He has authored a number of books on the subject, including Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement (1996), A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (2003), and Chasing Phantoms: Reality, Imagination, and Homeland Security Since 9/11 (2011).

[2] He serves on the editorial boards of Terrorism and Political Violence and Nova Religio, and was the editor of Communal Societies from 1987 to 1994.

Barkun focuses particularly on millenarian and utopian movements, terrorism and "doomsday weapons", and the contemporary influence of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion decades after it was exposed as a hoax.

[7] In a 2004 review, historian Paul S. Boyer wrote that Barkun "knows his way around the arcane world of contemporary conspiracy theorists" more "than any other scholar in America".

Furthermore, Barkun works to set the stage for the presence of conspiracist views that leave a large amount of questions unanswered.