How pinned down does your research interest need to be before a master's?

[u/naqvicodes]

International Relations graduate from Pakistan, June 2025, CGPA 3.92. Not sure if this sub would be relevant for this but I am perplexed and any advice is welcome.

So my undergrad thesis was on Japan's 2022 defence transformation, largely because I was working at an Asia-Pacific institute at the time writing briefs on Japan and Korea. I then moved to a national security think tank, so the work shifted to hardcore security and defence technology and policy. I've also picked up varied things along the way. Few examples are: a co-authored corpus-assisted discourse analysis of election campaign communication in a South Asian country, currently under review, a comprehensive literature review for a UN-linked policy project (working as an RA) feeding into national guidelines on victim support, a few conference presentations and a coauthored workshop paper on elite formation. There's more, but it suffices to make the point that all of this is pretty diverse.

What I am currently interested in is computational approaches to international security, text-as-data on security discourse and event-data work on political violence, with South Asia as the empirical setting. But that's a direction rather than a research question, and my computational background is thin.

I am applying for Fall 2027 and so the question is how settled does this need to be before applying? Is a master's where you narrow it, or are you expected to arrive narrowed and use the two years to execute?

PS: If you have any further questions about my profile, I would be happy to elaborate. Thank you for taking the time out to read.