How Rigorous Is Radicalization Research?

This article examines the quality and rigor of the academic literature on radicalization. Drawing on a sample of 260 publications that make claims for empirical research and were published between 1980 and 2010, it shows that qualitative approaches dominate, and that a significant number of publications relies on secondary sources—not primary research—to support their conclusions. Methodologies tend to be stronger and more rigorous in the social sciences than the humanities. Overall, it finds that research on radicalization contains clusters of excellence that meet the highest scholarly standards, but that it also suffers from some of the same problems that afflict the wider field of terrorism studies: 34 percent of the items in our sample were either methodologically or empirically poor, whereas 11 percent were both. The article argues that this situation may have resulted from an overreliance on (poorly controlled) government money, the nature of the subject itself, and the absence of a unified academic “field” through which tougher academic standards could be enforced.