What Pivot? International Relations Scholarship and the Study of East Asia 1 L INDSAY HUNDLEY ,B ENJAMIN K ENZER , AND S USAN P ETERSON College of William & Mary Scholars of international relations (IR) simultaneously believe that their work is policy-relevant and that a gap exists between the academic and policy worlds of IR. Using data from the 2011 Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) survey and the TRIP journal article database, we explore this disjuncture in one specific area, research on East Asia. If US scholars’ work addresses policy-relevant issues, as they believe, we would expect academic work to provide insights on a region that US policymakers have long thought to be growing in strategic importance. We find that academics recognize the strategic significance of East Asia, but comparatively few scholars teach about or do research on the region. Compared with the IR discipline more broadly, published research on East Asia is more paradigmatic, qualitative, and oriented toward the study of international political economy. The neglect of East Asia and the systematic differences in the way it is studied have poten- tially important consequences for the study and practice of IR. Keywords: international relations discipline, East Asia In a 2009 New York Times op-ed, Joseph Nye lamented the divide between the policy and academic spheres of international relations (IR), declaring that “scholars are paying less attention to questions about how their work relates to the policy world, and in many departments a focus on policy can hurt one’s career” (Nye 2009). Many scholars and practitioners share Nye’s concerns. Alex- ander George spent much of his academic career seeking to bridge the gap between the two worlds (for example, George 1993), and more recently, an increasing number of scholars have bemoaned the practical irrelevance of IR research and argued for more useful IR scholarship (for example, Jentleson 2002; Walt 2005; Desch 2009). On the other side of the divide, then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced the creation in 2008 of the Minerva Institute, an organization designed to apply university-based social science research to US national security policy, arguing that policymakers “must again embrace egg- heads and ideas” (Gates 2008). At the same time that both scholars and practitioners lament what they consider a deep divide between the policy and academic worlds, a 2011 survey by the Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) Project of IR scholars in the United States reveals that a surpris- 1 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Joint Meeting of the British International Studies Associa- tion and International Studies Association in Edinburgh in June 2012. The authors thank the Institute for the The- ory and Practice of International Relations at the College of William & Mary for financial support. Hundley, Lindsay, Benjamin Kenzer and Susan Peterson. (2013) What Pivot? International Relations Scholarship and the Study of East Asia. International Studies Perspectives, doi: 10.1111/insp.12060 Ó 2013 International Studies Association International Studies Perspectives (2013), 1–16.