Today I received a desk reject for a paper that a coauthor and I wrote. The paper is a good one and it does something that we don't think any other scholars have done. We didn't sell that point well enough, apparently, and the editors decided that our paper didn't fit the scope of their journal. That is fine and good, and a real part of academia. I understand that. However, I am beginning to see a pattern that I had not noticed before when I was less confident in my own work.
Arms transfer research is not mainstream in terms of "big topics" in international relations. I understood that when I picked the topic. There is interest in the subject, but it ebbs and flows. Big work in big journals often ignores the more nuts and bolts empirical work of studying patterns in arms flows when they discuss how arms effect international relations. A good example of this is the recent work by Yarhi-Milo and colleagues building on work by James Morrow about the choice that states have in providing arms or making alliances. The paper is excellent and the empirical case studies do a great job of illustrating their larger point - that arming protege states is an option for patron states who don't want to be obligated by a formal alliance.
The theory is about great powers - and specifically great powers who are interested in extended deterrence. This is a limited set of states. The use of case studies in this work is very appropriate. However, ignoring the work that has looked at arms transfers as a general pattern and its findings is a blind spot that is not caught by editors or reviewers.
When work that is grounded in the empirical patterns of arms sales between all states attempts to address wider theories of IR, however, the standards are much different. That is the case with the paper that was rejected. The paper addresses an issue that is simply taken for granted or assumed away in the broad literature on international relations - the existence of arms sales by states that are not great powers. The desk rejection will allow us to "re-frame" the paper in a stronger way and send it back out. That's not the main issue. The issue is the difference between how this paper was dealt with and a paper by the same coauthor and I who wrote about arms and human rights and had the paper accepted at International Studies Quarterly.
That paper was accepted because of its relationship with human rights, not because of the arms aspect itself. Work is also more accepted when it deals with the normative issues of arms control. In this sense, arms work is not only marginalized, it becomes politicized because work that does not fit into "acceptable" categories may not even make it past the first gate-keepers.
From a career standpoint this is something that needs to be considered. In a publish or perish environment, the lack of outlets for work on the margins can either move people away from a topic, or lead them to study in ways that conform to conventional wisdom rather than challenging that work and its assumptions. This is a subtle way in which bias can creep into academic work, and which weakens overall knowledge and the process of creating it.
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Arms transfer research is not mainstream in terms of "big topics" in international relations. I understood that when I picked the topic. There is interest in the subject, but it ebbs and flows. Big work in big journals often ignores the more nuts and bolts empirical work of studying patterns in arms flows when they discuss how arms effect international relations. A good example of this is the recent work by Yarhi-Milo and colleagues building on work by James Morrow about the choice that states have in providing arms or making alliances. The paper is excellent and the empirical case studies do a great job of illustrating their larger point - that arming protege states is an option for patron states who don't want to be obligated by a formal alliance.
The theory is about great powers - and specifically great powers who are interested in extended deterrence. This is a limited set of states. The use of case studies in this work is very appropriate. However, ignoring the work that has looked at arms transfers as a general pattern and its findings is a blind spot that is not caught by editors or reviewers.
When work that is grounded in the empirical patterns of arms sales between all states attempts to address wider theories of IR, however, the standards are much different. That is the case with the paper that was rejected. The paper addresses an issue that is simply taken for granted or assumed away in the broad literature on international relations - the existence of arms sales by states that are not great powers. The desk rejection will allow us to "re-frame" the paper in a stronger way and send it back out. That's not the main issue. The issue is the difference between how this paper was dealt with and a paper by the same coauthor and I who wrote about arms and human rights and had the paper accepted at International Studies Quarterly.
That paper was accepted because of its relationship with human rights, not because of the arms aspect itself. Work is also more accepted when it deals with the normative issues of arms control. In this sense, arms work is not only marginalized, it becomes politicized because work that does not fit into "acceptable" categories may not even make it past the first gate-keepers.
From a career standpoint this is something that needs to be considered. In a publish or perish environment, the lack of outlets for work on the margins can either move people away from a topic, or lead them to study in ways that conform to conventional wisdom rather than challenging that work and its assumptions. This is a subtle way in which bias can creep into academic work, and which weakens overall knowledge and the process of creating it.
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Morrow, James D. (1993) Arms Versus Allies: Trade-Offs in the Search for Security. International Organization 47: 207–233.
Yarhi-Milo, Keren, Alexander Lanoszka, and Zack Cooper. (2016) To Arm or to Ally?: The Patron’s Dilemma and the Strategic Logic of Arms Transfers and Alliances. International Security 41: 90–139.
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