TRIP to Launch Major Initiatives
The Teaching, Research & International Policy (TRIP) Project will launch two major initiatives at the end of August aimed at bridging the gap between academics and policymakers.
The first is a survey of international relations (IR) faculty in over 30 countries designed to examine teaching and research trends and foreign policy view in the IR discipline. Now in its fifth edition, the survey will expand to include scholars in rising powers such as India and Russia.
“We hope to learn about the ways that IR faculty around the world think about international relations, so we can begin to understand how these professors’ ideas influence the next generation of global leaders,” said Principal Investigator Sue Peterson, Reves Professor of Government and International Relations.
More than 10,000 scholars will be invited to participate in the survey, and the results will be published in Foreign Policy magazine and online.
Questions about U.S.-Russian relations, U.S. policy in Iraq, and the international health system will be of particular interest following recent events in Ukraine and Iraq and an Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
“In many cases, we can compare scholars’ views with the public’s responses to similar questions,” stated Principal Investigator Dan Maliniak ’06, Assistant Professor of Government. “These comparisons speak directly to whether the IR academy is reaching the public discourse,” he added.
As the survey goes live, TRIP will launch the second major initiative, a conference on “Strengthening the Links” between academics and policy makers. A pair of meetings will bring together these two communities to discuss how to better facilitate collaboration and improve both the study and practice of international relations.
Supported by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, TRIP will host a workshop in Washington, D.C. in August and a two-day conference in Williamsburg in January. The conference will yield a book-length publication examining the role of academic ideas in policymaking and the influence of real world events and policies on the study of IR.
Conference participants include scholars and policy experts representing eight issue areas in IR, such as war, foreign aid, trade, and human rights.
The TRIP Project is housed at the Institute for the Theory and Practice of International Relations at the College of William & Mary.
