ABSTRACT
The desire for policy influence is one major aspect of think-tank activity. But many foreign policy institutes hope to add, if only marginally, to the corpus of international relations (IR) and strategic studies literature. There is, however, a tension between sustaining academic legitimacy and speaking to the discipline, on the one hand, and the brokerage function and engagement with policy making that eschews disinterestedness, on the other. The balancing of these two roles differs substantially from one policy institute to another. The following discussion outlines some points of intersection between scholarship and policy.
