The international relations academic paper is dead

There was a time when the international relations academic paper was the cornerstone of policy debate. It was precise, rare, rigorous. If a senior policymaker wanted to understand a complex issue—be it nuclear proliferation, foreign policy, or multilateralism—they’d pick up a dense, footnoted article written by an academic with decades of expertise.

At the moment, I’m reading acacdemic papers written about Korea from the 1950s. You can tell these papers would have been shared among colleagues, perhaps even discussed in closed-door seminars or cited in speeches. These academic papers mattered. They informed thinking. They were designed to shape decisions.

That era is gone. Long gone.

Today, academic papers on Korea—or rather all international relations academic papers—are a bloated relic of a system that long ago traded purpose for paltry position in convoluted university ranking tables. The proliferation of journals, the obsession with rankings, and the corporatization of both universities and publishing houses have rendered the international relations academic paper largely irrelevant to real-world policymaking. It may still dominate CVs and performance reviews, but in the corridors of power, it gathers dust—if it ever arrives at all.

One of the great ironies of the digital age is that the expansion of academic publishing has devalued its product. There are today more journals than ever before, more special issues, more edited volumes, more conference proceedings uploaded to repositories that no policymaker will ever visit.

The old model—a handful of respected journals, modestly priced, read by both academics and practitioners—has given way to a glut of material few can access and even fewer can digest.

What was once scarce and valuable is now abundant and superfluous.

And it’s not just the volume. It’s the intent. Academic papers are no longer written to inform the public or guide decision-makers. They are written to meet performance targets. To satisfy tenure committees. To accumulate citations on Google Scholar and climb university rankings. They are outputs, not interventions. Metrics, not messages.

Did you know that there are now 13,800 papers discussing South Korea as a middle power? The earliest work on South Korea as a middle power dates from around 1998, so that’s a pretty heavy number—one a day? Yet, despite all this talk about South Korea as a middle power, not one of them can answer the question as to what makes the foreign policy of Australia, Canada, Sweden, Norway and South Korea similar as middle poowers, let alone adding others to the category, like Mexico, Indonesia, Poland, Malaysia or Serbia.

Clearly, the closest to policy that academic papers about South Korea as a middle power come is when they’re wedged under the minister’s door as an ad hoc doorstop.

Much of this decay can be traced to the transformation of the university itself. No longer a haven for intellectual pursuit, the modern university has become a corporation with HR departments, branding strategies, and global league table ambitions. Research isn’t supported because it’s important—it’s supported because it’s fundable, countable, and promotable.

This shift has produced a strange inversion. Academics are encouraged to produce papers not because they are read, but because they are counted.

The reward structure favors volume over influence. It doesn’t matter if a paper is read by three people—if it appears in a Q1 journal with a decent impact factor, it’s a win. In this environment, accessibility is irrelevant. Engagement is irrelevant. What matters is where the paper lands, not what it says or who reads it.

As for university press offices? They are more likely to promote a professor’s minor appearance on local television than their latest 9,000-word article on energy geopolitics. Because that’s what boosts social media presence. Because that’s what “the brand” wants.

Then there’s the academic publishing industry—perhaps the most parasitic corner of the knowledge economy.

Once imagined as public servants advancing enlightenment, the big publishers now operate like cartel bosses. They charge obscene subscription fees, lock publicly funded research behind paywalls, and demand authors sign away copyright for the privilege of being published in journals that pay neither the authors nor the peer reviewers! How f&%ked is that?

Open access was supposed to change that, but it has often become another grift. Journals now charge thousands in “article processing fees” to make a paper available to the public, effectively charging authors for the right to be read—assuming anyone outside academia even knows where to look.

The result? Most policy professionals either rely on executive summaries—if they exist—or skip academic literature altogether in favor of think tank briefs, news outlets, or policy blogs. It’s not that academics have nothing to say. It’s that the structure of publishing actively prevents their work from reaching the people who need to read it.

In the end, academic papers are no longer tools of engagement—they are trophies in a rigged game. They are rarely read by those in power, seldom cited in strategic debates, and mostly ignored by journalists, practitioners, and even fellow academics outside the author’s niche.

The tragedy is that many scholars want to engage. They want to write for policymakers, to influence debate, to bring complexity to simplified narratives. But they are trapped in a system that punishes clarity, brevity, and accessibility. If they write an op-ed or a blog post, it won’t count. If they publish a book that reaches 10,000 readers but doesn’t generate citations, it won’t count. If they speak to the public, that’s nice, but what about their h-index?

We are left with a knowledge economy where actual engagement is discouraged, and abstraction is rewarded. The academic paper remains, but only as a shell—an output for accounting purposes, not a vehicle for ideas.

I can’t see this changing without a changed incentive structure. At the moment, academics struggle to churn out as many papers as possible. Instead, they should be putting out one good paper that contributes every three years. Scholars need to be liberated from the tyranny of metrics so they can write like people with something to say!

Until then, the international relations academic paper will remain exactly what it has become: a dusty monument to a system more interested in prestige than purpose.