The UFO Taboo Is What IR Theorists Make of It: Sovereignty and the UFO in Citational Perspective

Brief

Murphy applies a mixed-method scientometric analysis to the citational reception of Wendt and Duvall's 2008 Political Theory paper 'Sovereignty and the UFO,' tracing how international relations scholarship has handled its core claim across 15 years of downstream literature. The study finds that most references to Wendt and Duvall are performatively dismissive: papers cite the work as a curiosity or theoretical provocation without engaging its central argument that modern sovereignty's anthropocentric foundations structurally preclude acknowledgment of non-human agency. This citational pattern means the taboo is invisible to simple keyword searches and can only be identified through qualitative reading of citation context. The title consciously echoes Wendt's constructivist axiom 'Anarchy Is What States Make of It,' reframing the UFO taboo as a socially reproduced disciplinary practice rather than an institutional prohibition.

Metadata

Category

Stigma

Venue

Alternatives: Global, Local, Political

Type

Peer-reviewed

Year

2024

Authors

Michael P. A. Murphy

DOI

10.1177/03043754231219831

Access

Open access

Length

19.9 K

Data sources

citation corpus. Wendt and Duvall (2008) downstream citations, 2008–2023

Tags

stigma, scientometrics, IR-theory, UAP-sociology, citation-analysis, political-science

Key points

• The study scientometrically maps 15 years of citational reception of Wendt and Duvall (2008) across IR and political science literature, providing one of the few empirical audits of how UFO-adjacent theory propagates through a mainstream academic field.
• The UFO taboo operates primarily through shallow citation, papers acknowledge Wendt and Duvall's existence without engaging the extraterrestrial hypothesis, rather than through outright exclusion or silence.
• Because the taboo is embedded in citational practice rather than overt rejection, it is structurally self-concealing: standard bibliometric methods cannot detect it without qualitative analysis of framing.
• Murphy's title riffs on Wendt's own most-cited constructivist work, framing disciplinary stigma around UFOs as a socially constructed and maintained fact rather than a natural feature of scientific rationality.
• Wendt and Duvall's (2008) original claim, that sovereignty is structurally anthropocentric and therefore constitutively unable to acknowledge non-human political agency, is the hypothesis Murphy tests for reception, not just citation count.
• The paper is open access via PMC, unusual for a critical IR venue, extending its reach beyond institutional subscribers in a field whose gatekeeping it critiques.

Most interesting

• Murphy audits a single source paper across 15 years of downstream literature, a citation-reception methodology rarely applied to heterodox political theory, it treats the discipline's response as data rather than ground truth.
• The finding that taboo operates through shallow citation rather than silence means a paper can be simultaneously 'part of the conversation' and functionally suppressed, a mechanism with implications for any stigmatized research area.
• Wendt and Duvall (2008) originally appeared in Political Theory, a prestigious mainstream journal, yet Murphy's analysis suggests even that venue credential was insufficient to compel substantive engagement with the ETH in IR.
• The title's echo of Wendt's 1992 'Anarchy Is What States Make of It' is a theoretical judo move: it uses the field's own foundational constructivist logic to argue that the UFO taboo is contingent and changeable, not epistemically inevitable.
• Murphy's venue, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, has a long history of publishing critical and post-positivist IR theory, placing this meta-critique within a tradition of disciplinary self-examination rather than fringe commentary.