The End of International Relations As We Know It...

...and I feel unsurprised.

Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

International relations (IR) as I’ve known it is on borrowed time.

For most of my adult life, IR has been an endless source of intellectual stimulation. I’ve made a career out of it! And in all likelihood, it’s kept me sane in an insane world. But things are changing fast.

AI’s Job-Apocalypse

Microsoft just published a list of most-replaceable jobs by AI and political scientists (international relations is a sub-field of political science) were listed at number 15, just behind concierge and just ahead of journalists. That’s also probably where we would land in terms of public esteem.

Pretty grim. While the paper generating this table does not predict a job-apocalypse in these fields, the “high applicability” of AI in these areas represents a job-apocalypse all the same. So far, AI has been an excuse to reduce costs by laying off people and blaming AI; many such cases. But that’s just management consulting with a new buzzword as the reasoning.

The real basis for the job-apocalypse is that AI is a tool to reduce cost per unit of output. As with previous innovations of technology and management, one way that AI can do its thing for capitalists is by “de-skilling” the workforce—a process that Harry Braverman documented through which workers become faceless cogs (and therefore cheaper) because the processes of production become either automated or chopped up into mind-numbing bits that do not require special skills. Any field that heavily relies on AI is de-skilling itself. Students relying on AI to think for them are proactively de-skilling themselves before even arriving on the job market.

Some of us are already worried about the waves of AI crashing on the shores of political science. Paul Musgrave—an IR scholar in my generational cohort—had a post recently where he walked through five unfavorable headwinds confronting academia (including IR). One of those trends was, in his words, “the assault of AI on traditional teaching.”¹

Academia in Decline

But decline did not begin with AI, and history did not begin with Trump 2.0. The MAGA war on higher education has simply accelerated and expanded long-running trends of academia in decline.

The acceleration of decline takes the form of immediately curtailing research funds and shrinking the student population by making the US an inhospitable place for foreign students to study. This compounds an already-acute fiscal crisis for most universities that its management executives only know how to meet with austerity of the university itself...a measure that also accelerates decline.

The expansion of decline takes the form of exposing even Ivy League universities to conditions of austerity by taxing the very endowments that insulated them from the secular trends in rising tuition prices, increasing productivity expectations from academic labor, and declining wage compensation for that labor. So nobody is immune any longer. A few years ago, I saw an advertisement for an assistant professor position at Smith College—a good school!—that paid $26,000/year. Managers at Whole Foods earn more than that.²

And of course, IR—like history—produces far more PhDs for the job market than there are jobs. The list of jobs in the entire field gets smaller every year and every ranked school is still cranking out new PhDs for the market. Elite in status, labor surplus in material condition.

It’s worth acknowledging that these problems facing academia are cross-disciplinary, besieging every field now, except perhaps donor-larded business schools. But IR has still more struggles.

Intellectual Failure

For one thing, contra my personal experience coming up, I don’t think students are learning much now. A master’s degree in IR is no longer proof either that the person writes well nor that they can think critically about the world. Most students don’t read—some of them tell me that to my face—and everyone grades their customers students on a curve.³

But it’s not all the students’ fault. The AI crisis in the classroom is a result of decades spent giving students good grades for regurgitating facts and at best mid-quality writing…AI’s sweet spot. In many cases, students also aren’t being taught a curriculum that helps them make sense of the world. What they usually get instead (especially at policy schools) is nationalist indoctrination—largely in the form of foreign policy case studies. Add to that some basic stuff about IR paradigm debates that happened in the ‘90s, stir in a heap of math that explains far less than its authors think, go out of your way to erase the imperialist and racist origins of the field, and voila—an IR degree. I’m painting with quite a broad brush here, even though I’m talking specifically about IR in the US, which is thin on theory and political philosophy while being heavy on positivist methodology. But if you know, you know.

The brilliant political economist Ha-Joon Chang wrote a critique of his discipline in the FT recently:

Economics today resembles Catholic theology in medieval Europe: a rigid doctrine guarded by a modern priesthood who claim to possess the sole truth. Dissenters are shunned…
…the challenges facing humanity have multiplied and intensified — ecological crises, geopolitical clashes, deepening inequality and anti-democracy movements, to name just a few. But, shockingly, the curriculum being offered to incoming economics students this autumn remains the same…
The consequences of bad economics teaching do not stop at the university gates. They spill out into the world. They shape our policies, our pay cheques and our climate. Economics, as it has been practised for the past 40 years, has been harmful for many people.

He could’ve been talking about IR. And that shouldn’t be too surprising, since modern IR is heavily constructed out of insights from neoclassical economics.

There’s also the question of (ir)relevance. In IR, relevance is almost always defined as insider access to foreign policy elites or militarist “bridging the gap” initiatives meant to translate theoretical and empirical insights into push-button answers for war-minded policymakers who will only pay any attention to the insight if it provides confirmation bias. Traditionally, to be an IR scholar seeking policy relevance is to work for ruling-class interests and on behalf of American power-hoarding in the world-system.⁴

While IR as a field has grown massively over the past generation and deliberate efforts to connect academia to the foreign policy world are all over the place, the world is more insecure than any point in my lifetime and US foreign policy can’t escape blame. We’re doing something wrong! 25% of America’s nearly 400 wars since its founding have occurred after the Cold War, during its unipolar moment. We scholars are either feckless in the face of poor judgment and rank abuses of power or we are complicit in them. Often both.

Ultimately, the highest aspiration of most IR students is to end up in the lanyard class of policy practitioners. For IR scholars, the highest aspiration of policy relevance is to tell the lanyard class something they can use to affect how that class uses state power. But for those aspirations of student and researcher to be noble, or anything more than destructively self-serving, you have to assume you live in a world that’s very different from ours.

Technocrats for Fascism

And that brings me to where all this ends up. IR as we knew it is a headless corpse walking around talking about great-power competition and critical minerals, certain that the Washington pendulum will swing back to a “sanity” whose definition is somehow supposed to include a trillion-dollar war machine and the facilitation of genocide while the majority of Americans grow more economically insecure.

Last year, I attended the International Studies Association in San Francisco—the leading academic conference for IR. I had three different books on display, caught up with friends old and new, and presented on the maximum allowable number of panels. It was buzzy, bourgie fun. It kind of felt like I had “made it.” But something about it left me feeling nauseated.

At one point I looked around and quietly thought to myself that it could be the last time I would ever have that kind of experience. Even if it wasn’t, the activity that filled the halls felt almost useless; a performance of the past.

I’m not sure I could defend anything happening there as serving the common good, or having public utility, even though most of us were on the public’s dime. These venues were not where knowledge production or the germs of new ideas were coming from; the crazed social activity (which part of me enjoys) made that impossible. So much time and money went into everyone being there at the same time, and it seemed like the entire point was to affirm ourselves in our social positions contra our political and economic reality. And the more you could be said to be part of small cliques of elite-tier scholars, the more the entire event was a celebration of you and for you.

The whole thing felt like an escape from—not a confrontation of—the accumulating crises we face in the real world. That, more than anything, is what gave me the sense that scholars as a social class are on borrowed time. It was the kind of display that would be alienating to people I grew up with. A MAGA reactionary would see it all as validating why they need to destroy the administrative state and the university system.

While the world is on fire and we’re failing to produce a next generation of scholars, everyone in my field is still judging everyone else according to ridiculous standards of elite networks and publishing-here-not-there that literally nobody outside our tiny field cares about. But professional status hierarchy is insufficient insulation from pressures toward either unemployment or working for fascists.

That future is already here. In the unlikely event that you’re gainfully employed in this field, the future lay in steering your ideas so that they appeal to right-wing billionaires and military contractors who might subsidize your research. You can look forward to working for reactionary governments, or “bridging the gap” to them. The next generation of civil servants will have to swear loyalty oaths to MAGA and will be rewarded for doing so.

Meanwhile, the public intellectual, the scholar who wishes their production of knowledge to aid progress and not just the accumulation of state power, has to take their vocation to the streets, so to speak. Newsletters, podcasts, YouTube videos, social clubs, and events for the public are the uncorrupted alternative future for our discipline, and that sucks because there just isn’t much money in it (yet) and even public intellectuals must pay the bills.

But that’s the future—slaves to fascisti of one sort or another, or else taking it to the streets. The latter is of course noble, but also a hell of a challenge: It means we have a narrow window of opportunity to take what we find useful about the great books and journal articles from our field and figure out ways to get it in the hands of the public. Discard the rest.

But becoming a street preacher of world affairs will be impossible if what you find useful in our discipline simply reinforces oligarchic state power, justifies society’s inequities, or tries to defend America’s endless warmaking. A public getting screwed over by the status quo will not be receptive to abstract reasons for why it’s necessary or good.

In sum, the crisis of international relations is something that’s happening to us, but also because of us. As I lamented earlier this year:

The field of international relations is in big trouble, and it might be less so if it existed to do more than advise princes on how best to consolidate and wield power on behalf of class privileges.

1. The other unfavorable trends were profound financial instability; substantial attacks on institutional autonomy; undeniable changes to student preparation; and geopolitics and ordinary domestic politics.

2. I know this because I looked into employment at Whole Foods at one point when I was still working at a DC think tank and desperate to get out.

3. Just one quick anecdote about the severity of this students-don’t-read-anymore trend. When I post a required reading in a course, I can see how many students click through; it’s now a very low percentage, sometimes as low as 5%. I wasn’t tracking this every year, but my first year of teaching it was more like 50-60%.

4. It doesn’t have to be this way, and if I had the resources for it, I’d setup bridging-the-gap initiatives with an entirely different valence—attached to social movements, labor, NGOs, and non-existent people’s councils.