The Complicity of the Experts: When Knowledge Fails in an Age of War
You may know that in Macedonia the academic disciplines of international relations, geopolitics, and international security were introduced long after the breakup of Yugoslavia. Everything started from scratch, and I would say that these fields are still in their infancy. With rare exceptions. In global terms, we are Lilliputians. Our academic community is small, our resources limited, and our institutional infrastructure fragile. Yet when I watch television debates where journalists and self-appointed “analysts” confidently discuss grand strategy, nuclear deterrence, or great-power rivalry, I cannot remain indifferent. After all, there exists an entire Institute for Security, Defense and Peace. There are people who have devoted their lives to studying these questions. And yet no one seems to think of asking them anything.
But the problem is not merely Macedonian provincialism. In fact, the deeper paradox lies elsewhere.
These disciplines were born and institutionalized in the West—primarily in Britain and the United States. Under various labels—international relations, global studies, global security, strategic studies—they became vast intellectual industries. Thousands of professors, researchers, think tanks, advisory bodies, policy institutes. Enormous research grants, prestigious journals, rankings, impact factors, conferences in luxury hotels, advisory roles close to power. If knowledge were power, one would expect the world to be safer than ever.
And yet here we are: closer to systemic war than at any moment in decades.
Despite this immense intellectual apparatus, Western political elites have repeatedly steered the world toward confrontation, militarization, and escalation. Whether under Donald Trump or his predecessors, the strategic direction has remained remarkably consistent: expanding alliances, intensifying rivalries, normalizing sanctions regimes, and steadily eroding the already fragile architecture of global security. If this is the outcome of the most sophisticated academic-policy complex in the world, one must ask an uncomfortable question: what exactly are all those experts doing?
Are they not consulted? Or do they prefer proximity to power over speaking inconvenient truths? Do they genuinely believe their own strategic doctrines, or are they simply maintaining the prestige economy of academia? What is the point of producing endless peer-reviewed articles with impressive impact factors if the geopolitical system they analyze is moving toward self-destruction?
Occasionally, public debates between well-known figures—John Mearsheimer, Jeffrey Sachs, and a handful of others—briefly puncture the consensus. But two or three dissenting voices cannot substitute for the responsibility of an entire discipline. I am not speaking about a few celebrity scholars; I am speaking about thousands of professors and researchers who populate departments, journals, advisory boards, and policy forums across the Western world.
Even more tragic, however, is the fate of peace studies.
In theory, peace research should provide the intellectual and moral counterweight to strategic studies and militarized geopolitics. It was once a vibrant field, born during the Cold War from the urgent realization that humanity had entered the nuclear age. Scholars like Johan Galtung developed the concept of “positive peace”—not merely the absence of war, but the presence of social justice, equality, and structural transformation. Peace was not simply a diplomatic arrangement between states; it was a social condition requiring profound political change.
But somewhere along the way, much of the field lost its nerve.
Today, large parts of peace studies appear trapped in a strange temporal lag. Conceptually, many remain anchored in Cold War frameworks and institutional faith in global governance structures that are visibly eroding. The United Nations is still invoked with near-liturgical reverence, as if its paralysis were merely a temporary malfunction rather than a structural feature of a world dominated by great-power rivalry.
At the same time, the radical core of the idea of positive peace has been quietly diluted. The original insight—that durable peace requires transforming unjust social and economic structures—has become uncomfortable in an era where neoliberal capitalism defines the boundaries of respectable discourse. Instead of confronting those structures, many scholars prefer safer terrain: conflict resolution workshops, dialogue facilitation, peace education modules, technocratic peacebuilding projects.
In other words, peace without politics.
The deeper dilemma is that many in the field seem to want to keep the cake and eat it too. They seek to preserve the language of liberal values—human rights, democracy, international law—as if these norms still function in the global order as they were once imagined. At the same time, they are visibly terrified of the implications of taking positive peace seriously. Because once you do, you inevitably confront questions of inequality, exploitation, imperial hierarchies, and the structural violence embedded in global capitalism.
And that road quickly leads to ideas that polite academic circles would rather avoid: systemic transformation, redistribution, and yes—even the socialist imagination that once animated the most ambitious visions of peace.
So the result is a curious intellectual balancing act. Strategic studies normalize militarization. Peace studies soften it with humanitarian vocabulary. Meanwhile, the system itself continues its slow march toward catastrophe.
But we are told that this is democracy—that the people decide.
Yet one must ask: what kind of people would consciously choose the end of the world? The world they already inhabit is sinking under the weight of social injustice, deepening inequality, ecological crisis, and political fragmentation. Societies are increasingly organized around polarization and permanent partisan warfare—the old imperial logic of divide et impera, divide and rule, now internalized within democratic systems themselves.
If democracy truly means collective self-government, then the silence of the intellectual class in the face of existential danger is not merely disappointing. It is historically tragic.
By the way, Ukraine and Iran were the most predictable wars. Academia’s contribution to conflict prevention – zero!
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