The Bush administration earned justified opprobrium for neglecting many regions of the world, failing to ground its policies in serious knowledge of those regions it did address, and generally focusing on the world it wanted to create to the exclusion of the world as it really was. It’s not that it isn’t a good idea to try to create a better world. This is a goal we should all hold dear. But it is foolhardy in the extreme to try to create the new without taking a serious look at what already exists. And it is madness to imagine that the US is strong enough to impose its will unilaterally on the world.

The transition to the Obama administration is a chance to help create a better government — and perhaps a better world. A crucial first step in this is strengthening the knowledge base from which the new government will work. All sorts of knowledge matter, but none more than knowledge of the different cultures, governments, economic institutions, religions, social movements and ideological commitments that shape the actions of both our allies and others, at scales from the local to the national to the global.

To benefit from such knowledge the Obama administration needs to look to researchers, and people with good research-based educations, not only to people with family or business connections to different parts of the world. Amateur knowledge and arbitrary personal experience won’t be sufficient.

One reason amateur knowledge and family connections aren’t enough is that every family comes with different biases. Vacation travel is a superficial source of insight into international affairs and the internal affairs of other nations. No matter how talented and productive a businessperson may be, having concluded a deal with a company in another country doesn’t guarantee a broader or especially a critical grasp of what else is going on in that country. Academic researchers don’t always have more insights than others, but they do have the training to look deeply and systematically at what is going on. Even more importantly, a research community cultivates critical assessments of different claims to truth. It is this invitation to argument based on evidence that most distinguishes a serious research field from the anecdotal knowledge which proliferates in many other settings.

Specialists doing research on the Middle East, for example, knew that trying to base Iraq policy on what a few exiled dissident leaders said was woefully inadequate. But many in the administration found it easier to be charmed by the seeming “authenticity” of Ahmed Chalabi’s personal testimony. That made for bad policy — with dreadful consequences that haven’t ceased.

Despite a recent fashion for abstractions and ambitious but empirically thin models, many researchers learn the languages of the places they study and pay close attention to both their histories and the movements for change that flourish today. This kind of knowledge is crucial. And we have to hope the Obama administration will not neglect it.

There is every reason to think that the Obama administration will be committed to basing its decisions on the best knowledge available. The Obama transition team has consistently emphasized competence in its appointees — including strong education and relevant experience. But recently there has been a furor over one worrying appointment. Many of the best researchers on South Asia have been shocked that the Obama transition team added an Indian-American business leader widely viewed as closely linked to Hindu nationalists. It’s worth reading the letter written by these distinguished researchers — many of them also Indian-American but speaking on the basis of scholarship not simply personal connections or commitments.

I don’t know Sonal Shah and can’t speak to how deeply she shares the Hindu nationalism of many of those with whom she has shared positions of organizational leadership. But I do know that Hindu nationalism is an issue to which the Obama administration needs to pay attention. Islam is not the only religion which produces extremists. There are Jewish and Christian examples as well. And in South Asia Hindu nationalism is every bit as violent as Islamism and every bit as much a threat to peace.

South Asia is just one of the regional contexts in which the Obama administration will face threats to peace. India is just one country but a very large and important one. Hindu nationalism may get less attention because it seems to be “just in India” and thus not a global issue, but that is misleading. Not only are there Hindus elsewhere, but as both terrorism and the financial crisis have been driving home, events in distant places are increasingly linked to each other.

The Obama administration needs experts on India and other specific places. It also needs people who look at issues like nationalism and political violence comparatively, based on both place-specific knowledge and knowledge of global connections. But fortunately, the government doesn’t need to hire all the specialists; America has a wonderful system of universities in which they will continue to work (though the administration would be wise to make sure that context-specific training and research remain active). The most important thing is for those the new administration charges with developing policy to have the attitude that they want the best possible knowledge and the willingness to listen to critical perspectives.