International Relations Is A Prime Habitat For Struthio Camelus*
Kevin Drum links to this post by Abu Aardvark:
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…
Hmm.
Now, the good Aardvark also makes the point that the reason that al Qaeda has been ignored is that the theoretical paradigms which prevail in International Relations, like “realism,” “idealism,” “liberalism,” and “constructivism” are not terribly conducive to analysing a non-state Islamist super-terrorist organization. Who knew?
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.
I suppose I should make these recent thoughts apply in a more general way to the American foreign policy/international relations discourse:
[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.
In any event, I’m glad I’m not the only one to notice how poorly adjusted to reality most American intellectual debate on the world has become. And I’m very glad this is being quantified by scholars like AA.
[UPDATE: An interesting reference in the comments to the field of comparative politics jogged my memory regarding another bete noire that hounds my thoughts, namely the lack of a truly compelling translation of either the Qu’ran or the hadith. I would assume that since this is the case (or was, the last time I checked), many other texts of vital importance to undertstanding the various Islams are also unavailable, or available only in bad editions (the assertion that the Qu’ran can never be translated is a religious belief, not an intellectual claim, and must not be permitted to stand in the way of making the fundamental documents of Islam available to non-Muslims in the best possible way). Now even if one assumes that the finest scholars are honest and they actually can read the Qu’ran in the original – not an entirely warranted assumption – the lack of a good English Qu’ran translation is as telling a symbol as I can imagine of the epidemic level of stultifying mediocrity that permeates international studies regarding Islam, Islamism, and related areas of politics and culture in the Middle East and other states where Islamic belief wields enormous influence.
One can only hope that truly excellent scholars, like Juan Cole who is well-known in the blogosphere, soon become the rule. But right now, they are not only exceptional, but the rare exception.]
*You can look up Struthio camelus here, and so endeth my dabbling in Latin. For now.