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1. Here is a thread on research projects that don't go as we might have hoped.
2. In a candid survey of his career in ANNUAL REVIEWS, Bob Keohane briefly describes a book-length project on reputation and compliance that he ultimately chose not to publish, in part because the evidence didn't fit his initial conjectures. https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-polisci-050918-042625#_i7
3. This anecdote is a useful reminder that not every promising idea pans out. I wish more scholars--and especially senior figures--would describe projects they undertook that they eventually discarded. In that spirit, here's a list of some of the blind alleys I've walked down.
4. As post-docs way back in 1983, Charlie Glaser and I wrote a paper on the actual use of nuclear weapons in war. We eventually produced a complete draft, but neither of us was very happy with it. We wisely put it aside and turned to other topics.
5. When I began working on REVOLUTION AND WAR in 1988, I had lots of clever ideas about how the backgrounds & biographies of revolutionary leaders might explain their behavior once in power. This approach led precisely nowhere and I dropped the idea from the book.
6. In the late 1990s, I started to write a theoretical article on the nature of unipolarity. Bill Wohlforth's 1999 INTERNATIONAL SECURITY article on this topic scooped me completely, and it was clearly better than anything I'd have written. Oh well. But then....
7. . . .one door closed, another opened: Wohlforth's article helped get me thinking about how other states were reacting to unipolarity, which eventually led me to write TAMING AMERICAN POWER.
8. In 2008, I began a project on the reasons why states find it hard to "cut losses" and collected a lot of material for it. I eventually published a chapter on the subject in an edited volume, but decided I didn't have anything more to say on that topic. So I didn't.
9. A few years ago, I began researching the phenomenon of political "insiders" who at some point have a dramatic change of heart and then go public (e.g., Ellsberg). I was hoping to find a common thread in their experiences but came up empty. It's on the shelf for now.
10. Three years ago, a journal editor invited me to write an essay on what he called the "death of IR theory." I spent a summer writing several drafts. Reactions from a diverse set of colleagues were polite but strongly negative. I decided they were right and hit the shredder.
11. In sum, I have spent a fair bit of time on research efforts that didn't bear fruit. I learned from each "failure," however, and I'm glad I pulled the plug when I did. I suspect my experience is quite common, and I hope other scholars will chime in on this subject too.
