CRITICAL INTERPRETATION AND INTERWAR PEACE MOVEMENTS 299entails both evidentiary and ethical rationales. Scholars should understand—and work through—
how conclusions and recommendations might translate into policy and think about the various
meanings that could be assigned to such conclusions, recommendations, and policies. This does
not mean that we should avoid conclusions that might be difficult if our evidence leads us to them.
Instead, it means that we should acknowledge that unspoken ethical or worldview assumptions
can shape our very research questions, the methods we use to examine them, and the conclusions
we draw from them. In other words, scholars’ research can affect policies and, consequently,
people’s lives. Therefore, we need to be more cognizant of whether our conclusions feed into, or
challenge, meta-narratives about world politics, and why and how they might do so. In undertak-
ing this ethical evaluation, however, scholars must continue to be reflexive and even self-critical.
If we avoid this responsibility, our interpretations become more dogmatic than critical, and we
forego the opportunity to gain continued insights in the future.
Thus, careful substantive (or “empirical”) work, combined with questioning assumptions about
events, can help to destabilize dominant interpretations. The task of critical interpretation chal-
lenges the belief, so prevalent in much of the social sciences, that arguments are won or lost based
on their merits alone. Rather, critical interpretation assumes that we must analyze the situatedness
of the arguments themselves, the evidence used to support them, and the ethical lessons drawn
from them, to understand the power relations that they support or deny. In evaluating this combi-
nation of arguments, evidence, and ethics, the researcher must also be aware of the context that
underlies her own questioning stance. Conversely, scholars cannot engage in persuasive critical
interpretation without examining a good deal of evidence, if possible from a variety of sources.
The promise of critical interpretation is that the interaction between empirical grounding and
critical questioning can permit scholars to break through powerful, and possibly stale, paradigms
to gain new insights on politics, power, and ethics.