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www.paecon.net THE PERESTROIKA MOVEMENT Discipline out of Touch with Real-World Concerns Therese S. Gunawardena-Vaughn I am a graduate student nearing completion of my Ph.D., and the recent discussion regarding APSA’s institutional exclusiveness and near-obsession with statistical methods resonates strongly with me. As an undergraduate, I majored in English and minored in political science and economics, and chose to enter a political science graduate program because of a passion for politics and intellectual inquiry. However, this initial (and somewhat youthful) idealism has gradually been supplanted by an ever-growing cynicism regarding both the discipline and my own function as one of its adherents. Mr. Perestroika’s claims regarding the hegemonic status accorded statistical methodologies deserve some comment here. During my tenure as a graduate student, I have encountered many “political scientists” whose fixation on quantitative tools blinds them to all else. They remain completely oblivious to the complexities inherent in social and political phenomena that we, as social scientists, are ostensibly charged with understanding and explicating. Additionally, I have attended numerous APSA meetings and listened to so-called “luminaries” in the field tout their “parsimonious and elegant” models that bear little resemblance to the world I inhabit. It is gratifying to realize that I was not alone in thinking that many of these studies were both uninteresting and futile. Incidentally, although I have presented individual papers at APSA meetings in the past, an analytically rigorous panel proposal on transnational social movements that I submitted to the 2000 meeting was unceremoniously rejected. While I do not think that my own research is particularly worthy of public approbation, the other panelists included accomplished scholars such as Saskia Sassen and Yossi Shain, both of whom have made significant contributions to our understanding of important contemporary political issues. This offhand dismissal seems indicative of APSA’s preoccupation with methodology at the expense of interesting, timely, and politically relevant scholarship. I am extremely excited about this revolution from within and lend it my unequivocal support. However, I will not be formally affiliated with the discipline in the near future. While I have been exceedingly fortunate to have a supervisor who shares my intellectual Weltanschauung, I have decided not to pursue a career in academia for many of the reasons highlighted by Mr. Perestroika. Finally, I am a woman and a minority (who did not grow up in the United States), and am amazed at how out of touch many American-trained political scientists are with “real-world” politics. As those of us who study ethnic conflict are keenly aware, these real-world politics affect people’s lives in tangible and sometimes terrible ways. I commend Mr. Perestroika and others for having the courage to give voice to opinions that many of us have long held in silence. Therese S. Gunawardena-Vaughn, University of Texas, Austin