This is a guest post, the first of two, by Eric Parajon, Richard Jordan, and Marcus Holmes. Eric Parajon is a recent graduate of William & Mary and currently a Project Manager for the Teaching, Research, and International Policy Project. Richard Jordan is an assistant professor at Baylor University. He researches game theory, security, and leadership. Marcus Holmes is an associate professor of Government at William & Mary. He recently published Face-to-Face Diplomacy: Social Neuroscience and International Relations.

Among IR scholars, research on the role of individuals in world politics, or the “first image,” has languished for three decades. With the dominance of structural and rationalist approaches in the late 20th century, combined with skepticism individuals can be studied in a systematic, rather than idiosyncratic way, the first image has largely been neglected. Data out of the Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) project at William & Mary illustrate the point. Over the last thirty-five years or so, only 12.5% of the articles analyzed, in a wide-swath of IR journals, featured any engagement with the first image:

Figure 1: Proportion of scholarly journal articles utilizing each image approach (Grouped by year)