Peat & Rose: The Changing Landscape of International Law Scholarship: Do Funding Bodies Influence What We Research?

Daniel Peat (Leiden Univ. - Law) & Cecily Rose (Leiden Univ. - Law) have posted The Changing Landscape of International Law Scholarship: Do Funding Bodies Influence What We Research? (Yale Journal of International Law, forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

Why does scholarship change? The rise of diverse methods in international legal scholarship has coincided with the creation, in jurisdictions and regions around the world, of individual grant schemes operated by external funding bodies. Studies have shown that securing external funding increases both the likelihood of promotion and the chances that subsequent external funding will be secured. In this article, we explore whether international law scholars exercise “strategic anticipation” by shaping their research projects to fit those they think most likely to be funded. We analyze twenty years of data from the Dutch Research Council (Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO)) and the European Research Council (ERC) to examine whether scholars change what they research in light of funding bodies’ preferences and the character of the panels that evaluate grant proposals. Our findings provide novel insights into how international law research has changed over the past 20 years and what factors may have driven those changes. In doing so, our article contributes to the larger debate regarding the move towards interdisciplinarity and empirical research in international law scholarship, and the appropriate role of external funding bodies.