Or, who is the strawman here?

This is my second post reflecting on the recent American Political Science Association annual meeting. The last one expressed concern about a new trend in the study of international politics. This one will focus on a long-standing issue that just doesn’t seem to go away: the refusal of certain research areas to actually engage with the literature they see as insufficient.

The attack

This incident occurred at an otherwise interesting panel. The papers, mostly by junior scholars, discussed different manifestations of public religion. Then a senior scholar who focused on the Middle East came up to talk.

It started off well. They acknowledged Middle East Studies tends to downplay religion and other identities, often in favor of materialist explanations. But they said it’s hard to not discuss religion at all, and that hinders their analyses. Then they said what is needed is a more nuanced approach to religion, and discussed the different ways public religion manifested in their country of expertise.

This refusal to engage with anything since Lewis or Huntington keeps occurring

The issue with this is that their big insight, presented as a critique of the supposedly simplistic way we discuss religion in the Middle East, would be immediately recognizable to anyone who has read studies on religion and politics over the past 20 years.

The study of religion and international politics has moved beyond earlier essentialist claims, and most of our work is actually an open critique of such simplistic analyses. We approach religion as a complex dynamic set of beliefs and relations that interact with material and institutional conditions. You wouldn’t know that listening to this talk, though.

Am I the strawman?

If it feels like I’m taking this personally, it’s because I am. I gave up on engaging with Middle East studies folks in grad school because they were so dismissive of religion, and at times openly hostile to anyone who thought it mattered. You had to prove you were not a secret Bernard Lewis.

This isn’t the case outside of that research area, however. There are flourishing sections on religion and politics in both the American Political Science Association and the International Studies Association. Work on religion regularly gets published in top journals. I gave a talk on my latest book—on states using religious rhetoric in power politics—at MIT’s Security Studies Program. While the realists in the room were skeptical, they did not see it as ridiculous to discuss religion in the context of security studies.

So maybe at the least we can ask everyone to make sure you do a literature review of recent work before you criticize an entire research program

But this refusal to engage with anything since Lewis or Huntington does keep occurring. I am unable to say no, so I’ve reviewed many book manuscripts on religion and IR. And I keep seeing the argument that the study of religion and IR is defined by the clash of civilizations. And I keep sending back semi-cranky reviews telling the author to read something after 1996.

Two strawmen fighting

Of course, anyone familiar with my writing here knows I’m not really a fan of Middle East Studies. I’ve worried about common wisdom driving studies and a lack of intellectual diversity. I’ve also been critical of Middle East Studies’ professional society. So it’s possible I’m being unfair, and, ironically, creating a strawman out of Middle East Studies. I’ll admit I didn’t do a survey of the literature before writing this post.

It’s also very possible this is not unique to Middle East Studies. Any research area comes to focus on certain issues and ignores others. There is a tension between area studies and cross-cutting social science.

So maybe at the least we can ask everyone to make sure you do a literature review of recent work before you criticize an entire research program. And yes, that’ll include me.