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"This Element denaturalizes political science, stressing the contestability and contingency of ideas, traditions, subfields, and even the discipline itself. The history of political science is less one of scholars testing and improving theories by reference to data than of their appropriating and transforming ideas, often obscuring or obliterating former meanings, to serve new purposes in shifting political contexts. Political science arose in the late nineteenth century as part of a wider modernism that replaced earlier developmental narratives with more formal explanations. It changed as some scholars yoked together behavioural topics, quantitative techniques, and positivist theory, and as other scholars rejected their doing so. Subfields such as international relations remained semi-detached and focussed on policy as much as theory. Furthermore, the shifting fashions within political science - modernism, behaviouralism, realism, neoliberalism, the new institutionalism - have informed the policies by which governments have tried to tame contingency and govern people"--

This contribution aims to give an overview on the state of the art of research on terrorism and gender in the field of Political Science and International Relations (IR). Contemporary analyses of terrorism have begun integrating gender aspects into their frameworks. This article supports the call for a much more coherent use of gender as an analytical category as this is beneficial for the analysis of ter-rorism in a threefold manner. First, gender as an analytical category in the study of terrorism exposes the gender blindness of the term terrorism; second, gender challenges the political myth of protection central to international politics, i.e. that states can legitimately fight wars to protect the vulnerable – vulgo women and children. Third, gender also challenges the myth of an intrinsic peacefulness/vulnerability of women. The paper closes with the plea to integrate a coherent historical dimension into a gendered analysis of terrorism in order to potentially achieve a more empirically attuned theoretical understanding of terrorism and political violence in current times.

A survey of 2 violently contrasting books, A. Brecht's positivistic study, POLITICAL THEORY (1959) & B. Crick's attack on this approach. While noting Brecht's wide range & profound learning, it is suggested that he goes too far in confining 'knowledge', philosophically, to what is empirically verifiable. The criticism of Crick's book is that, apart from inadequate study of the selected sources, the principle of selection is radically unsound since the reconstruction of 'pol'al sci', taken seriously, is not at all limited to US writers, is not well exemplified (eg, by T.V. Smith's work), & cannot justly be said to be epiphenomenal to, & in its methods limited by, the US soc scene. The pol'al philosophy is defensible; but the thesis as it stands is more startling than impressive. AA.