Abu Aardvark

IR of the Middle East: State of the Field

In my last post, I briefly described the headline panel on the state of the art in the International Relations of the Middle East which I chaired at the Middle East Studies Association Annual meeting on Saturday.   As promised, here is a lightly edited version of my prepared remarks for that panel -- only part of which I actually delivered, due to time constraints and deference to the other outstanding panelists, but which I reproduce here for those interested.  And see here for this old classic contretemps over IR theory's failure to deal with al-Qaeda and the follow-up response to various aggrieved parties - showing either that the problems remain or that I never learn!

International Relations of the Middle East:   State of the Field

Ten years ago in Chicago, I appeared on a special session at MESA evaluating the state of the art in the field of the International Relations of the Middle East, along with Greg Gause, Steve Walt, Mike Barnett and several others. This year seemed a good time to repeat the exercise – given how much both IR and the world have changed.   How has the field of IR ME dealt with the massive upheavals?  How has it informed the response?   I assembled the panel with an eye towards covering major subfields and approaches, including a determined effort to get the best of Europe and people who bridge the academic-policy divide. I regret that Fred Halliday and Etel Solingen were unable to attend, among others.   But despite their absence, we have assembled a sensational panel of highly accomplished scholars of the IR Middle East.
... [bios of participants here deleted]

The Middle East has been undeniably central to the great issues of world politics of the last 8 years:  from the failure of the Camp David peace summit to the outbreak of the second Palestinian Intifada and Israeli reoccupation of the West Bank, to 9/11 and the war on terror, to the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, to the jockeying over the Iranian nuclear program, to anti-Americanism and the war of ideas, to the rise of sovereign wealth funds and the dramatic fluctuations in oil prices. Has the Middle East also been central to the academic discipline of International Relations?  Has the IR of the Middle East had anything to say to the wider public and foreign policy debates on these subjects?  

There are two distinct areas of concern:  engagement with policy debates and engagement with the academic discipline of International Relations.  Because the other panelists will have much to say about the policy dimension, I want to focus here instead on the academic field of IR.  How have Middle East specialists fared?   Does it matter?  What can be done?

First, the performance question.  I begin with the assumption that publication in top peer-reviewed academic journals is an important measure of performance in the field.  Books are certainly important in IR, and -- as I discuss at greater length below -- other kinds of journals (policy oriented or Middle East focused) are important outlets for high-quality academic work on the subject.  Nevertheless, publication in top IR journals matters because of their centrality to the organization of the field and to hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions.   Put bluntly, how can specialists in the International Relations of the Middle East get tenure at top universities if they can't/don't/won't publish in the top journals as perceived by the discipline?  The answer is they can't, don’t, and won't. And then who will mentor the next generation of academic specialists in the field?

With the help of Rachel Whitlark, a graduate student at GWU, I did a systematic search of the IR journal literature over the last seven years: all articles published about the Middle East in the ten leading peer-reviewed academic IR journals (International Organization, International Security, International Studies Quarterly, International Studies Perspectives, International Studies Review, Security Studies, European Journal of International Relations, Review of International Studies, World Politics, and Journal of Conflict Resolution).   The findings are stark:  the IR of the ME – especially by MESA members -  is alarmingly slight -- and shows little sign of increasing.

What is the “appropriate” level?  I suggest using the contents of the leading policy journal Foreign Affairs as a proxy for what matters to the foreign policy community:  about 20% of all articles published there since 2001 have dealt with the Middle East.   By comparison, overall, 220 out of 2088 articles in the 10 academic IR journals dealt in some way with the Middle East – about 10.5%.    Of those, a very significant number were large-n studies in which Middle East cases appeared in the dataset but were not primarily about the Middle East.  In the leading journal International Organization, for instance, 42 out of 49 "Middle East" articles fell into this category.   What is more, a substantial number of the Middle East themed articles in such journals were actually comparative in focus, not IR.    Focusing only on articles in academic IR journals which primarily focus on the International Relations of the Middle East – using any methodology, and defined very broadly – left 154, less than 7.5%.   

Of those 154,  the vast majority employed quantitative or formal  methodologies which required no regional expertise, or were written by generalists relying exclusively on secondary sources.    I would wager that the number of these articles written by MESA members - a proxy for "regional expertise" which this audience at least may accept -  is in the low double digits. Adding in the generalist journals makes it worse:  in APSR, AJPS and JOP there were 5 out of 1255 articles coded – generously – as IR ME.  If I wanted to be apocalyptic, I would include these and drop the tally to less than 5%.  (Note:  while we did not code for this, Oded Haklai reports that he conducted a similar exercise for other regional area studies and found that the Middle East underperformed those, as well.)  I had hoped to see a time lag/ pipeline effect, and that more research would begin appearing after graduate students finished their dissertations and older faculty retooled.   But there is no noticable trend towards more articles on IRME topics – if anything, they have fallen off.

Does this matter?  I think it does -- and not just for the problems noted above about the effects on the field and prospective students.  The academic discipline is the incubator not only of talent but also of new ideas, presumably more insulated from the pressures of the headlines and the demands of partisanship.   It establishes the theoretical frameworks and methodologies and norms which will dominate the academic discipline and set the future of the profession.   There are also important intellectual costs of the exclusion of area specialists from the mainstream of the field.   For just one example, take the study of al-Qaeda:  the overwhelming majority of the articles published in the IR journals about this issue treat it as a problem of “terrorism” – some quite creatively and interestingly, using formal or quantitative or comparative methods, but failing to consider the wider sociological, intellectual or political context from which AQ emerged, lacking the language skills to grapple with the texts or the contexts.  

But here I offer a caveat.  Most MESA members would probably agree that it is a problem that people are writing about the Middle East without deep understanding of culture, history, language, politics.  But that position is not universally shared.  It needs to be defended by demonstrating exactly what is missed by those lacking such background or skills.  What trends, causal mechanisms, actors, or evidence are area specialists adding that others do not or can not?   I do not agree with those who believe that  local knowledge should take the place of theory or with those who prioritize general theory over local knoweldge.  Both are needed. But it is the particular burden of the area specialists in the configuration of today's academic disciplines to demonstrate their indispensibility -- not simply to assume it. 

Why is it so hard for Middle East specialists to navigate the IR field?   We’re all familiar with the ongoing, decades old arguments over parsimony vs empirical richness, policy relevance vs theory, and so on. And we’re all familiary with the vicious cycle:   training in leading departments, does not incentivize learning languages and extended field work, and well-meaning advisers likely warn students to focus on topics and methods which will get them published.  This ages old argument will not be resolved today.  But I would note that the subfield of Comparative Politics has done much better than the subfield of International Relations in recent years -- suggesting that the answer can not lie exclusively in the problems of training, in the nature of the region, or in the difficulty of doing research in the region.

One problem distinct to the field of IR is probably the nature of the leading journals.  Where those working on comparative politics can find a comfortable home in disciplinary journals such as Comparative Politics or Comparative Political Studies with work on core topics such as democratization and authoritarianism, civil society and social movements, and so forth, IR scholars working on the Middle East seem to be consistently farther from the expectations of the leading journals.   I do not think that editors are biased against the Middle East – indeed, anecdotally, many of them would love to see relevant articles but are not getting "acceptable" submissions.  But what is deemed “acceptable” is largely dictated by disciplinary norms.  In many of the leading journals there is a strong bias towards formal and quantitative methodologies which do not play to the strengths of most MESA members, and which would require asking different questions than we might prefer to ask.   The more qualitatively oriented journals fall into two main categories:  highly theoretical journals oriented towards disciplinary, non-regional concerns (EJIR, RIS) or else security oriented journals (SS, IS).  The former publish very few Middle East articles, while the latter publish quite a lot of Middle East articles which naturally cluster around the security concerns of the day -  Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Iraq war, al-Qaeda (but defined as terrorism, not as an Islamist phenomenon) – and are often written from an ‘external’ perspective.  

One response is to cast a pox on their house – why try to publish in journals which are not receptive and which can be frustrating, especially when policy journals -- with fast turnaround times, eager editors, and real-world impact -- beckon? I’ve already outlined the reasons why this is not a productive response.  But it’s nevertheless a common one – especially for those of us with tenure who can get away with it!    Many of us now publish our “IR of the ME” work in policy journals or as think tank papers or in the many fine Middle East focused journals, and avoid the leading journals – something to which I myself plead guilty, and in which I see considerable value.   But even if such writing helps our engagement with the policy debate, it also contributes to the problem of under-representation within the discipline.  Senior scholars in the subfield need to make more effort not only to help our students publish in these journals - we also need to publish in these journals ourselves to carve out the intellectual and disciplinary space for such articles.

Part of problem is that IR itself is in a bit of a funk right now - the grand paradigm wars have passed, the top journals are dominated by methods-driven studies.    Perhaps this should be seen as an opportunity for us to try to change this.   I would point to some success stories:    the growth of the insurgencies and civil wars literature, which has opened door to qualititaive and locally informed research in important ways;  the comparative politics of the ME, which has done much better at integrating itself into core concerns of the subfield.   What can our subfield learn from this?  Broadly speaking, we should do a better job of generating theoretical controversy:  develop our own set of interlocking, progressive debates with real world relevance and above all interesting puzzles which can be unlocked through innovative sources of data, theoretical approaches, counter-intuitive hypotheses  and unexpected comparisons.   As Greg Gause more pithily put it, argue with each other -- not political polemics, but analytical arguments which can sustain a series of related articles attacking a question from multiple perspectives.

Here are some practical suggestions of where such fights of broad disciplinary concern might be found:

•  Globalization:  The Middle East is too often dismissed as "outside globalization."  That's wrong.   As I've argued in a recent chapter in a volume edited by Jon Kirschner, aside from trade the Middle East is at the heart of globalization:  information and communications technology, the movement of peoples, finance.   Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood are each leading examples of transnational networks taking advantage of the changes driven by globalization – their adaptations and evolution could usefully be evaluated in the context of global civil society, transnational advocay networks, and globalization writ large.  Middle Eastern societies are unfortunately a key source of the international movement of peoples, from migrant labor to Iraqi refugees.  The region is also rotten with the kinds of black markets and illicit movements tracked by, say, Peter Andreas in the Balkans.    By attacking such questions through the lens of globalization, scholars of the IR of the Middle East could move that literature in genuinely new directions.
• Comparative regionalism:  Recent work by Etel Solingen and Peter Katzenstein demonstrates the potential of serious comparisons of the political and economic experience of different regions.  But most of those studies begin from Europe and Asia and then work outwards - what would be changed by seriously beginning from the Middle East's experience as a thoroughly penetrated sub-region (using Binder's old term) with broad social/political-cultural integration but state-level competition and anemic international organizations? 
• Wars of Ideas:   Al-Qaeda and other Islamists are also quintessentially constructivist actors:  motivated by moral ideas and engaging in persuasive argument in the international realm, waging ‘wars of ideas’ against the dominant international society.  Arab states have pushed back with their own ideological campaigns, while the U.S. has waged its well-advertised "war of ideas" with variable success.   Constructivists should be all over this, but have not generally been.   A lot of my work lies here, but there's plenty of untapped opportunities to argue here about how ideas operate and how they matter. 
•  Imperium and polarity:  The Middle East lies at the heart of the American dominated international system, and should be a crucial area to explore the dynamics of ‘imperium’ or unipolarity or hegemony from the bottom up.  The contrast between deep popular opposition to American foreign policy and America's seemingly stable alliances with virtually every state in the region cries out for analytical attention.    The American order described by, say, John Ikenberry looks very different from the vantage point of the Middle East, with its quarter million troops and deep involvement in sustaining political order in most countries in the region.  Work by Dan Nexon or Alex Cooley might be a good starting point to rethink the relationship between the region and the international order.  
• Regional power shifts:  some of the best recent work on the IR of the Middle East has been focused on alliances - Greg Gause's work on the Gulf, Curt Ryan's new book on Jordan, Ben Miller's book on regional security, and a variety of works focused on "regime security" concerns.  How do these theories stand up to the massive changes in the regional balance of power of the last few years - the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the rise of Iran, the vast amounts of money pouring into the Gulf.  
• Global power shifts:  If global power and economic weight continues to shift East, to China and India, how will this affect the Middle East?  Will the Gulf continue to be an American lake indefinitely?  Will the Middle East be a leading or a trailing indicator of global power shifts?   Where would we look to see this happening?

There's much more to be suggested here, of course - these are just some suggestions of where specialists in the IR of the Middle East might be able to tap into and reshape major arguments within the discipline at large.   My hope is that this can trigger a heightened focus on the problems of the subfield so that ten years from now we do not return for what Greg Gause calls another round of our ritual self-flagellation.  

IR/Middle East

Here's a not-rhetorical question for the political scientists in the audience. 10 years ago (Chicago, 1998), I was on a very well-attended roundtable at the Middle East Studies Association annual meeting about the state of the art in the field of "International Relations of the Middle East" The other panelists were Steve Walt, Michael Barnett, Malik Mufti, and Greg Gause.   Here is my question:  if you were to organize a similar panel today, who would you want on it?   Who do you think is doing the most interesting/influential work in the academic field of IR on the Middle East?  Please don't say me, even if you most sincerely believe that to be true, since that won't help me.  But feel free to nominate yourself if you can make a case for yourself,  and feel free to email me your answers privately if you'd prefer.  Thanks!

UPDATE:  thanks, everyone, for very interesting discussion and some great suggestions.  I'll let you know when this becomes relevant. 

Political Science Research Blog

My friend (and new colleague) Henry Farrell has created a new blog platform to identify and disseminate political science research which should be of interest to a wider public.

Welcome to the political science papers blog, which seeks to serve as a rough-and-ready guide to political science papers which are likely to have some appeal to a general audience (as measured by the editor's idiosyncratic notions of 'appeal').   As currently constituted, the blog will post entries consisting of the abstracts of the papers, bibliographic details, and, where available, links to the papers in question. Where the editor has something additional to say about the paper, and time to say it, he'll include this too.

I think it's a good idea.  I told Henry that I thought that in the longer term, this sort of thing would t be better administered by the American Political Science Association.  It would have the institutional self-interest in seeing research widely disseminated, the resources to pay someone to maintain it, the disciplinary clout to make it worth the while of young academics to submit their recent papers and perhaps the clout to get the papers more widely noticed.  Also, it could perhaps provide an outlet for unpublished research in progress, perhaps via the annual APSA meeting papers archive.   I'd like to see something similar for Middle East studies; perhaps something for MESA to look into?  At any rate, for now Henry is providing this service as a public good, and hopefully enough people will find it interesting to make it catch on. 

Kefaya, Iraq, and the Kuran thesis

Way back in 1998, the very smart USC economist Timur Kuran  wrote a fascinating essay riffing off of Nazih Ayubi's book about the Arab state.  Kuran's thesis was that

"many Arab regimes are highly vulnerable to a shock that would stimulate mass dissent.  Indeed, even an ostensibly minor rise in open opposition within one Arab country might trigger a revolutionary crusade in others.  Just such a domino process occurred in Eastern Europe less than a decade ago.... If the supporters of established political and economic structures include millions who privately desire various reforms, those structures may be very vulnerable, however entrenched they appear to the untrained eye. A shock that impels a few people to vocalize their grievances and demand reforms may catalyze a bandwagon process that resets the terms of acceptalbe public discourse and renders the incumbent regeims unsustainable." 

Kuran, who had developed one of the most powerful explanations of those Eastern European revolutions, had some good reasons for thinking that Arab regimes might be particularly brittle and the conditions ripe for radical change.  Many of the things which he expected to spark this bandwagon have in fact now happened:  the Iraq war toppled Saddam, the post-Hariri Lebanese protests drove out the Syrians, some brave activists began demanding change (Kefaya), Arab satellite TV broadcast it all widely.   But Arab regimes look as entrenched as ever. 

That has to be something of a puzzle.  A lot of people on both sides of today's partisan debates have spent the last few years working with some version of Kuran's thesis.  For American neo-conservatives, this was a core part of the logic behind invading Iraq:  deposing Saddam would trigger a cascade of popular demands for change which would bring down the decaying and corrupt Arab order.  Many Arab activists, especially the Egyptian Kefaya movement, hoped that brave protests (publicized by al-Jazeera and blogs) would break through the wall of fear and inspire the Arab masses to rally to their sides and bring down the decaying and corrupt Arab order.

Well, three years after Saddam's ouster, and a year and a half after the "Arab spring", the decaying and corrupt Arab order is very much still with us.  The shock did not produce the expected cascade.  Breaking the wall of fear wasn't enough, and the expected "tipping mechanism" has notably failed to tip.   Why have Arab regimes proven so much more resilient than Kuran and Kefaya expected? 

Why, indeed.  Wouldn't that be a great journal article for somebody?   Too bad I'm so busy...

Preventive war: lecture notes

Just for a change of pace, I thought I would post my lecture notes for this afternoon's panel discussion (if you're going to the talk, don't read this now unless you want to be bored;  okay, I didn't deliver it as written which should surprise nobody, but I'll leave it up anyway).   The International Studies Program posed the question "What is the future of preventative war?", which later morphed into "The future of preventative war."   I don't go into any historical depth because my co-panelist is the historian David Kaiser, who lectures about this stuff for a living, and I'm expecting he'll cover that ground (and hopefully he'll post his lecture notes too, so you can almost feel like you were there!).   I don't claim any great original insights here, since this isn't really my primary field... just thought I would post it since I don't have time to write anything else today.

"The future of preventative war"

Preventive war has always been and will always be a part of world politics – by whatever name.   All the way back to Thucydides, when Sparta allegedly went to war with Athens out of fear of the rise of Athenian power, created a series of pretexts searching for a casus belli until it found one. Israel attacked Egypt and Syria in 1967 for “preventive” reasons – not because it really feared imminent attack, but because it could not tolerate forever the harassment and incitement coming from its neighbors.  Even Saddam Hussein invoked preventive justifications when he launched war against Iran in 1980 (Khomeini was allegedly mobilizing Iraqi Shia against Saddam) and Kuwait in 1990 (Kuwait was engaged in “economic warfare” and bleeding Iraq dry).   Almost every war is cast as "preventive" in some way by its initiator - because a state thinks, or at least wants publics to think, that attacking now will be preferable to not attacking, i.e. preventing some undesirable outcome.  What's really the key is whether audiences believe the argument - whether it's seen as a legitimate, honest fear or a manufactured one. 

Despite this long, if less than glorious, pedigree, preventive war has long been seen as illegitimate under international law.  Hence the controversy when the Bush administration publicly articulated a doctrine of preventive war in its 2002 National Security Strategy.  In the Bush administration's formulation, preventive war meant that the US must reserve the right to act before a threat materialized.  In an age of WMD and terrorists, Rumsfeld argued, states must be able to act before "the smoking gun is a mushroom cloud."  This is not an insane argument.  Indeed, two colleagues – Rodger Payne and Peter Dombrowski – have recently argued that there is even an emerging consensus for preventive war around the world.  A lot of statesmen evidently saw the usefulness of a preventive war doctrine, even if they didn't agree with its implementation in Iraq.   Indians suggested that Pakistan would be a great candidate for preventive war, for instance.   

Iraq was the main test case for Bush’s new and improved preventive war doctrine.   Let me just make a few points about how Iraq shapes the likely short term future of preventive war, and then say a few words about Iran and North Korea – the most discussed targets of an American preventive war in the near future.   

The failure of the intelligence about Iraqi WMD and ties to al-Qaeda (leaving aside the question of whether this was really a failure or a politically motivated manipulation) casts grave doubt on the viability of any preventive war doctrine.   The world is full of bad people and threats, and a doctrine which demands that we remove them all is a recipe for overstretch, backlash, and disaster.   Preventive war has to be based on a compelling case that the state in question has both the intentions and is developing the capability to carry out a threat great enough to merit war.   Iraq was presented as such a case, with "slam dunk" intelligence - but it wasn't.   The doubt which this now casts on all intelligence cripples PW as a doctrine: how can we know when action is urgent when we can not know the urgency of the threat?  Some honest Iraq hawks, like Ken Pollack, have written about this dilemma at length as this has become clear;  I find it difficult to take seriously any foreign policy analyst who has not at least tried to wrestle with the dilemma. 

One response to the failure of uncertainty is simply to assume the worst and act whenever there is doubt.  That's fine, if you have unlimited capabilities or if war is cheap and success relatively easy.  But again, Iraq has crippled any such assumption.  With our military bogged down in a seemingly endless quagmire and civil war, who now will argue that a preventive war will cheaply and easily secure our objectives?

Of course, even if those problems didn't exist, a doctrine of untrammeled PW would still be a recipe for disaster.  Much of American hegemony has rested on the fact that most countries in the world have not feared us - there has been some confidence that for all America's power, it wouldn't exploit that power.   The Bush doctrine destroyed that conviction, but there are still limits.  If other countries believe that the US will engage in preventive war, their obvious move is to accelerate plans against such an invasion - get nukes now rather than later, put in place defensive measures, or... attack first before the US can get in the first strike.  Preventive war cuts both ways, you know.

Remember this?

Finally, one common argument in defense of preventive war is that it's good for the reputation:  that willingness to go to war with Iraq, say, will convince other states of the credibility of our threats and will enhance our bargaining power.   But that depends on the outcome of the war.   In May of 2003, some potentially targeted states surveying what appeared to be an easy American victory in Baghdad might have given greater attention to American threats.  The opposite is more likely true today – Iranians looking at American struggles in occupied Iraq are unlikely to conclude that the American public is eager for another war.  That makes American threats less rather than more credible. 

One final concern is that the process of building support for preventive war is itself generally problematic.  In the absence of an attack, the state which wants support for a preventive war needs to go to extremes to build public support:  which usually means demonizing the enemy, ratcheting up tensions, trying to manuever the opponent into an act of war, distorting intelligence and degrading the public sphere with apocalyptic argument.    This is not conducive to rational deliberation, and can be corrosive of both democracy and a prudent foreign policy.

Now the specific cases:     Iran and North Korea are the two obvious candidates for an American preventive war, as Bush has defined it, but neither looks likely.   No good military option exists against either. North Korea could devastate South Korea, possibly even Japan, has accelerated its nuclear program and possibly has workable nukes.  China and its other neighbors are more worried about its collapse than about its going nuclear.

And Iran?  the Iraq war has left Iran stronger than it has ever been:  in a dominant position in Iraq, the Hezbollah success and its own nuclear defiance have won it support across the Sunni-Shia divide.  It's bigger than Iraq, has learned from Iraq, and doesn't seem likely to be an easy win no matter how it's cut.   Unlike Saddam, its rulers are shrewd and preparing for war - and don't seem unduly concerned by American threats.

To sum up, then, I would say that preventive war will always be a weapon in the arsenal of great powers, regardless of international law or precedent.   It has probably become more likely given shifting technology and changing tolerance levels for uncertainty.  But I don't think it's likely in the two cases for which it's most frequently invoked these days.   

APSA Review, by request

So, a couple of folks have asked me to review the APSA.  That's always hard to do, since so much of the experience is personal - the friends you see or don't see, the restaurants you choose, the attendance at your panel, and so on.   What about more general impressions?

On the "controversy" over the relative weight of international and domestic politics going on over at the interesting new TNR academic blog, I'd have to agree with Dan Drezner.   I was at the "clash of civilizations" plenary along with half the conference, and I left after Steve Walt's entertaining declaration of victory on behalf of Realism (even though Steve himself has obviously become a constructivist!) along with half the audience.  I'd guess that most people went anticipating a lively argument between Sam Huntington and four big name critics (Walt, "Frank" Fukuyama, Ben Barber, and James Kurth).  But when Sam couldn't make it due to illness, it lost that attraction even if the other panelists gave their typically entertaining presentations.    Me, I have to admit that I felt like I had fallen into a wormhole and was back in 1996 instead of 2006, but it was still a decent way to spend the lunch hour.

The most personally rewarding panel I attended was the one Middle East panel I constructed for Division 12 which I was able to attend.  Malik Mufti, Salwa Ismail, and Rabab al-Mahdi each presented very interesting, original, and thoughtful papers on questions with both theoretical and policy relevance;  what more could we ask?   I hear that some of the other panels went well too, which I find gratifying.  Getting Middle East research out of the area studies ghetto and on to the main program - engaging with the core questions of the discipline without losing empirical richness - has long been important to me, and I'm very encouraged by the excellent work presented on these panels by the rising generation of grad students (like David Patel, Quinn Mecham, Lisa Blaydes, and others).

I found two panels very useful, even though I had to leave each of them early.  One on the future of the jihadi movement was quite promising for several reasons (even if  Juan Cole couldn't make it due to illness, and David Cook got trapped in Texas by the weather).  Peter Bergen was very impressive, I have to say, never having seen him before.  I didn't get to see Barbara Bodine's presentation, but was lucky enough to run into her in the lobby Saturday night and catch up a bit - I wish I could blog about some of our conversation about the Kurds and the future of Iraq, but I should probably get her explicit permission first since it was just a casual conversation.  The most telling thing about this panel, though, was that it was organized by West Point's Combatting Terrorism Center.  I find it quite telling for three reasons:  first, that the CTC - which does excellent work - is so energetically reaching out to the academic community for expertise and insight;  second, that the APSA welcomed them on to the program, in contrast to past reservations about such things;  and third, that there were no mainstream political scientists on a panel at the American Political Science Association, underlining a point I've made in the past about the limited contributions we've made as a discipline...  which hopefully will change soon.

The other panel which I found intriguing was the one by the task force on political violence called "Of what is Iraq a case?"   This followed directly from the Foreign Affairs roundtable, debating whether we should be thinking in terms of national insurgencies or ethnic warfare or something else entirely.  Stathis Kalyvas of Yale gave a nuanced and challenging reading of this question, suggesting that it was better to conceptualize the situation in terms of multiple dynamics - both insurgency and ethnic conflict - and try to model the interactions between them (does a stronger ethnic conflict weaken or strengthen the insurgency?).   David Laitin and Margaret Levi also gave challenging presentations, showing how the conceptual maps we bring to the table shape our conclusions and policy recommendations.   I had to leave before the discussion, but all in all this seemed like a really good example of what an APSA panel could be. 

Of the "normal" panels I attended, the less said the better. 

If I think of anything else, I'll fill it in later.  I'm sorry if I failed to meet up with anyone who had hoped to see me, but there's always next year... see you in Chicago! But now it's back to real work, and perhaps even real blogging!   

Another year, another APSA

I'm heading off early tomorrow morning for the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association.  Unlike many of my peers, I quite enjoy APSA.  That's probably because I rarely attend panels and spend most of my time hanging out with my friends and meeting new people.  Which is a terrible model for you hardworking, dedicated, up and coming grad students. Ignore what I do, and instead do what I say:   Attend every panel!  Listen carefully to every word uttered on the panel on "agglomeration processes in international politics" and the roundtable on "what has comparative politics accomplished? a conversation among leading scholars", and take copious notes, because it will be on your comprehensive exams!  The 8:00 AM panels are the most important ones to attend - the senior scholars on those panels will notice you in the sparse audience, and may invite you to co-author a paper!   Approach senior faculty whenever you recognized the names on the name tag, because people love having their conversations interrupted!   If you can't manage that, then at least gaze enviously at the senior scholars having what must be scintillating, theoretically sophisticated discussions about the finer points of constructivist theory (actually, they're trying to figure out where to get a decent meal in Philadelphia, but don't let reality intrude on the illusion....).  And above all, don't take up space at the bar:  beer is bad for you and will stunt your growth.   If that advice doesn't work for you, then be sure to consult Kieran Healy and Dan Drezner's much better advice.

As some of you may know, I was this year's section chief for Division 12 Comparative Politics of Developing Countries.  I was going to write up some reflections on being section chief, but I find I have little to add to Henry Farrell's reflections on being a section organizer posted last year. Short version:  it's a huge amount of work, without nearly the power or rewards which you'd expect.   I'd just ask anyone upset that their papers or panels didn't get accepted by my division to go easy on me.  As Henry pointed out, there's remarkably little room for the section chief to impose his or her own preferences on the division - though I'd like to think that I did organize some creative and interesting panels from individually submitted papers.  Because of the sheer volume of submissions, and the allocation rules, you have to turn down a lot of perfectly good papers and panels - I had to reject hundreds of individual papers and dozens of pre-organized panels.  Many of those deserved to be rejected, but there were quite a few perfectly good proposals for which there just wasn't room.  And then you see really great-looking panels fall apart as people withdraw for various reasons, and you kick yourself over the panels and papers you had to pass up to make room for them.  Anyway, I think that I put together a pretty good Division, and I'm even going to try to attend a few of the panels to see how they turned out.   

Henry has already posted his panel picks, so I thought I would do the same (keeping in mind that I don't get there until Thursday afternoon).  Here's where you might find me, if the local coffee shops and/or bars are aardvark-free:

Thursday, 4:15
12-10  Social and Political Islamism
David Patel, "Concealing to reveal: the changing informational role of Islamic dress"; Drew Linzer and Lisa Blaydes, "The political economy of women's support for fundamentalist Islam";  Quinn Mecham, "The strategic transformation of Islamist parties"; Stacey Yadav, "Islamist Parliamentary Politics: Hizballah and al-Islah in comparative perspective"; Ahmet Kuru, "From Islamism to conservative democracy";  Salwa Ismail, chair and discussant.

Friday, 8:00
I suspect I may be sleeping.   No offense.

Friday, 10:15
18-4  American Hegemony in Theoretical and Historical Perspective (Roundtable with Bradley Thayer, Robert Gilpin, Michael Desch, Christopher Layne, John Mearsheimer, Jack Snyder) is the big draw here for IR types.  But I'm tempted by 19-7 Revisiting Security Dilemmas, with Charles Glaser, Randy Schweller, Jennifer Mitzen, Keir Lieber, and Gerard Alexander.   

Friday lunch:   "The clash of civilizations and American hegemony", with Francis Fukuyama, Sam Huntington, Ben Barber, Steve Walt, and James Kurth.

Friday, 2:00  I kind of like the title of 10-2, "Introducing Power to Undergraduates" - what, you mean give them a D on their first paper and watch them complain hopelessly just for fun?  Just kidding, prospective students.   18-13 looks like an interesting panel on insurgency and counter-insurgency, and the Conference Group on the Middle East offers its annual panel with the usual suspects.  I've got some meetings though, so will probably miss all of those.

Friday 4:15  The headline roundtable is the one I made fun of a little while ago: "what has comparative politics accomplished", with Richard Snyder, Robert Dahl, David Laitin, Theda Skocpol, Alfred Stepan, and Gerardo Munck.    I'll most likely be among the vast hordes waiting outside the room if, as in past experience, the APSA organizers schedule this one for a tiny broom closet.

Saturday 8:00
You're so funny! 

Saturday, 10:15 
Probably 12-9 Arab Protest Movements, with Marsha Pripstein-Posusney, Malik Mufti (the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Jordan, and Syria), Salwa Ismail (Syria),  Rabab el-Mahdi (Egypt), Joyce Liyan (Syria), and Amaney Jamal.  There had been a good paper on Lebanon, but the presenters had to pull out - doh!   I might also check out 21-10 The Strategic Logic of Terrorism (Lindsey Heger, Robert Powell, Andrew Kydd, Barbara Walter, Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, Eli Berman, and David Lake), but loyalty to my section will probably pull me to 12-9. 

Saturday 2:00
18-19, Roundtable on the future of the jihadi movement, with Jarrett Brachman  and William McCants of the Combatting Terrorism Center), Juan Cole, Peter Bergen, Barbara Bodine, Joe Felter, David Cook, and Jessica Stern (thin on political scientists, but a topic of obvious interest to me).   

Saturday 4:15:  Of what is Iraq a case?   David Laitin, Robert Bates, Martha Crenshaw, Margaret Levi, Stathis Kalyvas. 

But what about my own panel, you ask?  Well, being a section organizer didn't help me one iota with the panel scheduling.  My panel is Sunday morning at 8:00 AM - yes, that's right, the deadest of the dead zones - despite my organizational role and despite my panel including not one but two scholars named in that big survey a couple of years ago as among the top 25 IR scholars doing the most interesting work (Marty Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink).   It will be a great panel, and if you're awake at 8 AM on Sunday you should definitely come so that Marty, Kathryn, Dick Price, Henry Shue and I aren't lonely.  I'm presenting a paper on the role of moral argument in the sanctions on Iraq in the 1990, and then getting on a train home. 

If you're a political scientist and you want to meet up with the aardvark, this may be your chance.  Feel free to say hi if you see me.   Either way, have a great APSA (unless you're on the job market, in which case such a salutation would just be mean).   Everyone else, I'll be back after Labor Day. 

Al-Qaeda's Constructivist Turn

Last fall, Praeger Security International - a new online, but proprietary, venture aiming to become a kind of central clearing house for international security research - commissioned (and peer-reviewed) a piece from me on al-Qaeda and Muslim public opinion.   I was worried that it might be completely ignored, since PSI is brand new, password protected, and an untraditional (electronic, not dead tree) outlet for this kind of article.  But I thought it was worth doing anyway, since it lays out a research agenda which will hopefully pay off in a number of other articles.   In a sense this is a gamble on the proposition that some kind of online publishing is the future, and that it can still reach a sizable audience via Abu Aardvark, Google, and so forth.  We'll see. 

With PSI's permission, I'm going to post excerpts from Al-Qaeda's Constructivist Turn here;  here's a rough html link to the full text and here's a PDF version.  Hopefully the excerpts will be suggestive enough to generate interest, and not too academic to drive ordinary readers away.  The essay lays out a research agenda, meaning that it's a starting point, not a conclusion.  Comments are very welcome.
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Since the loss of its Afghan base in the winter of 2001, al-Qaeda has undergone a “constructivist turn,” employing not only violence but also a dizzying array of persuasive rhetoric and public spectacle toward the end of strategic social construction. Failure to appreciate al-Qaeda’s fundamentally constructivist orientation has led to a range of misconceptions about its strategy and its fortunes, as well as about the success and failure of the “war on terror.” Al-Qaeda’s grand strategy seeks to promote an Islamic identity, define the interests of all Muslims as necessarily in confrontation with the West, and shape the normative environment in which Muslim politics are contested. This entails heightening the salience of religion in all aspects of political life, and to “frame” world politics as a clash of civilizations in which radical Islamists such as themselves stand on an equal footing with the great powers of the state system. Al-Qaeda’s constructivism derives both from structural factors—absence of a territorial base, a globalized field of contention shaped by new media and information technologies—and Islamist ideas themselves. It uses new media technologies to deliver and shape a narrative and a worldview in which al-Qaeda’s definition of the world—of its meaning, the stakes of conflict, and the identity of the competitors—becomes more widely diffused and shared. For individual al-Qaeda members and suicide attackers, who have fully internalized the norms and identity of the jihad, the act of terror may be an expressive one, a literal act of devotional faith—even if that “moral act” is instrumentally exploited by the organization’s leadership.

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American foreign policy has witnessed a similarly constructivist turn, as the “war of ideas” has been placed at the center of what the Pentagon’s 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review describes as a “long war struggle against Islamist terrorism…against global terrorist organizations that exploit Islam to achieve radical political aims.” But the theoretical foundations of such a war of ideas have always been alarmingly thin, particularly for International Relations theories that have traditionally downplayed the importance of ideas, norms, or public discourse. Any war of ideas necessarily takes place on a distinctively constructivist terrain, with questions of persuasion, framing, norm formation, socialization, and discourse taking priority over questions of material power, economic rationality, or formal international institutions. The United States and its allies are trying to create a norm against terror, whereas al-Qaeda and its allies are trying to establish a moral frame that not only justifies but also that makes mandatory violent jihad. As they pursue mirror strategies of normative transformation, “al-Qaeda and the American army are two sides in one war using both weapons of war and weapons of propaganda and psychology.”⁵ This article lays out a constructivist research agenda to grapple with al-Qaeda’s grand strategy as well as the potential responses.

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In March 2005, al-Quds al-Arabi reported that Sayf al-Adel, a leading al-Qaeda strategist, had distributed to jihadist Internet forums an outline of the organization’s strategy to 2020. Adel argued that the attack of 9/11 had succeeded in its primary goal of enticing the United States into direct interventions in the Arab region. Only America’s entrance into the region in force—especially the occupation of Iraq—would allow al-Qaeda to achieve its goal: to awaken the Islamic umma and “create a direct confrontation between Americans and Arabs/Muslims at the popular level.” In this second stage, al-Qaeda has ceased to be an organization in the literal sense but has become “an idea moving across geographic boundaries carried by satellite television.”⁶ The strategy now, as Faisal Devji suggests, was to impose definitions of reality that would in turn constitute very different forms of identity and modes of action: “By enclosing the battle of state interests within a war of religion, the jihad is staking a claim to the definition of that world of global relations in which it operates.”<sup>7

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At one level, al-Qaeda’s “constructivist turn” represents a rational adjustment to structural changes: the rise of satellite television and the Internet (Lynch 2006), the global, transnational nature of the perceived field of contention (Tarrow 2005), and the constricted material environment shaped by aggressive Western and Arab state counterterrorism operations. It also responds to organizational changes imposed by the increased American and global pressures that deprived al-Qaeda of a territorial base and that complicated its free movement across borders. The constructivist turn cannot be reduced to structural changes, however: not every actor would have responded in the same way to the structural pressures and opportunities. Bin Laden, Zawahiri, and other theoreticians of the jihad have developed a unique political practice that resonate with a constructivist understanding of the international system.⁹

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Al-Qaeda’s constructivist strategy follows the logic of what Sikkink and Finnemore called “strategic social construction” at the level of the Islamic umma and at the level of individual consciousness. Strategy is aimed less at achieving specific immediate results than at reshaping the taken for granted terms of reference in Arab and Muslim societies. From this vantage point, the overthrow of Arab regimes or attacks against Western targets are the wrong metric for evaluating the strategy’s success or failure. Instead, the metrics should be found in public discourse and the acceptance of narratives, arguments, and the credibility of various parties. As Jason Burke puts it, “al-Qaeda makes sense to many more people today than it did ten years ago. A previously fairly restricted discourse which is full of hate, prejudice and myth…is spreading.”⁶⁴

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Power: Al-Qaeda’s theory of power is perhaps its most distinctively constructivist concept.⁴⁰ In contrast to rationalists (whether Realist or liberals) who locate power within material capacities of various kinds, al-Qaeda’s understanding of power highlights the autonomous role of identity, ideas, and rhetoric. Faith, not simply material capabilities, plays a decisive role in al-Qaeda’s concept of political power. Like Emmaneul Adler, al-Qaeda understands that “the imposition of meanings on the material world is one of the ultimate forms of power.”⁴¹ Like Christian Reus-Smit, al-Qaeda sees political power as “deeply embedded in webs of social exchange and mutual constitution.”⁴² Like the constructivist authors in a recent special issue of Millennium, al-Qaeda refuses a sharp distinction between “hard” and “soft” power with the latter in a supporting role; instead, it sees ideational and material power as intimately connected and mutually constitutive.⁴³

Al-Qaeda’s theorists cast faith both as the ultimate source of power and as a key battlefield between the West and Islam. Zawahiri has argued that “the strongest weapon which the mujahideen enjoy—after the help and granting of success by God—is popular support from the Muslim masses in Iraq, and the surrounding Muslim countries.” This makes the battle for public opinion, and the battle over the definition of Islam, absolutely central to power relations: both an independent and a dependent variable, mutually constitutive in the truest constructivist sense. As Kepel put it, “bin Laden’s counter-offensive recognized that, under the right circumstances, rhetoric and satellite propaganda can be on equal footing with unmanned bombers and cruise-missiles.”⁴⁴

This is not to say that al-Qaeda scorns the conventional dimensions of power politics. Terrorism is seen as a way of evening the imbalance of power between Islam and the West. As bin Laden put it shortly after 9/11: “So as they kill us, without a doubt we have to kill them, until we obtain a balance of terror. This is the first time, in recent years, that the balance of terror evened out between the Muslims and the Americans; previously, the Americans did to us whatever they pleased, and the victim wasn’t even allowed to complain.”⁴⁵ Al-Qaeda goes to great efforts to raise money, and invests heavily in the recruitment and training of personnel. Its training videos and the Encyclopedia of Jihad show a frank, clear eyed concern for military techniques, scientific knowledge, and the like. There is little reason to believe that al-Qaeda would forego the opportunity to acquire weapons of mass destruction, or a territorial base, or even conventional military forces should such an occasion arise.

But ultimately al-Qaeda’s understandings of power focus more on the autonomous power of faith and identity than on strictly material concerns. Its political thought and practice has been shaped by the absence of such conventional material resources; and second, even it acquired such material resources, it would still have a distinctively Islamist understanding of the power of ideas and faith. Bin Laden put it like this: “God almighty said: ‘The believers fight for God’s cause, while those who reject faith fight for an unjust cause. Fight the allies of Satan: Satan’s strategies are truly weak.’ Second, we remind you that victory comes only with God. All we need to do is prepare and motivate for the jihad.”⁴⁶

Bin Laden claims not only that power ultimately derives from closeness to God but also that the West is aware of this and is targeting true Islam in response. American- and European-led reform initiatives, whether in education curricula or in the fostering of civil society, are seen as attempts to sever Muslims from their true source of power—faith. As bin Laden argued, “The West today is doing its utmost to tarnish jihad and kill anyone seeking jihad. The West is supported in this endeavor by hypocrites. This is because they all know that jihad is the effective power to foil all their conspiracies.” ⁴⁷ Western ideas such as democracy or nationalism aim at the “paralysis of the powers of our umma through other means, like the deceptive idea of democracy.”⁴⁸ Bin Laden cast Western policy as clearly aimed at eradicating Muslim identity, and therefore power: “The Americans’ intentions have also become clear in their statements about the need to change the beliefs, curricula, and morals of Muslims in order to become more tolerant, as they put it. In clearer terms, it is a religious-economic war. They want the believers to desist from worshipping God so that they can enslave them, occupy their countries, and loot their wealth.”⁴⁹

What the Muslim umma needed was not more material power, but rather the will to use it. If the Muslim world could unite, with its oil wealth and human resources, it would have all the material capabilities it needed: “Today, by the grace of God, our umma possesses enormous powers, sufficient to rescue Palestine and the rest of the Muslim lands. However these powers have been fettered and we must work to release them. For our umma has been promised victory. If it has been delayed, that is only because of our sins and our failure to help God.”⁵⁰ The real obstacle was ideational, not material: the failure of Muslims to realize their true identity and act upon it. Public support, and individual faith, is a key component of power: “in the absence of this popular support, the Islamic mujahed movement would be crushed in the shadows, far from the masses who are distracted and fearful, and the struggle between the jihadist elite and the arrogant authorities would be confined to prison dungeons far from the public and the light of day. This is precisely what the secular, apostate forces that are controlling our countries are striving for.”⁵¹

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Identity: Al-Qaeda is trying to bring forward the Muslim component of identity in order to restructure political reality. Bin Laden and Zawahiri’s rhetoric is replete with appeals to Muslims to awaken, to embrace their true identity and to act accordingly. Terrorism, and the ideational struggle that follows, is in large part aimed at awakening the Muslim identity of Arabs and Muslims. Zawahiri wrote that “the masses must become convinced that this battle, while it is taking place, involves every Muslim.”⁵⁸ Bin Laden similarly framed the issue in terms of identities transcending the nation-state: “I say that the battle isn’t between the al-Qaeda organization and the global crusaders. Rather, the battle is between Muslims—the people of Islam—and the global Crusaders.”⁵⁹

There is nothing obvious or natural about the Islamist identity proclaimed by al-Qaeda. To take this as the evocation of a deep, essentialist identity is to grant bin Laden victory in the single most important stage of constructing social reality. In fact, this appeal to identity is a radical act, demanding that actors from an enormous range of social and cultural settings both renounce their current identities and embrace a new one. Muslims around the world have long juggled multiple claims on their identity. Al-Qaeda, like other Islamists, advances a claim on identity which is radically detached from the very concept of the state, one in which every individual is directly and personally linked to a global umma of believers. Just because Islamists declare the existence of a global Islamic umma—in which Islamic identity is the central and dominant aspect of every Muslim’s identity—does not make it so. Al-Qaeda’s rhetoric about a global Islamic identity aims at driving a self-fulfilling prophecy, constructing a collective identity rather than simply reflecting it.

This decades-long project to “Islamize” society from the bottom up is what gives resonance to al-Qaeda’s discourse. Movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood differ profoundly with al-Qaeda on strategy, on doctrine, and on core normative beliefs. Moderates and radicals disagree intensely about political issues, about the value of democracy, about the legitimacy of violence, about the legitimacy of takfir, about the meaning of jihad, and so on. But where they agree is on the common project of constructing an Islamic identity that transcends all other aspects of personal and political identity.

Moderate and social Islamists have prepared the ground for al-Qaeda’s invocation of Muslim identity through a long, patient project of reshaping personal identity.⁶⁰ Arab and Muslim worldviews have been patiently reworked through persuasion, socialization, and internalization of ideas about the way the world works. Al-Qaeda is rather peripheral to this ongoing project of constructing a global Islamic identity.⁶¹ As Peter Mandaville describes it, “Al-Qaida is not the only game in town in terms of the transnational forces competing for Muslim hearts and minds.” Al-Qaeda is trying to cash in on someone else’s project—and, in the case of Zawahiri, a project he himself rejected.⁶²

This appropriation of a well-developed Islamist project creates vulnerabilities as well as strengths for al-Qaeda. Few constructivists would now argue that a particular set of political interests necessarily follows from a given political or civilizational identity. The contestation of the interests that follow from any collective identity is a key site of political struggle, as those within a collective identity fought over definitions of shared interests.⁶³ This means that al-Qaeda must engage in public arguments with other Islamists and other Arab political forces over the definition of interests, rather than simply presume its leadership. When moderate and radical views converge on the latter’s narrative—as they did over Israel during the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada in 2000, or over the American invasion of Iraq in 2003—al-Qaeda can command far greater power than it could hope to muster for its own project. But this leaves al-Qaeda particularly vulnerable to those moderate Islamist figures who challenge its positions.

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A Constructivist Research Agenda

What follows for theory or for practice from describing al-Qaeda’s strategy as constructivist? This concluding section lays out a constructivist research agenda, highlighting points of convergence with recent constructivist theory and suggesting paths for theoretical and empirical research.

Political thought: Constructivists generally argue that ideas matter in a far richer sense than usually embraced by rationalist theories. This places a greater burden on the constructivist to understand Islamist political thought and political discourse on its own terms. ......

Rationality and modes of action: Constructivists have made important advances in exploring different conceptions of rationality: strategic, normative and communicative; instrumental and expressive.⁷⁸ How do such theories help account for al-Qaeda’s mode of action? Can al-Qaeda’s actions be described effectively through these models, or can it help constructivists formulate new categories of social action? Analysts working outside the constructivist tradition have struggled to make sense of al-Qaeda’s rationality. Benjamin and Simon wrote in 2002 that “what appears to be senseless violence actually made a great deal of sense to the terrorists and their sympathizers, for whom this mass killing was an act of redemption” and that al-Qaeda’s actions did “reflect a strategy with intelligible goals and methods,” but that ultimately al-Qaeda lived “in a world where cause and effect lose all meaning.”⁷⁹ Faisal Devji similarly questions whether an instrumental rationality guides al-Qaeda: “for an instrumental politics of this sort to be possible, after all, some proportion between its causes and effects is required, whereas the global consequences of jihad have outstripped its local causes, and so have exceeded its intentions, to take on a life of their own well beyond the politics of control.”⁸⁰ Many others have countered with rational reconstructions of al-Qaeda’s strategy, on the part of the central leadership if not individual suicide terrorists. A constructivist research agenda could both explain al-Qaeda’s logic of action and use this understanding to enrich existing theoretical accounts.

Strategic social construction: This article has argued that strategic social construction—actions oriented toward shaping the background beliefs and norms of international politics—is at the core of al-Qaeda’s strategy. As a “norm entrepreneur,” bin Laden is attempting to convince a critical mass of Arabs and Muslims to embrace a new identity and its attendant norms, interests, and strategies. The ultimate goal is the background assumptions of political life, the underlying narrative and identities that give meaning to every day political events and that establish the context for strategic bargaining and moral argumentation alike.⁸¹ But such a normative context is never fixed permanently, and is open to challenge and reinterpretation through ongoing framing struggles. As national publics responded to local terror attacks with revulsion, for example, shifting the frame from “Islam against the West” to “extremists perverting true Islam” dramatically changes the normative-political equation. Constructivism should have policy-relevant advice for those trying to construct a norm against terror, as well as for those trying to frustrate attempts to construct a normative environment receptive to terrorism (that its insights should equally be useful to the other side is a normatively uncomfortable reality).

Cultural contexts: What is the relationship between the patient restructuring of society from below pursued by groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda’s constructivist strategy? Even where moderate Islamists actively oppose al-Qaeda’s terrorist methods or its political goals, their decades of efforts have clearly shaped the normative and political environment. The Muslim Brotherhood, Arab regimes, and the United States are each in their own way promoting antijihadist forces in the media and beyond. The field of Islam is therefore crowded with actors embodying different political theories, different strategies, and different priorities. A constructivist research agenda should theorize this entire field, exploring their interrelations, conflicts, and synergies—both to shed light on Islamism today and for comparative insights into similarly crowded transnational fields of contention. As Richard Price put it, “Cultural contexts are not simply found but are made through the politics of activism.”⁸² Sikkink and Finnemore argue that “Norms do not appear out of thin air; they are actively built by agents having strong notions about appropriate or desirable behavior in their community.”⁸³ This cultural context, Rodger Payne argues, “almost certainly matters more than the content or framing of specific messages.”⁸⁴ In this case, the agents are not so much al-Qaeda as they are Islamist activists working to Islamize society over a long period. Constructivist research should explore the relationship between these two very different strategies of normative action: the Muslim Brotherhood’s slow, patient, process of norm-building from below and al-Qaeda’s dramatic, violent galvanization from above. Beyond the Islamic world, what does this relationship say for more general theories of normative change and social action? This also should have policy relevance. For instance, if it is the case that external pressure on identity triggers defensiveness, and strengthens al-Qaeda’s case that the West targets Muslim identity, should the United States avoid directly targeting “Islam” as the problem in order to avoid triggering defensive identity discourses?

Moral arguments: Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink offer three pathways for the development of norms: instrumental adaptation and strategic bargaining, moral consciousness raising, and institutionalization and habituation.⁸⁵ Of these, moral consciousness raising may be the pivotal stage in al-Qaeda’s strategy. Although it may seem odd to talk about al-Qaeda as a “moral” actor, it clearly views itself as such and is actively engaged in both appealing to Muslim morality and constructing new moral norms for Muslims. Al-Qaeda employs a distinctly moral rhetoric, equating faith and virtue with a specific political course of action. This moral argument directly competes with Western moral argumentation, challenging its alleged double-standards and hypocrisy; in a video aired on al-Jazeera in January 2006, for example, Zawahiri pointedly referred to revelations about American use of white phosphorous in Iraq and secret prisons around the world for interrogating suspected terrorists in order to deflate American moral arguments. These moral arguments have been called “normative power politics,” where “states seek, through rhetoric and diplomacy, to publicly delegitimize weapons that are perceived to give the adversary a power advantage.”⁸⁶ The definition of norms of appropriateness involves public argument, inflected by power but not reducible to it. Constructivism should offer a guide to the politics of moral argument at this level, and its relationship with strategic outcomes.⁸⁷

Cascades and tipping points: Sikkink and Finnemore describe the life cycle of a norm as “norm emergence,” “norm cascade leading to broad acceptance,” and then finally “internalization.” 9/11 and subsequent terror attacks could be seen as attempt to trigger such a norm cascade. What can constructivism contribute to understanding the prospects for such a norm cascade in the Islamic world? What does the experience of the “war of ideas” since 9/11 tell us about existing theories of norm cascades? One important rationalist argument, for instance, is that people often form their opinions based on their perception of the prevailing distribution of opinion. Should the distribution of public arguments change (more pro-American voices in the media, more pro-Islamist voices in the media), individuals will reorient their own publicly expressed views in response. The introduction of voices into the public sphere could thus in principle set off a “cascade” leading to a sudden and dramatic reversal of seemingly entrenched views. This cascade logic has been an important, if untheorized, element of American public diplomacy efforts. The creation of Arabic-language radio and television stations, along with Bush’s pro-democracy rhetoric and the violent shock of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, was meant to insert pro-American voices and perspectives into an Arab media environment presumably dominated by anti-American views. Such rationalist views generally tend to underestimate the role of identity and preexisting narratives, however. A constructivist research agenda should explore both theoretically and empirically this logic of normative cascades.

Socialization and identity: Jeffrey Checkel defines socialization as the point at which “an agent switches from following a logic of consequences to a logic of appropriateness.”⁸⁸ Rather than calculate whether or not terrorism would be instrumentally useful, it would simply be rejected as morally wrong (if the antiterrorist norm had been consolidated) or accepted as an appropriate way to act in the world as it currently exists (had al-Qaeda’s frame been consolidated). As Tannenwald argues, where this takes place “one should expect to see identity and self-interest defined in ways that increasingly take the taboo for granted. That is, the process of norm creation does not simply change the incentives for behavior (the rationalist view); it transforms the identity and interests of the actors themselves (the constructivist view).” A recent special issue of International Organization dealt with questions of socialization and persuasion in various institutional contexts (primarily Europe): What insights might be useful for evaluating the prospects of success for al-Qaeda, other Islamists, or Westernizers?

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This essay has argued that al-Qaeda has taken a constructivist turn, with its grand strategy aimed ultimately at “strategic social construction.” But, as argued earlier, al-Qaeda is only one actor in a very crowded field of contention. The recent controversy over the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed illustrates the extent to which unforeseen events can suddenly radicalize the political atmosphere. Although al-Qaeda itself should not be credited with triggering the cartoons crisis, the unfolding of events has followed its constructivist strategy to the letter. Both Western and Arab media have largely framed the conflict around a “clash of civilizations” motif, greatly strengthening al-Qaeda’s agenda of defining Muslim identity around such monolithic and mutually exclusive identities. By striking on a deeply symbolic front, the crisis heightens the salience of the kinds of ideas and emotions most conducive to driving ordinary Arabs and Muslims into a more radical narrative of conflict and confrontation. The availability of these frames, and their resonance, suggests that al-Qaeda has considerable success over the last half decade in reshaping the narratives, identities, and taken-for-granteds of Arab and Muslim political life. The violence of some of the responses—even in the face of calls by figures such as Qaradawi for “rational” rage rather than violence—shows the difficulty that moderate Islamists can have in controlling the dynamics set in motion by their Islamizing project. A constructivist research agenda should be well placed to analyze not only al-Qaeda’s strategy but also this broader cultural context and its long-term political implications.

IR Theory and al-Qaeda: response to comments

Friday's post on the irrelevance of IR theory to understanding al-Qaeda or Islamism generated an unusually high quality of responses - indeed, I'd be happy to put it out there as a model of what an online academic peer review system could look like.    In this follow-up, let me try to respond to some of the many interesting comments and critiques;  I'll update later today as more responses come in.

To recap, Friday's post looked at 7 leading IR journals (actually 6 plus the APSR) and found that only 3% of some 800 articles even loosely touched on questions of terrorism, al-Qaeda, or Islamism.   Policy journals, by contrast, are full of such analysis - often by IR scholars.  I interpreted this as evidence for the irrelevance of IR theory to the question - whether because of the nature of the theories, the nature of the field, or something else, the highest prestige IR journals had nothing to say.

Here are some of the main criticisms, and my attempts to respond:

1. Dan Drezner, and many others, point out that I shouldn't have left out International Security, which is a high-prestige, peer-reviewed, and generally excellent journal.  I agree with all of the above, and agree that I shouldn't have left it out.  So I went and did the same thing for IS.  Since 2002, IS has published 72 articles.  Of those there are 7 which are loosely about al-Qaeda, Islamism, or terrorism (mostly the last):  one on intelligence failures and reform;  a review of the 9/11 Commission Report;  3 articles on bio-terrorism;  and 2 on the relationship between globalization and terrorism.  If I just wanted to defend my hypothesis, I would only count three of those (the two on globalization, and the review), but I'll include all 7 to be as fair as possible.  That generous coding brings the total count to 32 out of 868, or  3.7%.   
2. What about other security-centered journals?  Of the ones named by various critics, I would only count Security Studies as in the same prestige league (theoretically-oriented, peer-reviewed, etc) as the ones under review.  Not just in my opinion:  Sue Peterson and Michael Tierney's recent survey of IR professors did give us a ranking of "prestige" of IR journals.  The only ones not included in my list (other than International Security) are Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy (clearly policy journals) and the American Journal of Political Science, which I'm fairly sure would knock the number down even lower.  Anyway, I did look at Security Studies: it published 59 articles since 2002, of which zero deal with Islamism, al-Qaeda, or terrorism (although a case could be made for Ron Hassner's piece on "sacred spaces").   That would bring the count to 3.5% (32 or 33 out of 927).  Overall, the critique that including the security journals I ignored would change the picture was a valid hypothesis;  the evidence suggests that it doesn't really make a difference. 
   
3. Lag time:  one of the strongest criticisms is that it's just too soon to expect to see serious scholarship on 9/11 related themes.  Established scholars would take time, and would sacrifice serious sunk costs in terms of skills and expertise, if they retooled to deal with Islamism or terrorism.  Graduate students would only now be at the stage of completing their dissertations.  Either way, before indicting the field, I should wait another 3-4 years.  Maybe.  On the one hand, yes - other than the 'instant experts', the Middle East area experts, or the generalists, it does take time (my first article specifically about Islamism only came out at the beginning of this year, for example).  And the writing, submission, review, revise and resubmit, review, and finally get on the line for publication takes quite a long time at most journals (hello, IO).   But two points.  First, the response of the IR field to the end of the Cold War was much more rapid and intellectually productive.   The first major symposium on the end of the Cold War in International Organization was in the spring of 1994, although some articles appeared earlier; International Security was publishing important articles about it in winter 1991-92.  Depending on whether you count from 1989 or 1991 as the end of the Cold War determines how you count the lag.   More important, though, is that by 1991-92, there was already a lot of major stuff in the pipeline that the whole field was talking about.  I still remember a 1991 conference at Cornell on the end of the cold war, with many of the field's heavyweights participating.   There's not really anything like that going on right now in the field about al-Qaeda or Islamism, at least that I'm aware of - I'd be happy to be pointed to examples proving me wrong.  As Dan Drezner point out, "Take the Princeton Project on National Security's latest working paper on grand strategy for example (co-authored by Frank Fukuyama and John Ikenberry). Al Qaeda is mentioned three times; terrorism is mentioned sixteen times. China, in contrast, gets 127 mentions."    Anyway, the "pipeline" shouldn't be completely obscure - if there is a lot of stuff in the pipeline, we should be seeing it by now in the form of conference papers (I first presented my piece on Islamism at the 2003 APSA, for instance).  So I just did a quick search of the paper archives for last year's American Political Science Association annual meeting.  I only found about 25 papers about anything to do with the topics at hand (another 70 or so mention al-Qaeda in passing to explain something else);  by contrast I got 481 hits on "alliances", 365 on "Iraq", and 325 on "China" (but take that with many, many grains of salt, since I'd have to do the same exercise on those - knocking out papers not really about those topics -  to make it comparatively valid... see how methodologically accomodating I am?)
4. Okay, moving on... a number of people validly complained that other subfields do it better.  No argument there - the contentious politics literature has a lot to say about the subject, for example, and Sid Tarrow's recent book Transnational Political Activism is a good place to start.  But this actually strengthens my case:  these are generally not considered to be "IR" by those in the business of enforcing disciplinary boundaries (which, believe it or not, I'm not.)
5. Dan Nexon and others suggest that IR's neglect of terrorism and al-Qaeda is rational because it is not in fact especially significant.  That's an important point worthy of more extended discussion than I can give it here.  I will say, though, that even if that's true, it would still put the field quite at odds with the main trends in American foreign policy.   Ignoring something which objectively speaking has had a major effect in changing American foreign policy, and therefore the international system, would need more justification than "more people die in traffic accidents."   

I'm sure there are more good points out there, but I'm out of time right now.  I'll try to update later.

UPDATE 1:  I'm reminded that International Organization put together a companion journal, Dialog-IO, which published some really interesting articles on terrorism and 9/11 by Peter Katzenstein, Bob Keohane, Ron Deibert and Janice Stein, David Lake, Peter Gourevitch, and David Leheny.   Alas, this journal only published one subsequent article - a critique of a Jeff Legro article by Dan Nexon and Pat Jackson - and then disappeared into obscurity.   How to interpret this?  On the one hand, the journal IO and some major theorists did try to respond;  but their articles were cordoned off into essentially a one-shot special issue which doesn't even show up in most searches.   

UPDATE 2:  Millennium did a special issue on religion and international relations in 2000 (and published an article of mine on the "Dialogue of Civilizations" in that same year - including that journal wouldn't help the constructivists' cause in the 2002-2005 range, but does speak to some pre-9/11 interest in the topic on their partnbsp;

Understanding al-Qaeda: the irrelevance of IR theory

In my review essay on al-Qaeda (in progress), I note that mainstream International Relations theory has had virtually nothing to say about al-Qaeda, the war on terror, or anything to do with Islamism. 

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.       Realism, with its emphasis on the balance of power among self-interested nation-states, had little to say about a non-state actor motivated by religion.   Liberalism, with its various arguments about international institutions, trade, and democracy, similarly offered little traction.  Rationalist approaches seemed initially stymied by an organization defined by intense religious convictions, and by individual suicide terrorism (though there were some game efforts to reconstruct a strategic rationale behind al-Qaeda’s terrorism).   Of all the dominant trends within IR, constructivism seemed to be the best placed to account for such a religious, transnational movement.   But constructivist analyses of al-Qaeda were few and far between.  Whether because the Islamist movement espouses norms repugnant to the liberalism espoused by many constructivist theorists or because of a lack of interest in policy relevant research, constructivists have largely failed to rise to the opportunity of authoritatively interpreting al-Qaeda.

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%?

Details:  International Organization, generally considered the 'best' journal for international relations theory, ran 116 articles between 2002 and 2005, only 2 of which even loosely touched on issues related to al-Qaeda.  Of 150 articles in the American Political Science Review, only one dealt with the topic (Pape’s strategic analysis of suicide terrorism).  International Studies Quarterly (journal of the International Studies Association) has published 2 articles out of 115 total, one a quantitative study of transnational terrorism prior to 1999, the other a postmodernist exploration of how al-Qaeda’s jihad and the American war on terror were mirror images of one another.   World Politics has done slightly better, with five articles out of 43:  one of those was a study of Islam’s relationship to authoritarianism, and another a response to it - so not really on al-Qaeda, but at least on Islam;  two were extremely well-done review essays (Byman and Anderson), but not original research;  and one (Philpott) explored the absence of religion from IR scholarship.   The quantitative/formal Journal of Conflict Resolution did publish a 7 article special issue on transnational terrorism, but otherwise managed only 3 articles out of 146.   Nor do the leading non-American IR theory journals do significantly better.  The European Journal of International Relations has published only one article (out of 63), a look at the role of secularism in the field of IR.  The Review of International Studies has published 4 articles on the topic, out of 163;  of those one was a review essay on global Islam, one offered a detailed analysis of Taleban diplomacy, one used Edgar Allan Poe to reflect on the traumatic nature of 9/11, and only one (by Barak Mendelsohn) really looked at al-Qaeda itself.

One obvious objection 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 (but I won't say which seven to avoid offending anyone, since it's Friday).

NOTE:  see my response to comments in this post above.