The dominant theoretical trends in the international relations field have been strikingly absent from the mountains of paper expended on analysis of al-Qaeda, Islamism, and the war on terror. Most of the dominant theoretical approaches were not so much wrong as irrelevant.

[SNIP]

But is that true? Has IR theory been irrelevant to the debates? To find out, I just spent a few hours looking at the contents of the last four years of the six leading journals for International Relations theory (International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, World Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, European Journal of International Relations, Review of International Studies - see the end of the post for discussion of these choices), along with the American Political Science Review. I used an exceedingly loose definition of "about al-Qaeda" - i.e. I included everything about terrorism and counter-terrorism, even if it barely touched at all on al-Qaeda or Islamism itself; and I included review essays, even if they did not include any original research.

The results were even more striking than I expected. All told, these seven journals published 796 articles between 2002-2005. I found a total of 25 articles dealing even loosely with al-Qaeda, Islamism, or terrorism. That's just over 3% of the articles. Now, there's lots of important stuff out there in the world, and there's no reason for the whole field to be following the headlines, but still... 3%?

[SNIP]

One obvious objection [to the methodology used in the review of IR literature] would be that I excluded policy-oriented journals such as Foreign Affairs, International Security, and The Washington Quarterly, which do tend to publish much more on the topic. I did that intentionally, because that best captures the prestige value within the field of International Relations. The policy journals are generally undervalued within the International Relations profession, to the extent that many top Political Science Departments wouldn't even consider a Foreign Affairs publication suitable for a tenure file. In other words, the fact that there is a lot more on Islamism and al-Qaeda in those journals only strengthens my claim - even though political scientists have a lot to say on the subject, they can't or don't say it in the most prestigious, theory oriented journals.

Oh, and I didn't even say anything about the quality of those 25 articles... all I'll say is that of them, I would count about 7 of them as actually useful in any meaningful way...

Adherence to any ideological position, especially ones as crude as "realism," "idealism," "isolationism," or "Jacksonianism" is a mistake. In fact this kind of terminology obscures the necessary complexity of decision making in foreign affairs.

Far more sophisticated and flexible models within which to discuss foreign affairs decision making are desperately needed.

[While liberal interventionists] have been discussing ever so "reasonably" how best to adjust the "calculus" of America's Manifest Destiny so "we" will continue to be a force of good in the world, they have, almost to a person, demonstrated their profound inability merely to look outside their own goddamn windows and respond with simple human decency and commonsense to the real world. And once again, they've demonstrated how alarmingly limited American foreign policy discourse has become.