the-evolution-of-international-security-studies

the five driving forces as general analytical categories 59status of security scholars. ISS is constituted as an academic field, whichmeans that it gains its legitimacy from being a particular form of knowledgehowever broadly conceived. But it is also a field which has beenformed around a set of perceived urgent policy questions and the boundarybetween the academic and the political, the scholar and the advisor,has thus always been a tenuous and debated one. Academics may chooseto act politically, either directly as advisors or as public intellectuals whoengage in debate in the attempt to influence policy decisions. The advisoryrole blurs in most cases the lines between scientific authority andpolicy advocate, while the identity of the public intellectual is built upona particular epistemic authority that sets him or her aside from ‘the averagecitizen’. As an illustration, many universities have a policy for howstaff should be listed when making media appearances: when speakingon matters of security one gives one’s university affiliation, when writingabout the joys of gardening one does not. Security scholars may speakabout politics, as did prominent Realists in the lead-up to the war againstIraq in 2003 (Mearsheimer and Walt, 2003), but they also need to be carefulto make sure that they do not compromise their academic authorityand become viewed as ‘merely’ politicising. Exactly where the boundarybetween the academic and the political is drawn can, however, be difficultto tell; it is contextually constituted and may differ from country tocountry and perhaps even from university to university. The combinationof the high politics nature of ‘security’ and the absence of any objectivedefinitions of the ‘good security analyst’ means that ISS has witnessedheated discussions of the drawing of the academic–advisory boundaryboth within and across approaches.Fourth, ISS is also impacted by the ‘meta-view’ that scholars holdabout how the field should evolve. This goes back to the Kuhnian discussionof academic paradigms and commensurability above and underlinesthat there are different views on whether ISS is – or should be – a fieldmade up by only one approach or whether it thrives on debate acrossdifferent approaches. If ISS is made up of different perspectives, are theseincommensurable or is there, in spite of the different views of referentobjects, threats and politics, a substantial and thematic core that ties thefield together, thus constituting a ‘meta-commensurability’? Do securityscholars have a responsibility to engage across paradigms, or may theyjust as well try to either exile or ignore opponents? Different scholars haveresponded differently to these questions and their responses have importantconsequences for how ISS evolves as a field, both for its diversity and