“This Research has Important Policy Implications…”

The COVID 19 pandemic has generated much interest in the relationship between research and policy. It has drawn new attention to the limitations of a linear model, where policy is based on first observing prior scientific research and then designed in response to this. Conflict researchers often motivate the importance of their work by claiming that their “research has important policy implications”, but the proposals offered are often at best incomplete. I identify a number of common limitations in claims about policy implications, including a lack of discussion of objectives and priorities, stating objectives themselves as if they were policies, claims about targeting factors without discussing the effectiveness of possible interventions, and a failure to consider uncertainty and potential tensions with other objectives or unintended effects. Research can potentially inform policy discussions and improve decisions, but the incentives in academic research are very different from policy decisions, and the latter often calls for very different evidence than what is offered by the former. Rather than attempting to offer policy prescriptions as an afterthought to academic articles, research can be more helpful to policy by trying to inform debates, focusing on what we know from the cumulative body of research than individual manuscripts, and providing new data and empirical material that allow for better problem description and analysis.