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Over the last decade, the impact of emergencies on the American state has become the subject of renewed interest. While early literature in the post-9/11 era often overlooked the historical development of crisis governance in the United States, many scholars have begun to uncover the precedents that continue to shape modern emergency management. In an effort to clarify the main analytical assumptions of the existing scholarship, I construct three models of emergency statebuilding: permanent emergency state, national security state, and contract state. The models each share an underlying framework of historical institutionalism, which defines the state as a stabilized material institutional structure that is disrupted by emergency conditions—exogenous shocks that cannot be incorporated into the normal statebuilding processes or legal order. Yet this perspective is ill-equipped to explain institutional change. I propose discursive institutionalism as an approach that emphasizes how discourse and ideas construct emergencies as objects of government management—in different ways, at different times. I then illustrate the utility of this perspective by demonstrating the influence of national planning ideas on efforts to prepare the state for emergencies before they occur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I explain here the disconnect between our discipline's self-image as balancing rigor with relevance with the reality of how we actually conduct our scholarship most of the time. To do so, I account for variation in social scientists' willingness to engage in policy-relevant scholarship over time. My theory is that social science, at least as it has been practiced in the United States since the early twentieth century, has tried to balance two impulses: To be a rigorous science and a relevant social enterprise. The problem is that there are sometimes tensions between these two objectives. First, historically the most useful policy-relevant social science work in the area of national security affairs has been interdisciplinary in nature, and this cuts against the increasingly rigid disciplinary siloes in the modern academy. Second, as sociologist Thomas Gieryn puts it, there is “in science, an unyielding tension between basic and applied research, and between the empirical and theoretical aspects of inquiry.” During wartime, the tensions between these two impulses have been generally muted, especially among those disciplines of direct relevance to the war effort; in peacetime, they reemerge and there are a variety of powerful institutional incentives within academe to resolve them in favor of a narrow definition of rigor that excludes relevance. My objective is to document how these trends in political science are marginalizing the sub-field of security studies, which has historically sought both scholarly rigor and real-world relevance. — Michael Desch.This essay is followed by responses from Ido Oren, Laura Sjobreg, Helen Louise Turton, Erik Voeten, and Stephen M. Walt. Michael Desch then offers a response to commentators. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The recent outpouring of work on executive power during emergencies, inspired by the post-9/11 era, has significantly enhanced our legal and theoretical understanding of this crucial subject. A key flaw in this literature, however, is that it is historically un-rooted, either dismissing or ignoring important analytical and empirical insights from presidential research and from APD and historical-institutionalist perspectives. In this article, I argue that we can better explain patterns and variations in the use of presidential emergency power by paying careful attention to shifting historical set points for executive choice and action during security crises. In particular, the findings here underscore the episodic growth of new precedents, resources, and expectations for the White House in perilous contexts. The development of presidential emergency power reflects the potential for early executive choices to be repeated and legitimated over time, laying dormant as a “loaded weapon” to be used by future executives in similarly urgent circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author comments on the views of Michael Desch, professor of political science at University of Notre Dame, on researching in political science for academic reasons. Topics discussed include engagement of academics for solving problems related to political; science, collaboration between security policymakers of the U.S. and academics and relevance of social science for the U.S. national security policy.

In this article, the author comments on the views of Michael Desch, professor of political science at University of Notre Dame, on external threats determining the relevance of political science. Topics discussed include involvement of security studies during the Indochina War, emergence of public policy schools, course of academic career, and the use of intellectual ecosystem to deal with war and peace issues.

In this article, the author focuses on the decline in the policy-relevance because of professionalization of political science. Topics discussed include changing disciplinary of national security, role of academically-focused research center in political science, relationship between science and policy, academic approaches to security studies and international relations, and use of policy relevance to government policymakers, and education of students about politics.