The Academia and Foreign Policy Making: Bridging the Gap

The aim of this paper is to explore the relationship between academic research in the field of International Relations (IR) and the making of foreign policy. How do these two coincide and coexist? What are the requirements leveled upon research taking into account the shifting and complicated nature of the conduct of foreign as well as security policies? What does the relationship look like if seen from the perspective of practitioners and policy planners?

It seems, as such, that the scholarly community is faced with increasing calls for being useful and relevant, although the social and cultural distance between analysis and policy making remains formidable. The differences often seem to be larger than the commonalities and the two fields approach world politics from rather different angles. In exploring the scholarly community and the field of policy-analysis as their particular approaches to the production of knowledge, questions are posed about the nature of the relationship between policy making and academic analysis in order to illuminate the nature of the nexus and the prospects for bridging the distance. The aim is to address the question whether the alleged "gap" is unbridgeable, as claimed by some, or whether the two spheres can be brought closer to each other by adding to the commonalities, thereby reducing the current rather dichotomous state of affairs.