an excellent attempt to conduct a scholarly assessment of the war’s impact on U.S. security interests. There are chapters by Steve Simon on the war on terror, Mike O’Hanlon on military readiness, Joe Cirincione on proliferation, Greg Gause on the Middle East region, and Clay Ramsay on public opinion. The editors sum it up in their conclusion and also attempt to wrestle with the obvious counter-factuals: what would have happened if we hadn’t gone in? Or if we had sent more troops from the beginning? Or if Saddam had ‘fessed up, or if the inspectors had continued longer? etc. The basic verdict is that the war has been bad for overall U.S. security interests, but the picture painted is not as consistently grim as some of you might think.

The book is important because Iraq remains a political football, and you can bet that Democrats and Republicans will continue to debate both the original decision and the subsequent conduct of the war, and will do so in an explicitly partisan fashion. The belief that Iraq is a disaster helped propel Obama to the Oval Office, but you can already see the neoconservative architects of the war preparing their own “stab in the back theory.” The core of this version is the argument that “the surge worked, and victory is at hand.” So if anything bad happens subsequently, it is all Obama’s fault (or so the argument will run).

That's why a book this is valuable: academic scholars don’t have pick a side in this fight; their comparative advantage lies in providing as even-handed and fair-minded an assessment as they can. And that’s what this book tries to do. Not the last word on the subject, perhaps, but an important contribution.

Then on to another panel on unipolarity, with several excellent papers. One highlight was University of Chicago Ph.D. student Nuno Monteiro’s paper “Unrest Assured: Why Unipolarity is Not Peaceful.” His basic argument is that the dominant state in a unipolar system (i.e., the unipole) will be tempted to try to maintain or improve its advantage, and especially to prevent weak states from acquiring a nuclear deterrent, which the weak state could use to constrain the unipolar's actions. Accordingly, the logic of unipolarity will tend to provoke conflicts between the unipolar and any lesser powers who refuse to accept its dominance.

It’s a very creative argument, although one can raise at least two questions. First, if Monteiro’s logic is correct, why didn’t the United States do more to stop North Korea, Pakistan, and Iran from getting a nuclear capability? We did fight a war with Iraq to prevent that from happening, but the argument suggests the U.S. should have fought these other states too. Second, if we have been in a unipolar world for the past fifteen years or so, what are the implications of the economic meltdown? Will economic constraints undermine America's dominant position, and drive us back to multipolarity?

A second highlight was Todd Sechsers’s paper “Goliath’s Curse: Asymmetric Power and Effectiveness of Coercive Threats.” Using a simple bargaining model, Sechser (from the University of Virginia) argues that great powers often fail to get their way when they issue coercive threats (which is surprising at first glance), and that this problem may in fact get worse the more powerful they are. The basic logic here concerns reputation: weak states will worry about giving in to a great power’s demands (even when the demands are fairly minor), because they will fear that the great power will just demand more later. So they resist now, to enhance their reputation for being stubborn and to convince the great power to leave them alone in the future. The core of the problem is that a very powerful state can’t make a credible commitment of restraint; it can’t reassure the weak state that it really, truly, wants just a modest concession, one that the weak state might be willing to grant if it were confident that this would be the only demand. And the bigger and stronger the coercing state is, the harder it is for that state to reassure the weak power that its aims are actually limited.

Sechser illustrates his model with a nice case study of Finland’s refusal to bow to Soviet demands in 1940, a refusal that triggered the Russo-Finnish war. But I kept thinking about the United States and Serbia in 1998-99 and the United States and Iran today. In the latter case, we have issued demands that we think are actually quite reasonable, and we’ve also said we will provide some positive benefits if we get a deal. But what if Iran is still worried that we really do have more ambitious goals (such as regime changfe) and that we will take advantage of any concessions they might make and up our demands later? If that is their view, then making relatively modest demands and offering generous incentives may not work. Paradoxically, his paper implies that we might have a better chance of cutting a deal with Iran if our position in the region were somewhat weaker, because Tehran would be less worried about the long-term implications of giving up its nuclear program. It also implies that great powers like the United States have to think about how they can provide credible reassurances to weak states, as a way of making them more willing to cut a deal.

I've oversimplified both these papers considerably; nonetheless, it was reassuring to see several scholarly projects that are directly relevant to current policy issues. If you know the ISA, this is not something one can always count on at these meetings.

Tomorrow’s highlight: a panel offering a posthumous award to Samuel Huntington for his contributions to international studies. It is a shame that Sam won’t be here to receive it himself, though I’m sure he would have been embarrassed by all the fuss.

My nominee for the silliest comment on the Iraqi provincial elections comes from -- no surprise here -- former UN Ambassador John Bolton. After praising the elections as a vindication of the "surge" and characterizing them as a setback for Iran, Bolton warned that the elections will not "put an end to Iran's ambitions. Tehran appears to believe that its influence in the region is expanding and that its neighbors and the United States have failed to respond effectively. This belief is unsurprising, given the Obama administration’s acquiescent attitude toward Tehran."

Let me get this straight. Obama has been in office for about two weeks, and Iran has already drawn the lesson from that brief period that "its influence is expanding." Has Bolton forgotten about the Bush administration, whose mishandling of Mideast policy failed to slow Iran's nuclear program and strengthened Iran's position in the Gulf, in Lebanon, and possibly in Gaza as well? The neoconservatives who ran our Mideast policy couldn’t have done more to help Iran if they had been on Tehran's payroll.

Better get used to Bolton's line of argument, because we are going to hear it over and over and over. As the new administration wrestles with the mess that Bush & Co. bequeathed them, neoconservative stalwarts will be rewriting history at every opportunity. They will try to portray our position on January 21, 2009, as basically sound, pin every subsequent bit of bad news on Obama, and hope we all forget who we got us into this situation. I have no doubt that Obama and his team will make some mistakes of their own -- and I'll be happy to criticize them when they do -- but let's not forget who dealt them the hand they are being forced to play now.

My take on the elections? They contain some encouraging signs but also some disturbing features, notably the growing accusations of fraud and the fact that exceptional measures had to be taken to prevent violent disruptions. A substantial number of Iraqis seem to be rallying around more secular parties and around Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in particular, which may make it easier for the United States to stick to the withdrawal timetable agreed to in the Status of Forces agreement signed last November. (Don't forget that a majority of Iraqis want us out either immediately or soon, and Maliki's toughminded handling of the SOFA negotiations probably boosted his popularity, even among some Sunnis.) Maliki's Dawa Party and his main coalition partners (the Supreme Islamic Council of Iraq) aren't going to be Tehran's lackeys, but as Juan Cole points out (directly contradicting Bolton’s claims), both groups have good relations with Tehran and are viewed much more favorably by Tehran than Saddam ever was.

One aspect of the results give me pause. Iraq's voters appear to have endorsed parties who favor a strong central state, as opposed to those who might favor greater regional autonomy. On the one hand, a unified Iraq is in the U.S. interest, and we want a central government that is strong enough to maintain order after U.S. forces withdraw. But on the other hand, the stronger the central government becomes, the more that the contending groups will want to control it and greater the potential for trouble with Iraq's Kurds, who still want autonomy if not independence. If Iraq's Sunni population thinks it is getting shut out of power again, then prospects for genuine political reconciliation will remain bleak and renewed violence is likely after we are gone. And that has been the $64,000 question ever since the idea of invading Iraq was first proposed: What is the political formula by which Iraq will be governed now that Saddam's brutal dictatorship is gone?

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Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad offered a predictably unhelpful response to President Barack Obama's conciliatory message to the Muslim world last week. Ahmadinejad's answer: first the United States has to "apologize" for its opposition to Iran's nuclear program and for a host of other transgressions.

I've got news for him: we've already done so -- at least in part -- and he's not going to get another apology any time soon. Obama may be hoping for a fresh start with Tehran, but he is not going to start the process by apologizing for anything. And he's certainly not going to take any steps that might bolster Ahmadinejad's popularity between now and the Iranian presidential election in June.

Yet Ahmadinejad's statement does raise a broader question: should states apologize at all, even when they've done something they regret?

You might think that realists wouldn't put much stock in apologies; aren't they just meaningless "cheap talk?" Don't realists worry more about balances of power and conflicts of interest, and don't they emphasize that international politics is a rough business where states routinely do nasty things to weaker parties? Given that world-view, what's the point of saying you're sorry?

In fact, even realists think being willing to apologize sometimes matters. But as Dartmouth's Jennifer Lind argues in her book Sorry States: Apologies in World Politics, the act of apology can be tricky too, and can easily backfire.

There are at least three good reasons for states to apologize when they have behaved badly towards others.

First, apologizing to those you have wronged is an acknowledgement of their equal status; it is a recognition that they are of sufficient stature to deserve an expression of regret. Refusing to apologize sends the message that you think the wronged party is too insignificant to warrant any contrition. To do so betrays contempt for the party we have wronged, and treating someone with contempt is bound to fuel a desire for revenge.

Second, far from being "cheap talk," apologies can be a costly signal that conveys a genuine and sincere desire for a new relationship. Why? Because apologizing to a former adversary is politically risky, and only leaders who are genuinely sorry would be willing to run the risks and bear the costs.  When a state acknowledges responsibility and expresses regret, it also opens itself up to demands for compensation or various forms of sanction and it may even lend legitimacy to opponents who then try to take advantage of the admission. The fact that there can be genuine costs to an apology explains why mere words still carry genuine meaning to the wronged party.

Third, apologizing tells others that no matter what we may have done in the past, we understand where the boundaries of acceptable conduct lie. If a country commits a heinous act and then refuses to apologize for it, others have reason to question whether its leaders are even aware that they have crossed a moral boundary. When someone shows no understanding of where the lines are, there is every reason to think they would cross them again without a second thought. To take an obvious example, had Germany failed to acknowledge the Holocaust and to openly apologize for it, people everywhere would have reason to think that Germans might easily do something similar again. The same logic explains why Pope Benedict's decision to reverse the excommunication of a Holocaust-denying priest is troubling; if the Vatican thinks Holocaust-denial is a minor matter that should take a back seat to the unity of the church, what does that tell us about the priority it places on crimes against humanity?

Even for realists, therefore, apologies can be a necessary tool of diplomacy. Apologizing for past mistakes is sometimes the best -- maybe the only -- way to wipe the slate clean and provide others with some basis for giving a country a second chance. Being a great power may mean that you never have to say you're sorry, but sometimes it is still a good idea.

But not always. Lind's book also shows that the question of apologies is more complicated than the simple picture I just sketched. She points out that states sometimes reconcile in the absence of an official apology -- as France and Germany did after World War II -- especially when former rivals realize that they have powerful strategic reasons to bury the hatchet and move on. Moreover, sometimes the act of extending an apology triggers a domestic backlash that undercuts the very leaders who are trying to promoting reconciliation, reinforcing existing suspicions and frustrating efforts to build a new relationship.  In order to balance these conflicting imperatives, states may be better off eschewing efforts to "name and shame" and relying on less accusatory forms of remembrance and regret, such as memorials to victims (on both sides), international commissions to advise on the writing of textbooks and other educational materials, and joint scholarly programs designed to address sensitive historical events.

With respect to the United States and Iran, this is good advice. To build a new relationship, both sides will have to come to terms with the various hostile acts that each has committed over the past fifty-plus years. But no Iranian leader is likely to apologize to the "Great Satan" and no U.S. president could go beyond past expressions of regret without risking a backlash here at home. A better path is to emphasize the interests that the United States and Iran do have in common -- such as a shared desire for a stable and unified Iraq, and a growing concern about the Taliban's resurgence in Afghanistan -- while addressing the obvious points of contention (e.g., Iran's nuclear program). If we can make progress on the concrete diplomatic issues, we can also begin unofficial efforts to understand how and why U.S.-Iranian relations deteriorated in the past. American and Iranian scholars could usefully explore these issues through academic exchanges and then disseminate their findings more broadly, allowing each society to learn from past mistakes but without demanding humiliating expressions of regret that neither is likely to get.

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What's the biggest problem facing the world today? Most people would probably say the downward spiral of the global economy. Over at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Steve Schwartzman, chairman of the Blackstone private equity group, said "Forty percent of the world's wealth was destroyed in last five quarters. It is an almost incomprehensible number."  NewsCorp chief Rupert Murdoch warned "the crisis is getting worse” and said that fixing it "will take a long time." 

Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu -- whose Likud Party is leading the current polls in Israel -- begs to differ. According to the Associated Press, Netanyahu told the Davos crowd that Iran's nuclear program "ranks far above the global economy as a challenge facing world leaders."

Why? According to Netanyahu, it's because the financial meltdown is reversible if governments and business make the right decisions. But "what is not reversible is the acquisition of nuclear weapons by a fanatical radical regime," he said, adding that "we have never had, since the dawn of the nuclear age, nuclear weapons in hands of such a fanatical regime."

There are plenty of good reasons to try to keep Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, and it is easy to understand why Israelis are especially concerned about Iran's nuclear program. But Netanyahu's assessment of the relative importance of these two problems is just plain wrong, for at least five reasons.

First, let's be clear about the current state of play. Iran has no nuclear weapons today, and we still don't know for sure if they will ever get them. By contrast, the economic crisis is a reality now. Iran cannot build a bomb today because it has no plutonium or highly-enriched uranium (HEU). Its centrifuges are producing low-enriched uranium (LEU), but you can’t build a bomb with that. In theory it could enrich its LEU to weapons grade, but its LEU stockpile is under IAEA surveillance and the diversion would be detected (this turns out to be something the IAEA is very good at doing). As William Luers, Thomas Pickering, and Jim Walsh note in a sensible article in the latest New York Review of Books, if Iran wants a bomb, its choices "are to cheat and get caught or to kick the inspectors out." Unless Iran has a secret clandestine enrichment program up and running somewhere (which we’ve found no sign of up till now), it’s hard to see the current situation as anywhere near as serious as our economic problems today.

Second, Netayanhu is wrong to say that the world have never seen such a "fanatical regime" with nuclear weapons. Iran's government has many unsavoury qualities, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said some stupid and offensive things about the Holocaust and about Israel. But "fanatical?" By historic standards Iran's government isn't even in the top rank, and its foreign policy behavior is hardly irrational. Joseph Stalin was an even greater mass murderer than Adolf Hitler, and his successors were ruthless, ideologically-driven men with scant regard for human life. They had a large nuclear arsenal, and yet we managed to wage and win the Cold War against them anyway. Similarly, Mao Zedong was directly responsible for millions of deaths, and he also made a number of shockingly cavalier remarks about nuclear war. Indeed, Secretary of State Dean Rusk once told a Congressional committee that "a country whose behavior is as violent, irascible, unyielding and hostile as that of Communist China is led by leaders whose view of the world and of life itself is unreal." Yet Mao had the bomb and never used it; indeed, Chinese nuclear weapons policy has been quite circumspect for over forty years.

Third, it is remarkably self-centered for Netanyahu to declare Iran's program to be a greater challenge than the global recession. The economic crisis is already harming many millions of people around the world, and it is likely to have an enduring impact on how millions of people -- even billions -- live their lives. It will lower life expectancy, alter life-opportunities, change demographic patterns, and affect the tenor of politics in many places, probably for the worse. Just look at all the social and political ills spawned by the Great Depression and you get some idea what a protracted global recession might do today. Even if Iran did get nuclear weapons someday, that is mostly a regional problem rather than a global one. Iran's neighbors would have legitimate concerns, but does Netanyahu really think that this is a bigger issue than the world economy for the leaders of Brazil, Canada, Indonesia, Norway, Japan, China, Chile, South Africa, or New Zealand?

Fourth, let's not forget that Israel has several hundred nuclear weapons of its own, and Israel's American ally has several thousand of them. If Iran were to acquire a few nuclear weapons someday, it could not use them without triggering its own destruction. Iran's government may support terrorist groups like Islamic Jihad that employ suicide bombers, but Iran's leaders show no signs of being suicidal themselves.

Finally, the more panicked people sound about the prospect of an Iranian arsenal, the more that Iranians might falsely conclude that getting a few bombs might actually give them a lot of leverage. This sort of overheated rhetoric may also convince some Israelis that an Iranian bomb would be an existential threat and convince them to leave, which in turn might give some Iranians an additional reason to pursue that option. Ironically, by portraying a legitimate security concern as an imminent peril, Netanyahu and others of his ilk may in fact be undermining Israel's long-term future.

Netanyahu's remarks may help him win more votes back in Israel, but my guess is that didn't win him much sympathy in Davos. To a sophisticated crowd with a global perspective, I'll bet it sounded like special pleading, which is precisely what it was.

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I'd like to follow up last week's query about the "IR Hall of Fame" with a new "open-mic" question: who are the most underrated scholars in the history of the field?

As I suspect most academics realize, the ivory tower is a less-than-perfect meritocracy. Success and renown are partly a function of one's work, of course, but there are a lot of random elements in the process. Timing matters, picking a "hot topic" for one's early work helps, being plugged into a well-placed network of scholars is a big plus, and sheer good fortune plays a role, too. All this is to say that cream usually rises, but not necessarily as far as it should.

To be clear: by "underrated" I don't necessarily mean people who remained completely obscure despite having done great work. Rather, I would also include individuals who have done excellent work that did attract some attention, but nonetheless never got quite as much attention as it deserved.

My nominee in this category would be John Herz. Among other things, Herz identified the core concept of the "security dilemma" -- which he described as:

A social constellation in which units of power (such as states or nations in international relations) find themselves whenever they exist side by side without higher authority that might impose standards of behavior upon them and thus protect them from attacking each other. In such a condition, a feeling of insecurity, deriving from mutual suspicion and mutual fear, comples these units to compete for ever more power in order to find more security, an effort which proves self-defeating because complete security remains ultimately unobtainable."

Herz also wrote important works contrasting political realism and political idealism, on international law, and on the implications of nuclear weapons for world politics. He's a respected figure in the history of the field, but as Jana Puglierin puts it in the current issue of the British journal International Relations (a special issue devoted to Herz's thought), he "has so far not had the recognition his contribution to theorizing world politics deserves."

So the floor is open: who are the other thinkers who deserve more recognition than they have heretofore received?

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