3---Alt is more policy relevant than the aff.

IR scholarship doesn’t seem to “fit” contemporary politics First, the observation that IR theories and hypotheses have difficulty matching up with the present moment is relatively uncontroversial and well accepted. But this is not necessarily a fault of scholars or scholarship, but rather because we are always operating in an interim—the “games” we are analyzing have yet to conclude. Scholars writing during the “inter-war” period, for instance, could not know that they were doing so, unaware as they were that World War II was yet to come. Those theorizing bipolar stability in 1986 could not know for certain that the world was about to systemically change. I have read articles from last summer (2016) whose claims and assumptions about American foreign policy and the American-led world order already appear out of place and incongruent with the new normal of politics. Only with the benefit of hindsight, once emergent processes have concluded, can we know what we’re looking at with the certainty scholars prefer. Once we reach that point, we can then go about the process of comparing it with the long narratives of history. For the most part, this is to the good and the historian’s admonition against “presentism” is a valuable one. To be sure, many “new” things aren’t quite so new or impressive when seen against the backdrop of history. But IR scholarship is expressly not history and there will be times where we observe events occurring, crises erupting, and warning shots that become the first shot in a war, rather than a forgotten shot across the bow or yet another near-miss. The irony of making this claim on a site dedicated to emphasizing criticality, contingency, and representational politics is not lost on me. And I don’t endorse the tired claim that IR scholars have no meaningful political knowledge/impact/relevance regarding contemporary politics, which occasionally gets trotted out as a general critique of academic work. IR scholarship has much to say in terms of envisioning radical alternatives, identifying different ways of being in the world of global politics, and reassessing the very questions that seem to define its practices, as well as the more traditional claims and studies regarding mechanisms and empirical regularities. The distinction I’m drawing is that (some) IR scholars are indeed quite good at this, yet IR scholarship itself is not built for it. What needs to be made more visible and expanded is a willingness to fundamentally rethink what role IR scholarship plays, who it is for, and what it does in the world—all of which is currently happening in various areas of the discipline. However, this needs to be amplified and coupled with a generalized willingness to put these insights into widespread practice at all levels and in all areas of the discipline. Reflexive debates about decolonization and difference, epistemological assumptions regarding generalizability, prediction, and the value of narrow, context-based claims may be seen by some as divergent from “actual” international politics, but they directly implicate how our work responds to times like these. If we really are in a time of “change” and “crisis” in international politics and we’re having difficulty applying extant IR knowledge to the present—particularly knowledge that authors like Weber refer to as “disciplinary IR”—IR should seriously consider adapting some of the ways in which it frames, represents, and relates events and practices across time to be more in line with those issues under investigation.