The recently appointed director of the Scrivner Institute of Public Policy belongs to a new generation of scholars who are shaking up the old guard in the national security and foreign policy establishment, bridging the gap between academia and policymakers and the public. But change never comes easy — and allies and mentors matter
Naazneen “Naaz” Barma was a first-year graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, the day the Twin Towers collapsed. “9/11 happened during my second week, and I remember walking into class that day thinking, ‘I’m in a PhD program in political science, so I’m going to be able to understand what just happened and do something about it.’” Instead she was thrown by her professor’s words: “Look, guys, this is huge. It’s going to change the world around us,” he said. “But we’re here to do game theory. So, let’s turn back to the textbook.”
Barma had come to Berkeley from the World Bank, where she specialized in institutional and governance reform in the East Asia and Pacific region. At the age of 25, she was flying to Cambodia and East Timor, where she worked on postconflict transitions with the UN. “In the late ’90s you had this opening in terms of American foreign policy following the Cold War, and the work was fascinating,” she says. However, to advance in her career, a PhD was the necessary next step. Yet at Berkeley, “I was so frustrated during those months when we were all so shell-shocked after 9/11. I kept wondering, ‘What am I doing here, maybe this isn’t for me, maybe I should go back to D.C.’”
Barma sought out others in her cohort who were also eager to move beyond the classroom and apply scholarly insights to real-world problems — not something that was then encouraged in the ivory tower. “We kind of kept each other sane,” says Barma, “and had our secret conversations about policy. We sort of had this little discussion group to begin with.” Ely Ratner, now special assistant to the secretary of defense, and Brent Durbin, now a professor at Smith College, were part of this special troupe. A shared mentor, Steve Weber, then director of Berkeley’s Institute of International Studies, came to them with a proposition. “Hey, guys, if you want to have a group of PhD students talk about policy, I have some funding,” Barma remembers Weber saying. “What do you want to do with it?”
What the group did was launch the New Era Foreign Policy Conference, held at Berkeley in 2006. “Basically we reached out to the top 20 political science PhD programs in the U.S. and said, ‘If you are interested in talking about policy, come talk with us,’” says Barma. “We brought in other professors who we thought would support us, people who we wanted to know — we were networking, too.” Bruce Jentleson, who was head of the public policy school at Duke University, was one of them. Jim Goldgeier, then a professor at George Washington University, was pulled into the group sometime later.
This was one of the kernels that turned into the Bridging the Gap (BtG) Project, funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York beginning in 2008 and spearheaded by Stephen Del Rosso, director of the International Peace and Security (IPS) program at the Corporation. A former U.S. diplomat, Del Rosso has long believed that “good policy is informed by good ideas, and good ideas are not formed in a vacuum.” The academy, he argues, needs to be a primary source of these ideas, and “should help ensure that they are not lost in translation for a policy audience.”
“Steve had the vision to build it out,” says Goldgeier, noting that resistance within the academy was strong. Among the old guard, the entrenched belief was that the academy’s role was to look back at itself and align with methodologies unrelated to real-world problems, providing “increasingly precise answers to increasingly irrelevant questions,” as Del Rosso has written. “Most people in academia didn’t give a hoot about policy,” adds Jentleson. “I joke that our bumper sticker should have been, ‘we may not make a revolution, but a little insurrection is not a bad thing.’”
This was one of the kernels that turned into the Bridging the Gap (BtG) Project, funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York beginning in 2008 and spearheaded by Stephen Del Rosso, director of the International Peace and Security (IPS) program at the Corporation. A former U.S. diplomat, Del Rosso has long believed that “good policy is informed by good ideas, and good ideas are not formed in a vacuum.”
Over its 14 years, the flagship initiative — the BtG Project at AU — has added several programs, such as their International Policy Summer Institute (IPSI) for faculty foreign policy process in Washington. The summer institute draws decision makers from the executive branch, Capitol Hill, NGOs, and international organizations who advise attendees on engaging with the policy community and discerning the needs of those communities. Intense media training hones participants’ communication skills for public engagement. “It’s rewarding to see scholars who have been through media training workshops go on The Daily Show or CNN,” says Durbin, who heads the effort, “and to know that that kind of public engagement is deeply rooted in rigorous research.” Op-eds and articles written by participants that were languishing on their computers often make their way successfully out of media workshopping to print or blog publication.
In 2018, the BtG Project began a partnership with Oxford University Press. The Bridging the Gap Series publishes manuscripts that are written to engage both academic and policy audiences, making significant contributions to debates in both communities. Steve Weber, Bruce Jentleson, and Jim Goldgeier are coeditors of the series. “This squares the circle and allows academics to reach a broader public,” says Jentleson, “while doing work for tenure promotion.” In a running start, they have published half a dozen books, and five more are under contract. “We have more proposals,” says Jentleson, “than we know what to do with, to be honest.”
Fourteen years later that original merry band is largely still involved, and the Corporation continues to be BtG’s principal benefactor. Steve Weber, Bruce Jentleson, and Jim Goldgeier recently stepped back from codirecting and now serve as BtG senior advisors. Barma and her Berkeley classmate Brent Durbin, an associate professor of government at Smith College, continue to codirect, along with a later arrival to the group, Jordan Tama, associate professor at American University’s School of International Service. Under their aegis, the BtG project produces a host of programs, but still at its heart is the New Era Workshop, affectionately known by its participants as NEW, which is Barma’s charge in collaboration with a core group of graduate student fellows.
The annual two-day workshop for political science doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows employs complex scenario exercises to develop research questions linking theory and practice. In it, a series of imaginary but plausible worlds five years hence are proposed to the group. Later, a shock, such as a pandemic, is introduced. The exercises help scholars think nimbly and develop the kinds of questions that might be useful to decision makers down the line. According to one scholar, for those involved it’s “political-science nerd heaven.” The event is the ideological spawn of the original New Era Foreign Policy Conference at Berkeley back in 2006.
As for Barma, she would return to the World Bank after earning her PhD, as she had always intended. Her 2017 book, The Peacebuilding Puzzle: Political Order in Post-Conflict States, drew on her fieldwork in Afghanistan, Cambodia, and East Timor with the organization. She ultimately returned to academia with a faculty appointment at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, where she spent a decade as a professor in the Department of National Security Affairs. “They actually appreciated the policy work I had done,” says Barma, “which was part of why they hired me.”
Throughout those years, her touchstone — both personally and professionally — was Bridging the Gap, which moved from Berkeley, then to Duke, and finally to American University (AU) in Washington, D.C., when Jim Goldgeier became dean of its School of International Service in 2011.
The name “Bridging the Gap” is a kind of homage to Stanford University professor Alexander George, who in one way or another mentored the BtG Project’s current senior advisors. George’s 1993 book, Bridging the Gap: Theory and Practice in Foreign Policy, argued that policymaking could benefit from scholarly expertise and that academics needed a clearer understanding of the political prerogatives of decision makers. “He was extraordinary. It brings a chill to my spine to remember him,” Weber, still a professor at Berkeley, says of George, who was his PhD advisor at Stanford. “He was a humble man who never lost sight of his convictions or let the fashions of academia bounce him off his path.”
“Within the academy, the historic feeling was that political science should be insulated from the real world, that it should be dealing with these internal, theoretical issues and that it’s up to the rest of the world to figure out how those ideas might be mined to affect society,” says the Corporation’s Del Rosso. “However, if a policymaker or an American citizen picked up a political science journal and tried to discern the bottom line and how it affects the world, they couldn’t. The jargon is often abstruse, and the methodological approaches tend to obscure rather than illuminate.”
The goal of the Corporation’s Bridging the Gap Initiative is to promote and support a cohort of early-career scholars who are interested in real-world problems and to create multiple platforms so that their academic insights are disseminated to a broader audience. “And the other part,” says Del Rosso, “is that we wanted to chip away at the incentive structure within the academy, such as tenure considerations, to give more weight to policy engagement.” In theory, “nobody wants these trees to fall in the forest that nobody hears,” but change didn’t come easily.
In 2014, a request for proposals to graduate schools for international affairs led to a broader Corporation-supported Bridging the Gap Initiative at five major universities throughout the U.S. This grantmaking added to a BtG portfolio within the International Peace and Security program portfolio that had expanded to include a diverse set of programs largely based at universities — from blogs and research centers, to a project that focuses on the ethical dimensions of policy engagement and another venture that teases out the implications of quantum theory on international relations and security policy.
In September 2020 Barma’s work with Bridging the Gap came full circle. She was appointed the inaugural director of the Douglas and Mary Scrivner Institute of Public Policy, established in 2018, as well as associate professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver. As Scrivner Chair — “a total dream job,” according to Barma — she leads an organization that defines itself as lying at the intersection of real-world problems and practical policy solutions.
“Korbel has the spirit embedded within it of being a school of international affairs that is interdisciplinary. It’s not a traditional international relations department. It’s a school with a mandate to be outwardly and publicly engaged,” says Barma. “There are faculty here who are part of our Bridging the Gap network, who have gone through our programs,” says Barma, providing further evidence that efforts such as the Bridging the Gap Project — along with compatible work supported by Carnegie Corporation of New York’s International Peace and Security program, such as a project housed at Korbel’s Sié Chéou-Kang Center for International Security and Diplomacy — have substantially moved the needle toward policy engagement in academia. “Every like-minded scholar we talk with,” says Smith College’s Durbin, “seems to have been touched by at least one of the Carnegie-funded programs.”
More recently, BtG’s New Voices in National Security program — supported by the Raymond Frankel Foundation — taps the research findings of younger scholars. “The core aim of that program is really to bring in underrepresented voices, emerging scholars who look different than the people who usually sit around the table and who are not just from mid-Atlantic universities,” says Barma, who recently won the Women’s Caucus of the International Studies Association’s Susan S. Northcutt Award for scholarship, teaching, and mentoring that advances women and underrepresented scholars.
Barma’s October 2020 article in the Center for Strategic and International Studies blog Defence360° emphasized the necessity of including diverse voices in public policy. As a self-described “queer, gender non-conforming woman of color and a first-generation naturalized American,” Barma — of Indian descent and born in Hong Kong — claims to have benefitted from peer and senior mentors who have tempered any marginalization or adversity based on her visible identities. “Allies and mentors matter,” she wrote. “Bringing the wealth of a wider range of lived experience into national security policy formulation does improve the process; it is the effective thing to do.”
In the New Voices in National Security 2019 two-day conference — “The Deterrent and Signaling Effects of Sanctions” — six scholars from diverse backgrounds submitted memos addressing questions posed in advance by policymakers from the National Security Council, the Department of State, the Department of the Treasury, and Capitol Hill, before convening to discuss the ramifications and further research opportunities. “We felt that policymakers in Washington could have their horizons broadened by meeting younger academics that they wouldn’t otherwise come across and who might have interesting things to say about the topics that they work on,” says Goldgeier. A subsequent Government Accountability Office report on economic sanctions quoted the conference, spearheaded by American University’s Tama on the BtG team, providing tangible proof of BtG’s input. Participating scholars made important and lasting connections.
“We measure our success at Bridging the Gap in terms of whether and how our participants take what they’ve learned at our workshops and engage more with the media and policymakers,” says Barma. “Are they publishing in blog outlets? Are they writing op-eds? Are they doing radio and TV appearances? Are they taking their research papers and finding ways to communicate directly with policymakers, whether it’s through think tanks or through congressional briefings? I think we can take some credit for that because we are facilitating those connections.” Alumni — now close to 500 in number — tend to circle back and stay involved in BtG, creating a kind of 21st-century version of a foreign policy old-boy network.
I think you help change the world around you by fully being in it, and by being authentic to who you are and what you can contribute. I’m both most effective and happiest when my sense of internal purpose and what I’m doing align. Where I’ve ended up now is not exactly a culmination, but a place where I’ve found my equilibrium on my continued pathway.
“My involvement with Bridging the Gap encouraged me to have the audacity to ask big questions, to engage with the policy world, and to cultivate a network of peers and mentors who will support me in my efforts,” says Rebecca Lissner, now an official on President Biden’s National Security Council, who coauthored An Open World: How America Can Win the Contest for Twenty-First-Century Order with fellow BtG alumnus Mira Rapp-Hooper, now a Department of State official.
Rachel Whitlark, assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is part of the team that works with Barma in creating the scenarios for the New Era Workshops. Whitlark says she “glommed on” to the BtG project in the 2008 workshop when she was a graduate student at George Washington “and never let go.” She remembers that as a graduate student she had to play her “cards close to the vest.” If you were interested in working on policy, that was “something you kept to yourself, which is no longer true,” Whitlark maintains. “Bridging the Gap continues to broaden the conversation.”
Interestingly the “imaginary” scenarios Barma and the team of emerging scholar fellows create for NEW are sometimes eerily prescient, which means they have to be discarded and written anew. “Unfortunately, we get too close quite regularly. A few years ago we imagined a global pandemic, and a few years before that we proposed a massive upheaval of dictatorships in a Middle East that had experienced sudden, popular revolutions,” says Whitlark. “But we don’t intend to be predictive. We just try to get people out of their comfort zones and question their longstanding assumptions.”
In these days of COVID, BtG has taken some of their programming online, creating webinars on issues related to diversity and inclusion in international relations and on nonacademic careers. The BtG Project principals — Barma, Weber, Jentleson, Goldgeier, Durbin, and Tama — meet by Zoom every week, along with deputy director Leila Adler and project coordinator Kathryn Urban, to tackle the agenda. In fact, says Barma, “Now, when any one of us misses that meeting, it feels like a hole. This is what we do. We get together. We check in every Thursday morning.”
“Naaz has been the glue that kept the group together,” says Weber, observing that “intellectually and professionally,” Barma never gets “boxed into a narrow perspective. The combination of her academic credentials, work, diversity criteria, and lived experience make her a macro-thinker.”
Goldgeier calls Barma a “rock star” in international studies. “We are all engaged with the students, but Naaz is the most important mentor in our cohort,” says Goldgeier. “She has this kind of ‘superpower’ to provide feedback on other people’s work and to help students move forward in their careers.” Jentleson cites Naaz’s strategic judgment and leadership sense: “She’s able to engage people but also to exert authority when she needs to.”
“I’m a big believer in purpose,” says Barma. “My wife gave me this little plaque that says, ‘What good shall I do this day?’ I think you help change the world around you by fully being in it, and by being authentic to who you are and what you can contribute. I’m both most effective and happiest when my sense of internal purpose and what I’m doing align. Where I’ve ended up now is not exactly a culmination, but a place where I’ve found my equilibrium on my continued pathway.”
Ellen T. White, a former managing editor of the New York Public Library, is a freelance writer.
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