Note: The blog post originally appeared at the Australian Institute of International Affairs on 20 June 2019. The original post can be found at: http://www.internationalaffairs.org.au/australianoutlook/popular-culture-and-ir-after-game-of-thrones/.

Series like Game of Thrones and Lost don’t simply mirror politics in the real world. They show how pop culture makes world politics by premediating what is to come.

With the series finale of the long-running HBO series Game of Thrones now a historical event, it is worth taking stock of popular culture’s contributions to, intersections with and constructions of International Relations (IR). While various forms of popular culture have long been recognized as holding up a mirror to world politics, from the James Bond film franchise to Captain America comic books, it is a more recent recognition that popular culture makes world politics.

Undeniably, the links between the popular and the political have grown denser over the past three decades. The 1980s — which saw the former Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan in the White House — marked a watershed, from Live Aid in 1985 to the flurry of late-Cold War cinema including Red Dawn, Rocky IV, Rambo III and The Hunt for Red October to the explosive popularity of G.I. Joe toys. After a cooling down period associated with the America’s “unipolar moment,” the 9/11 attacks prompted a revitalization of popular culture’s contributions to the way we see the world, and especially our place in it: this was especially true with the medium of television.

Premiering in 2004, the global hit Lost riveted audiences around the world; as I have argued elsewhere, this series helped Americans make sense of a post-9/11 world, while also giving the rest of the globe the ability to look inside the “American mind” in the wake of the al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. In addition to its geopolitical content, Lost benefited from the advent of a host of new technologies which expanded the reach and resonance of older forms of popular culture, including DVRs and downloadable episodes on platforms like iTunes. The series took place — through flashbacks — in multiple languages and countries, including Iraq, South Korea, Nigeria and Australia. Buttressed by the availability of fast-evolving social media tools that allowed viewers to exchange information, discuss plot lines, advocate for their favourite characters, and educate themselves about the complex politics of the series, the series sculpted a global imaginary that truly resonated with its viewers, creating one of the most watched and talked about shows of the new millennium. While it has taken some time for Lost to be recognized for its contributions to the understanding of the “way the world really works,” this was obvious from the moment the next global phenomenon in dramatic television aired on 17 April 2011.

Premiering nearly a decade on from 9/11, Game of Thrones (GoT), an epic screened fantasy based on George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels, presented a Second Order World of the first order, prompting IR professor and political pundit Daniel Drezner to declare that we had entered a “golden age” of IR television programming. Drezner, as well as other IR scholars who have engaged with the series, tend to focus on the complex ways in which the various “houses” of Westeros clamour for power: which can be read rather easily through the lens of IR theory. The introduction of airborne, fire-breathing dragons under the control of the “breaker of chains” Queen Daenerys Targaryen and the reverse-engineering of one of these beasts by the Night King — the first White Walker, a species of undead from the frigid north who command an ever-expanding army of mindless “wights” — presents historians of world politics with an especially fecund space of representation to discuss the US development of atomic weapons, quickly followed by the Soviet Union — using intelligence gleaned from Los Alamos and elsewhere. Given the popularity of the series, lecturers of IR across the US, UK, Australia, and other member states of the western alliance were quick to fold the series into their courses, eager to make use of their students expanding knowledge of “hard” and “soft” power in the fantasy-land that they entered each week, or more likely in prolonged “binges.”

Looking beyond these metaphors, the series — which is set in a world of two continents, a Britannia-like Westeros and a Levantine/Asiatic realm of Essos — revels in Orientalist stereotypes, screens a violent misogyny, and trades in various tropes of “whiteness” and “northernness.” Arguably, these have partially fuelled the current lurch to identitarianism, new forms of patriarchy, and anti-immigrant sentiment across the western democracies. As a point of reference, the most popular — and ultimately victorious — family in the series, the Starks, advocate for decentralised government, a return to the traditions of the past, and constant securitization against threats both internal and external: sound familiar?

Despite the arch-conservative grounding of the series, GoT has also been lauded for engaging the ontological insecurity of the developed world vis-à-vis the looming impacts of climate change in its central theme of “Winter is Coming!” which inverts the threat of global warming by scripting a permanent winter, more akin to that promised in the event of a full-scale nuclear exchange. This verbal meme, which can used in almost any social setting, refers to the threat of catastrophic climate change, which is brought on by the White Walkers, who — at least in the series if not the books — were created as a last ditch effort by the Children of the Forest, an otherworldly non-human race resembling the aos sí of Irish mythology. Whatever the merits of Martin’s meticulously built-world’s introduction of the threat of the climate crisis into the everyday lifeworlds of GoT viewers, the resolution of the epic wrapped up things too neatly, with the White Walkers dead, climate change averted, and the happy denizens of Westeros ruled by a benevolent monarch who will ensure that neoliberal prosperity continues.
In their own ways, these two series changed television viewing forever: first by creating space for high-quality, attention-demanding, and geopolitically-engaged drama in Lost, and then by taking full advantage of the new milieu, at least in terms of metaphor, in Game of Thrones. Taken in concert, they have prepared a new generation of small screen enthusiasts for content that not only reveals and contests the vagaries of world politics, but also premediates what is to come, therein preparing the ground for substantive changes in power relations, as well as political culture.

We should not view the conclusion of GoT as an end, but as a transition to a new stage of televisual IR. Geopolitical television is now all the rage. Across Scandinavia, public broadcasters are producing sophisticated series that deal with everything from petro-politics in Norway’s Occupied and Nobel to the rise of radical right/left politics in Sweden’s The Bridge and Blue Eyes, to the blowback of participating in Middle Eastern conflicts seen in Denmark’s Below the Surface and Warrior, and to China’s creeping influence in the Arctic in Iceland’s Trapped and Stella Blómkvist.

Two recent Australian series, Secret City and Pine Gap, have also reflected the rising power of Beijing, while also critiquing the unbalanced relationship between Canberra and Washington in the post-Cold War era. Elsewhere, historical dramas are serving a tool for revising and reimagining how we got to where we are, including The Crown (UK), Rebellion (Ireland), Deutschland 83/86 (Germany) and Netflix’s noir-ish alternative history 1983 (Poland). Bubbling fears around the issue of migration are perhaps the area where we seeing televisual interventions most obviously coming to the fore, with Safe Harbour (Australia), Taken Down (Ireland) and Pagan Peak (Germany/Austria) tackling the issue head on. At the same time, existential worries about humanity’s capacity to alter the world also permeate contemporary TV series, resulting in the increasing popularity of “pandemic” dramas from AMC’s paranoia-inducing The Walking Dead to the UK’s Fortitude to the Danish-Swedish The Rain.

Perhaps, this moment represents a threshold that portends a deepening nexus of popular culture and world politics. This should not surprise us given that a former reality-TV host occupies the Oval Office and the newly-elected president of Ukraine came to fame playing that role on television. Popular culture — especially in a world of Netflix, SBS on Demand, Amazon Prime, and other transnational digital providers — matters.

Note: The blog post originally appeared at E-International Relations on 16 September 2018. The original post can be found at: https://www.e-ir.info/2018/09/16/plotting-the-future-of-popular-geopolitics-an-introduction/. 

Earlier this year, Routledge inaugurated its new series in Geopolitics (edited by Klaus Dodds and Reece Jones) with our volume Popular Geopolitics: Plotting an Evolving Interdiscipline. In the book, we sought to bring together scholars from across a variety of academic disciplines (IR, geography, languages/literature, cultural studies, and film studies) to assess the current state of the subfield of popular geopolitics, while also – rather conspiratorially – ‘plotting’ its future trajectories. The project grew out of the seminar series ‘The Interdisciplinarity of Popular Geopolitics: Popular Culture and the Making of Place and Space’, hosted by the Leeds Russian Centre (Russia[n] in the Global Context), directed by Vlad Strukov and Sarah Hudspith (autumn of 2014). This speakers’ series enabled us to identify most pertinent problems of popular geopolitics, which we aimed to resolve in the issue by specially commissioning research articles, interviews, and reports. We also asked our authors to present their ideas in the form of visualisations, thus probing popular geopolitics as a method, too. So, the book, on the one hand, provides an archaeology of field, mapping the flows of various frameworks of analysis into (and out of) popular geopolitics, and on the other, delineates the real-world implications of popular culture and manifested a variety of new forms of the ‘doing’ popular geopolitics.

We posited popular geopolitics as a form of post-language, or an occurrence that exceeds structuralist categories and yet makes creative use of them. At the same time, we argued that popular geopolitics invents and projects its own powers, symbols, and iterations about individual and collective entities. As we contend in the Introduction (2018, p. 1):

Although the relationships between artefacts of popular culture and items of political meaning in the arena of interstate relations is a long-standing one, the history of their academic investigation is quite short. The complexity of the issue is in that popular geopolitics simultaneously defines and produces what it studies. The most significant features of this dualistic relationship include: (a) the use of popular culture to construct and promote a specific worldview; (b) the dissolution of ‘real politics’ in favour of hyper-mediated, impression-based politics on the world stage; and (c) a disciplinary approach to the study of contemporary and historical phenomena.

As an ‘open’ field of study (much like cultural studies, gender studies, and even more recent areas of organized academic scholarship), popular geopolitics is very much an interdiscipline, and one that is weakened when structural barriers are used to hem it in. With that in mind, we sought (and were duly rewarded with) participation from across various disciplines and geographies (both in terms of scholars and research areas).

Our first chapter saw the ‘comic book guy’ of political geography, Jason Dittmer, sitting down for a wide-ranging interview with two of the founders of popular geopolitics, the aforementioned Klaus Dodds and Jo Sharp, whose work on Reader’s Digest and the Cold War continues to serve a paragon in the field. Next out of the box came Kyle Grayson’s erudite update of his co-authored (with fellow Newcastle University politics professors Simon Philpott and Matt Davies) 2009 piece ‘Pop Goes IR? Researching the Popular Culture–World Politics Continuum’. The next two chapters, by Vlad Strukov and Federica Caso, elaborated on how other interdisciplines (specifically, cultural studies and gender studies) can help guide popular geopolitics into increasingly interesting and critical directions, focusing on resistance and the body, respectively. Robert A. Saunders then wrapped up the first section with a piece on what happens when popular culture gets real, building on his previous research into the Danish Cartoons Affair, Borat, and The Interview, while also expanding into new avenues of research such as the Russian ‘hack’ of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

In the second section, the focus turned from theoretical, analytical, and methodological approaches to empirical studies. Maša Kolanović showed us how Yugoslavian popular culture managed the concept of ‘Amerika’ throughout second half of the twentieth century. Tackling the world’s two largest nations, Ashvin Devasundaram investigated how India’s post-Bollywood ‘new cinema’ is engaging with major political issues, while Chris Homewood analysed the roles that Chinese co-production and the country’s massive marketplace are playing in the re-imagination of China and Chinese in big budget ‘Hollywood’ fare. Roxanne Chaitowitz and Shannon Brincat raised the dead – or more accurately, undead – as a means for understanding global political economy in a neoliberal world. Daniel Bos rounded out the section with an assessment of how military-themed videogames shape popular understandings of geopolitics and armed conflict. In lieu of a standard conclusion, we invited each contributor to source an image that visually conceptualised the main arguments of their chapter, resulting in what we hope serves as a poignant reflection of the DIY nature of popular geopolitics (i.e. writing is also doing).

This blog entry serves as the first in a series by our contributors. Over the next few weeks and months, the scholars listed above will be posting short, original interventions that build on their published chapters. As they say, ‘Watch this space!’

Note: The blog post originally appeared at E-International Relations on 27 May 2018. The original post can be found at: https://www.e-ir.info/2018/05/27/northern-fears-preparing-for-and-watching-nordens-doom/. 

Netflix’s newest dystopian drama is The Rain, a near-future tale of a cataclysmic plague unleashed on southern Scandinavia by a malevolent corporation called Apollon, which aims to (profitably) provide the ‘cure’ the disease they have (secretly) manufactured. Reflecting the success of Nordic noir on the platform (including series such as Bordertown, Occupied, and Trapped), as well as the runaway success of The Bridge on competitor Hulu, Netflix has chosen to make this series its first production in the region. While The Rain is highly derivative – evincing elements of The Walking Dead, The 100, and Fortitude – it is quite bingeable. This is in part due to solid acting from some well-known Danish television stars, including Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen (Department Q), Lars Simonsen (The Bridge), and Iben Hjejle (Dicte).

The Rain follows closely on the heels of Netflix’s first German-language production, Dark, a mind-bending, time-traveling thriller that has drawn comparisons with Stranger Things given its eerie aesthetics and tapping of the 1980s-era paranoia with the government. Both series have made me reconsider the claim that I made in my recent article on IR-inflected television in Geopolitics, namely that ‘European production companies have proved somewhat reticent to combine the fantastical with the geopolitical’ (other than Occupied, which depicts a ‘velvet glove’ invasion of Norway by Russia to secure access to its petroleum exports). While I continue to stand by this, Netflix’s increasing presence in a market hitherto dominated by national broadcasters like DR, ZDG, and SVT is likely to prompt these companies to consider the leap into speculative realm. And given the current state of geopolitics in Norden, we are likely to see an increasingly bleak view of what is to come.

Spoiler Alert: The Rain opens with an able, yet shy Simone Andersen (Alba August) prepping for an exam when her scientist father scoops her up from high school in a desperate attempt to escape a coming rain storm. Failing to make it to safety, he leads his wife and two children into a hidden bunker supplied with food and protected from the ‘rain’, which is carries a virus that infects and later kills those it touches. Simone’s father leaves the bunker for mysterious reasons and her mother dies in the rain, leaving her to care for her adolescent brother. Fast-forward six years: Simone and her brother join a motley band of survivors as they make their way from Zealand to the northern part of the Scandinavian Peninsula, which is cordoned off by a wall that stretches from the Baltic to the North Sea (one assumes there is southerly wall across the narrow neck of Jutland). As they head into Copenhagen and eventually to Scania, they are pursued by the ‘Strangers’, seemingly-murderous paramilitaries who speak accented-English and deploy drones to find and capture any free-range Danes (these interlopers are – rather ominously – played by actors of Slavic, Caucasian, and Middle Eastern descent). Life is a constant battle against hunger, a vengeful environment, and foreigners with superior firepower.

Premièring on 4 May 2018, the series only slightly predated the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency’s issuing of its newly-revised emergency handbook intended to prepare the populace for a war, climatic catastrophe, or other mass-fatality events. Entitled (in the English version) ‘If Crisis or War Comes’, Swedish authorities suggest that people stock up on tortillas, tinned hummus, and wet-wipes, among other everyday necessities. Sweden’s citizens are urged to focus on four areas of preparedness: food; water; warmth; and communication. As the New York Times points out, this iteration represents the first major revision since the midpoint of the Cold War and serves as a marker of a new era of insecurity for the notoriously peaceful nation. In recent years, Stockholm has reinstated conscription (including women in this go-around) and publicly wavered on its long-held commitment to neutrality, openly considering joining NATO to mitigate increasing threats from Russia (first and foremost), but also other quarters in a world beset by the proliferation of WMDs, jihadi and right-wing terrorism, politicised hacking and fake news, and looming environmental dangers.

While Sweden has not opted to follow the United States’ Centre for Disease Control’s full-on descent into popular culture via its well-publicised (and often parodied) ‘zombie preparedness’ campaigns, the timing of the brochure’s release can easily be conflated with the effects of many Scandinavians watching The Rain and wondering ‘what if…’. This is especially true if – after wrapping up a binge session – they click on Netflix’s recommendation and watch the second series of Occupied. Going live back in March, the follow-up to the powerful first season depicts a deepening crisis across Nordic Europe, which ultimately draws in Finland and eastern European countries into Russia’s geopolitical web. As U.S. President Donald Trump seeks to undermine his country’s NATO obligations and upset the balance of European-Iranian relations just as Vladimir Putin settles into a new term, perhaps it is time for the people of northern Europe to prepare for the unknown.

Note: The blog post originally appeared at E-International Relations on 18 January 2018. The original post can be found at: http://www.e-ir.info/2018/01/18/trumps-dark-geographical-imagination/. 

In the context of debate over his country’s immigration policy, the dark corners of U.S. President Donald Trump’s geographical understanding have been forced into the light, with swift and troubling ramifications for American foreign policy in Africa. In a bipartisan meeting of prominent politicians, Trump reportedly referred to the whole of Africa (as well as the Caribbean nation of Haiti, which – incidentally – was the first free black nation in the Western hemisphere) as ‘shithole’ or ‘shithouse’ countries (the exact wording of the quote is currently in dispute, a fact which some of the president’s defenders have used to decry widespread condemnation of the chief executive’s scatological language). Putting aside the ‘hole’ vs. ‘house’ dispute, Trump’s policy position is clear: he wants more immigrants from ‘countries like Norway’ and seeks to bar immigration from the world second-largest and most populous continent. While there has been endless palaver about Trump’s incorrigible racism and a return to the pre-1965 quota system that favoured immigrants from northern Europe (effectively banning people from the developing world), less has been said how Trump imagines Africa.

If we can say one thing about Trump it is that he is rather simple-minded. The Norway comment attests to this, given that he met with the Norwegian prime minister Erna Solberg the day before the now-infamous outburst during the immigration summit. Put simply, Norway was on and in the front of his mind, while Africa, Haiti, and other places were confined to its darker corners. So when Democratic lawmakers brought up protections on immigration from these places, Trump was forced to access what scholars refer to as ‘geographical imagination’. In its essence, this is an individual’s way of thinking about places and people based on their accumulation and synthesis of images, stories, and life experiences. For many of us (and especially those without stamps in their passports), this means an imperfect understanding based on jokes we have heard, what we have read in comic books or novels, seen on television or film, and learned from the news.

Like the travel writers, journalists and museum curators of yesteryear, contemporary producers of popular culture have not been particularly kind to Africa, continuing to project what David Campbell and Marcus Power call a ‘scopic regime’ of the continent that accentuates exotic natural attributes (animals, jungles, etc.), violence (civil wars, child soldiers, etc.), and extreme poverty (starving women and children). Far from sloughing off the jaundiced gestalt conjured by Joseph Conrad in his imperial novella Heart of Darkness (1899), Western media continues to labour under a blinkered view of Africa, one which artificially keeps alive the notion of it as the ‘Dark Continent’.

From telecoms company AT&T’s infamous use of a monkey on a phone in Africa (when all the callers on the world’s other continents were humans) in a 1993 publication to H&M’s more recent controversy over its advertisement featuring a black child wearing a green, hooded sweatshirt bearing the slogan ‘Coolest monkey in the jungle’ (other jungle-themed hoodies were modelled by white children and did not make references to simians), corporations have regularly stumbled into thickets of casual racism due to pervasive – some would argue ubiquitous – false seeings of Africa and Africans. Coincidentally, the H&M debacle has overlapped Trump’s geopolitical affront, showing that Africans will no longer be silent with regards to their continent’s representation by Westerners. For its part, H&M was forced to shut seventeen of its stores in South Africa for security reasons when the Economic Freedom Fighters, a revolutionary group that took offence to the ad, rallied its supporters resulting in multiple protests. While economic implications are likely to come, the Trump administration faced an immediate diplomatic backlash. The African Union issued a strongly-worded rebuke to and a demand for an apology from the president, while Trump saw a number of his ambassadors summoned to account for the vulgar depictions of the continent.

Here in the U.S., the pundit class continues to chatter on about whether or not this most recent example of bigoted opprobrium will hurt or help Trump with his so-called ‘base’, a hodgepodge of Republicans, independents, and white, working-class Democrats who are purportedly ‘fed up’ with globalization, immigration, and the ‘browning of America’. While Trump’s discursive discharge certainly reflects the blooming ‘white identity crisis’ that fuelled his campaign, it also elucidates the West’s problematic geopolitical imaginaries of Africa. With its burgeoning national economies, deep natural resource base, and key role in global security, sub-Saharan Africa should be a realm that Washington pays careful attention to (Beijing certainly does). Instead, it appears that the White House would rather fall back on hoary representations of the continent gleaned from Tarzan novels, Disney movies, and other (poisoned) fruits of Western imagination and news reporting. Sadly, in a country where much of the population still tend to regard ‘Africa’ as a country (rather than a continent or a world region), there is little hope for change in the near term.

Note: The blog post originally appeared at E-International Relations on 4 January 2018. The original post can be found at: http://www.e-ir.info/2018/01/04/pop-culture-and-trump-part-3-roger-waters-vs-the-big-man-pig-man/.

In the third instalment of my series on the pop-culture presidency of Donald J. Trump, I want to focus on the current Us + Them tour of Roger Waters, former frontman of the hugely influential progressive rock band Pink Floyd. The creative genius behind Wish You Were Here (1975), Animals (1977), and the visceral-yet-enduring The Wall (1979), as well an unapologetic auteur who often challenged fans with painfully introspective projects like The Final Cut (1982) and Radio K.A.O.S. (1987), Waters has taken on a long list of political targets from the Falklands War to monetarism to food policy. I recently had the pleasure of attending one these shows, and while Waters has always been known for his politics, this current tour represents a watermark in his evolution as a musician-cum-activist.

Waters has never been shy about his social and political views. In one of the series most talked-about interviews, BBC HARDtalk’s Stephen Sackur probed Waters’ background which included discussions of his father’s die hard pacifism and membership in the Communist Party. Waters employs this patrimony as a foundation for his globally-inclined political project, one he argues is based on ‘love’ as he recently told the centre-right CNN host Michael Smerconish in an interview on the anti-Trump content of his current tour. Like many U.S. conservatives of a certain age (and gender), Smerconish was visibly at pains to reconcile his aesthetic admiration for Waters’ oeuvre and his distaste at the overtly leftist orientation of the performances, from indictments of the Israeli border wall to post-9/11 critiques of Guantanamo Bay detentions to the current anti-Trump invective. The pundit even went as far as to pen an editorial about his ‘complicated relationship’ with the singer and his work in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

I saw a late summer performance on Us + Them in Newark, New Jersey – one the U.S.’s most economically depressed and crime-ridden cities, a rather appropriate venue for the dystopian themes of Water’s tour-associated album Is This the Life We Really Want? (2017). Towards the middle of the North American leg of the tour, it was clear that Waters had settled into a groove (both performatively and politically). The concert was a stunning exhibition of technology, sound and messaging. Interestingly, a giant Battersea Power Station-like projection extended over the middle of the floor-level seating, blocking the views of the highest-paying audience members, but giving those of us in the ‘cheap seats’ the best vantage points to experience the full effect of spectacle (thus providing a subtle reminder of his socialist roots). Kept under wraps until the start of the tour, the content was decidedly anti-Trump, featuring the ‘billionaire’ real estate mogul-turned reality TV star-turned U.S. president as a demonic nemesis of the common people. Effigies of a coiffured Trump proliferated throughout the show, but interestingly, Waters did not let Barack Obama off the hook, heavily featuring footage of the ‘drone presidency’ of Trump’s predecessor (a theme of the new track ‘Déjà Vu’, which was featured in the concert). While the set included tracks from Dark Side of the Moon (1973), The Wall, Wish You Were Here and Waters’ latest album, the most evocative songs were those drawn from the Pink Floyd’s concept album Animals.

Referenced in the title of this post, the lyrics from ‘Pigs (Three Different Ones)’ – which was the second song of the second set (following Animals’ anti-bullying anthem ‘Dogs’) – proved particularly ripe for Trumpian era. Intertextually referencing the political elite of George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945), ‘Pigs’ was originally written as an invective against mid-1970s British politicians and social campaigners, and specifically calls out the conservative activist (Mary) Whitehouse by name. However, the song proved infinitely versatile, quickly being retooled to impugn the U.S. President Jimmy Carter (and a list of other officials over the decades). With the opening lines ‘Big man, pig man/Ha, ha, charade you are’, ‘Pigs’ tears into the institution of politics, eviscerating the very notion of ‘public service’. However, it is now painfully evident that Waters’ youthful antipathy towards the greedy, self-serving politico was tragically naïve, given the contemporary manifestation of Trumpism. On Inauguration Day, the Pink Floyd alumnus explicitly linked Trump’s anti-Mexican campaign rhetoric to the content of ‘Pigs’, posting a video of a performance of the song in Mexico City to initiate the ‘resistance’. The show included images of Trump ‘toting a machine gun outside the White House, giving the Nazi salute and surrounding himself with KKK members’, a prognostic chimera that is now chilling in the wake of Charlottesville.

Waters seems comfortable in his role as activist-musician, taking direct aim at the malignant narcissism of ‘demagogues and despots’ who use ‘us and them’ bombast to assure their positions (and fill their wallets). Whether the Berlin Wall, the West Bank Barrier or Trump’s promised-though-as-yet-unrealised ‘Southern Wall’, Waters has long railed against such physical manifestations of (state) power. And for those fans who don’t want to hear his messages, he dismissively suggests they go listen to Katy Perry (a somewhat ironic barb given the pop-star’s close association with Trump’s rival Hillary Clinton). As a multimedia phantasmagoria, the Us + Them tour represents the current pinnacle in the meeting of pop-culture and global politics, as Waters has mobilised his political fervour for the world stage. From his criticism of Radiohead for performing in Israel as part of his support for the Boycott, Divest & Sanctions movement to his re-imagination of his 1970s-era lyrics for the Trumpocalypse, Waters constantly proves himself to be a key player in the popular culture-world politics continuum. And with the tour now headed to Europe and then Australia, it appears that there’s no stopping him.

Note: The blog post originally appeared at E-International Relations on 1 October 2017. The original post can be found at: http://www.e-ir.info/2017/10/01/pop-culture-trump-interviewing-r-sikoryak-creator-of-the-unquotable-trump/.

I recently sat down with Robert Sikoryak, who typically works under the name R. Sikoryak, to discuss his recent project The Unquotable Trump. Building on the artist’s expertise at adapting great works of literature to the comic book format, the collection of retooled iconic covers uses Trump’s bombastic quotes cast against fantastic scenes to satirize the U.S. president and his policies. With this explicitly political project, Sikoryak joins the ranks of other cartoonists who have turned their pen into a weapon against the billionaire reality-TV host-turned-leader of the free world, from Stephen Byrne’s ‘Trump Rally’ to Pia Guerra’s Bannon-Trump ‘Big Boy’ to the feminist anthology ‘Resist’. In many of Sikoryak’s depictions, Trump assumes the role of a super-powered antagonist, such as a winning-obsessed Magneto taking on the ‘Ex-Men’, an apish campaigner chastising ‘The Black Voter’, and a Dr. Doom-like overlord trying to nab some ‘Hombres Fantásticos’ (all of which reprise famous covers from Marvel Comics (The Uncanny X-Men, The Black Panther, and The Fantastic Four, respectively). On other covers, he assumes more banal forms, such as a flesh-eating zombie in ‘The Walking Donald’, a misogynist thug dispatched by Wonder Woman, or a Bluto stand-in bragging to Popeye about his ability to build a ‘wall’. Given the increasingly recognised power of graphic novels and sequential art to reinforce and transform political culture and even impact international relations, I wanted to dig into Sikoryak’s motivations and methods, with an eye towards how such representation reinforces or challenges ideas about Trump in the U.S. and overseas.

Saunders: Could you discuss when and why you decided to embark on your now-famous project to employ classic comic-book covers to depict Donald Trump’s bid for the U.S.? How did your previous experiences adapting literary classics to comics inform your work?

Sikoryak: The idea came to me in early November 2016, just a few days before the election. I was so exhausted and distressed by Trump’s outrageous statements as a candidate that I wanted to say something. I thought it would be a perfect satirical response to take his actual quotes and put them into parodies of real comic book covers, which are so bold and graphic. But on November 2, I really didn’t want to think about him anymore!  And then, a few days later, he won the election, and I felt I had to do it.

I originally did 16 of the covers for a small, self-published black and white mini-comic, and I thought that would be it.  But then I posted the images on Tumblr, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. So I was convinced to keep doing them, and I incorporated more quotes from the campaign as well as many spoken since the election. I drew a total of 48 covers over the course of about six and a half months.

This project is related in some ways to my comics that retell the classics (such as those in my book, Masterpiece Comics). For those, I also try to replicate the styles of famous comics, and I take great pleasure in remixing them with literary sources. The Unquotable Trump was an extension of that way of working.

Saunders: What is about comics – and particularly some of the more epic battles between superheroes and super-villains – that presents an attractive medium for satirizing Trump?

Sikoryak: Well, there have been many superhero parodies with presidents. Years ago, I drew one for The Daily Show with George W. Bush as The Decider.  I think part of the reason it works so well is that comics are often very stark when depicting good and evil.  And sometimes they’re very simplistic in their worldview, as are Trump’s statements. Now, I think comics can be quite subtle and nuanced, but for this series I’m definitely playing with the broad stereotypes of comics. At the same time, it was important for me to only use Trump’s real quotes, I didn’t want to exaggerate or change what he said. His actual, over-the-top speeches fit right into superhero covers.  Also, I wanted to capture his rambling, spontaneous, colloquial way of speaking (rather than his Twitter voice) and play that off of the broad comic book tropes.

Saunders: Could you discuss how you decide on the direction of a piece of art. Do you begin with the quote and then locate a representative depiction or is it more free-form?

Sikoryak: My decision process was rather freeform, but it always involved research. Certainly I remembered many of Trump’s quotes, but I went back and did internet searches to document the actual quotes and find many more. For the artwork, I know a lot of comic books history, and in some cases I knew I wanted to include a specific character before I had the quote. But there were searches for those as well. For instance, I knew I had to include a Captain America cover, but I went back to my own collection and searched online for the right issue to match the quote I chose (about war heroes who are captured).

Saunders: Do you follow Pres. Supervillain (@PresVillain) on Twitter and if so, how would you compare your respective projects?

Sikoryak: I do follow @PresVillain. Luckily for me, I discovered him long after I’d drawn my first 16 covers (in late 2016). I wouldn’t have wanted to be influenced by his choices.  It’s a similar conceit, of course, and I assume it involves the same sort of research.  But we aren’t the first people to compare a President to an evil comic-book mastermind!

Saunders: So far, which depiction has provoked the most interest (positive or negative)? What sorts of feedback have you received and from whom?

Sikoryak: I think my “Nasty Woman” cover, a Wonder Woman parody, has provoked the most positive reaction. It definitely struck a nerve. I was really happy to see that, it’s one of my favourites. Almost all of the feedback I’ve personally received has been very positive.  I actually expected I’d get more backlash, even from opponents of Trump, in that I’m giving Trump even more attention.  And I’ve read a little of that on Twitter. But for the most part, people who don’t like him have really enjoyed the humour.

Saunders: Comics have long served as a mechanism for imparting American values abroad? How do you think your work will be interpreted outside of the United States?

Sikoryak: I decided early on that I should only use American comic covers, since Trump is so American. It wouldn’t have felt right to me to insert him in a Tintin or an Astro Boy cover. Since the work has appeared on Tumblr, a few European publications have interviewed me and/or reprinted selected images.  They got the humour and seemed to really enjoy it, too.  I would like the world to see that Trump doesn’t speak for all Americans.

Saunders: Has anyone tried to shut down or otherwise contest your project? (Trump’s lawyers, Marvel or DC’s legal team, etc.)?

Sikoryak: I haven’t heard from any legal departments!  I’ve been doing comics parodies professionally for almost three decades, and I didn’t expect to have any trouble with this.  Certainly MAD Magazine has sent a precedent for parodies that many cartoonists have benefited from. Not to mention other institutions like Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show. As far as Trump’s lawyers go, I doubt that they or Trump will ever see it!  Unless the right person talks about it on television, preferably someone on Fox News.

Saunders: What do you hope your readers take away from the series?

Sikoryak: I hope my readers will find it funny… and scary.

Saunders: What’s next for Unquotable Trump? And what’s next for R. Sikoryak?

Sikoryak: The Unquotable Trump will be published in a full colour, oversized edition from Drawn and Quarterly, available this October. And I’ll be returning to the classics with short adaptations of Emily Dickinson poems and a comic book version of Moby Dick. Generally I prefer to have a little more distance from my subject matter.

Image Source: An American Infestation by Koren Shadmi

Note: The blog post originally appeared at E-International Relations on 9 May 2017. The original post can be found at: http://www.e-ir.info/2017/05/09/iceland-a-pop-culture-powerhouse-at-the-top-of-the-world/.

In early May 2017, Bloomberg Financial reported that the Icelandic krona was the world’s best performing currency, outpacing all others against the euro and the US dollar over the previous year. Moreover, it shows no signs of slowing down and is on track to continue its growth. The reason: Game of Thrones. Obviously, the gritty HBO series is not the only or even the main reason for the krona’s dramatic ascent; instead, GoT serves a synecdoche for Iceland’s pivotal role in producing contemporary popular culture and a concomitant rise in tourism. According to Newsweek, the island nation attracted approximately seven-times its total population in tourists during 2016. The driver for much of this tourism is rooted in the country’s depiction in movies and television series; in fact, a recent study shows that more than a quarter of US tourists select their destination based on what they have seen on film or TV, and Iceland seems to be everywhere right now.

As an (anonymous) backdrop to fantastical shows like Game of Thrones and blockbuster science fiction films including Prometheus (2012), Interstellar (2014), and Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), the otherworldly geography of Iceland’s glaciers, fjords, and waterfalls makes an excellent tableau for showrunners and cinematographers. Seeking to cash in on film and televisual tourism, Iceland’s tour operators tend to frame their excursions and travel packages with references to easily recognisable celebrities from Christian Bale to Angelina Jolie. With its proximity to both Europe and the north-eastern United States, Iceland has also become a cinematic stand-in for other locales, from the Himalayas in Batman Begins (2005) to Siberia in Captain America: Civil War (2016). Tapping into the Nordic Noir craze, Sky TV’s thriller Fortitude (2015- ) is also filmed in Iceland, which doubles as a fictional Norwegian island (Svalbard, perhaps?), and stars some of the country’s biggest actors. However, the tiny nation at the edge of the Arctic Circle also serves as an explicit setting for other media products. In the recent remake of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013), Ben Stiller’s character makes his way to Iceland only to be greeted by a massive volcanic explosion, evincing the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull (paradoxically, the ash cloud which virtually halted air traffic in the North Atlantic actually put Iceland on the map for many prospective tourists). Similarly, the remake of Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008) was set in and around the extinct volcano Snæfellsjökull.

Not content to let Hollywood exploit the island’s pop-culture resources on an exclusive basis, Iceland’s cultural producers are also making good use of international interest in their homeland. The runaway hit Ófærð/Trapped (2015- ) has established Iceland as a peer among its Nordic neighbours Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, showing that an island at the top of the world can make shows as good as Borgen, The Bridge, and Occupied. Recognising the popularity of the Nordic Noir genre, Netflix has scrambled to sign deals for more Icelandic content, including The Lava Field (2014) and Case (2015). Following in the ample wake of the iconic songstress Bjork, there is also an ‘Icelandic invasion’ underway in the US and Europe, spearheaded by ethereal rockers  Sigur Rós, hipster darlings Of Monsters and Men, and up-and-coming acts like Samaris, thus expanding the allure of the island beyond its visual beauty and into the aural realm. With its unexpected defeat of England in the knockout stages of Euro 2016, the national football team has also added its might to the global image of Iceland as a country that punches above its weight in terms of popular culture.

Cognisant of Simon Anholt’s notion of nation branding and Joseph Nye’s concept of soft power, the growing puissance of Iceland popular culture-tourism partnership on the global scale bodes well for its position in International Relations (not least of which is the aforementioned buoyance of its currency, particularly in the wake a disastrous economic collapse a decade ago). However, such gains are not necessarily accidental. In fact, there is an obscure geopolitical source behind Iceland’s current rise. When I visited the country in advance of the summer solstice of 2015, I was told by locals that the ongoing boom in tourism was – at least partially – attributable to US foreign policy. In 2006, Washington informed Reykjavik that it would be ending its decades-long military presence on the island, centred in Keflavik. As the State Department web site attests, the US committed to working with ‘local officials to mitigate the impact of job losses at the Air Station, notably by encouraging U.S. investment in industry and tourism development in the Keflavik area’. During the financial crisis that lasted from 2008 until 2011, Americans started to flock to Iceland to see the northern lights, take the waters at the Blue Lagoon Geothermal Spa, and go off-roading across the country’s unique landscape.

Buttressed by countless media products touting Iceland’s harsh beauty, the country now presents a tantalising destination for Americans, Brits, and Europeans seeking something off the beaten path (though with its tiny population of 330,000, Icelanders are being swamped in a slurry of international visitors, which may not be sustainable in the long run). In 2015, the Pentagon signalled that it was interested in re-evaluating its decision to quit Iceland, recognising the rising threat posed by a resurgent Russia. Some ten years after departing, the US Navy is back on the island to counter Vladimir Putin’s more aggressive posture, and seeking funds to modernise existing facilities. While the small military presence on the island may do little to deter Moscow, what it is certain is that Iceland is now a meaningful quotient in everyday geopolitical understanding of millions of citizens in other NATO countries, thus shoring up the country’s security in ways that many foreign policy experts are liable to overlook.

With the summer fleeting all too fast, I found myself spending a surprisingly warm day touring the tap houses of Nørrebro, a neighborhood that can best be described as the Brooklyn of greater Copenhagen, Denmark. My adventure began as I stepped off the S-train at the Nørreport station in the heart of the city. Coming up the stairs I turned right onto Fredericksborggade heading across the Dronning Louises Bro, a scenic bridge that separates the Peblinge Sø from its northern sister, the Sortedams Sø. Together with the Sankt Jørgens, these manmade lakes form the one of the most distinctive elements of Copenhagen’s topography, providing enticing promenades for pedestrians as well as an easily navigable cycling route for those on two wheels.

Crossing into Nørrebro, one notices a palpable change in atmosphere, if not necessarily architecture. One of ten official districts of Copenhagen, the borough is known for its bohemian ethos, ethnic diversity, and periodic bouts of social unrest, including a number of violent riots in recent decades. However, on this particularly pleasant Saturday afternoon, such worries were far from mind as I strolled along Nørrebrogade spying the kebab houses, electronic shops, and Islamic garment boutiques. Distracted by the bright colors and weekend conviviality, I soon came to my senses as I approached the high walls of Assistens Cemetery, the final resting place of such luminaries as the writer Hans Christian Andersen and the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. After reviewing the wares of the locals who gather along the promenade to sell family heirlooms and various baubles, I ducked into the cemetery, which seemed a world away from the teeming streets of Nørrebro. Traversing this quiet green space punctuated by the gravestones of Denmark’s most famous souls (one of which even sported Norse runes), I took a moment to gather my thoughts before pushing on to my first stop, Mikkeler and Friends (Stefansgade 35).

Situated on a corner abutting a park where neighborhood kids were playing soccer, this modest outpost of the growing empire of Mikkel Borg-Bjergsø did not disappoint. Having been to two of his other pubs, one in central Copenhagen and the other in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, I immediately felt at home (perhaps a bit too much so with the flat echoes of American accents all around).  I wasn’t surprised to see so many American beer-hounds here given that Mikkel is one half of the great Danish beer twins, the other being Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø whose Brooklyn watering hole Tørst serves as the NYC metro area’s most important beer mecca. I bellied up the bar and ordered one Mikkeler’s guest beers, the Twisted Verbena, a Berliner Weiss accented with that supernatural herb that purportedly wards off evil. A collaboration between Barcelona-based Edge Brewing and the British brewery Magic Rock, this otherworldly beer proved to be just the right way to start my hop-centric journey, particularly when offset by a slab of Danish hard cheese and some smoked pistachios. Having just flown in from Newcastle, Northumberland, a city famous for its chocolatey ales, I chose to follow the verbena beer with one of Mikkeler’s own, the Nørrebro Brown. As I downed this sweet and simple brew, I felt as if I was literally drinking in the environs. Rather than visiting Koelschip, Mikkeler’s Belgian-style adjunct next door, I decided to push on to new pastures.

After a fairly short walk through an area that was clearly undergoing a robust wave of gentrification, I found myself at just-opened Tapperiet Brus (Guldbergsgade 29F), a well-appointed brewery with extensive outdoor seating just opposite an organic pizzeria and a bustling bakery. While I considered ordering the Brettexit, a wild ale made with “non-European” hops, I instead settled on a curious hybrid entitled My Sour Pils from To Øl. Positioned in the sun on a park bench where I could watch the many passersby, I was able to properly appreciate the wonderful venue. Located in an old iron foundry and locomotive factory, Brus is a partnership with To Øl Brewing and the tony Copenhagen cocktail bar Mikropolis. Brus takes its name for the Danish word for the sparkling appearance of bubbling beverages, and with a baker’s dozen of fermentation tanks and 70-odd oak barrels, you know you are in the heart of a burgeoning brewing culture. Interestingly, the Danes are the only nation Scandinavian nation that prefers ales to aquavit, shifting from a spirits-based to a beer culture only in the last century.

Although I could have spent the rest of the day at Brus sunning myself and drinking tart pils, I pushed on to one of my favorite haunts in the Danish capital, Nørrebro Bryghus (Ryesgade 3). Heading down Guldbergsgade, I happened upon another, smaller cemetery cordoned off by those now-familiar walls. After stopping to purchase a few old maps of Scandinavia (including one sketched before World War I), I happened to overhear a local guide tell his charges to hop up on the bike racks and peer over the wall. I waited until they departed and discretely followed his advice to discover the (closed) Jewish Northern Cemetery. Seeing the overgrown headstones inscribed in Hebrew, my thoughts turned to the privations of the last war and how they afflicted this northern corner of Europe. However I shortly was drawn back to the here-and-now watching local youths in a skate park. One turn later and I was at the only brew house bold enough to take its name from the neighborhood.

Commanding a prime piece of real estate in a friendly corner of the borough, Nørrebro Brewery is a destination for any visiting beer-lover. With the good weather, I was lucky to score a seat at one of the few park benches outside (sunny days drawn Danes out into open air regardless of the temperature).  Departing from form, I ordered a bottled beer known as “The Good.” This refreshing Danish take on an American pale ale is in a new series from Nørrebro Brewing known as The Good Bad Evil. Its darker peers are a Belgian quadruple (the “Bad”) and a black imperial porter (the “Evil”). With the sky now totally blue, Nørrebro was teeming with Danes and international visitors alike seeking to drink in the waning days of summer, so I gave up my seat and headed south perusing a pop-up market on the wonderfully eclectic pedestrian lane known as Blågårdsgade, before turning right onto Rantzausgade towards my next destination, Kølsters Tolv Haner at No. 56.

As I approached this organic beer mecca, I noticed a heavy police presence on the streets despite the seemingly halcyon atmosphere of this brilliant Saturday. The experience immediately memories of watching the Danish-Swedish TV series Bron//Broen (known in the U.S. as “The Bridge”) and its foreboding depiction of the Nørrebro district in the episode on the “failure” of integration. But when I ordered a small glass of golden Højsommer, all thoughts of the oppressive grayness of The Bridge evaporated. Appropriately, I drank down that honey-flavored beer that smacked of the midsummer days after which it was named in the front garden (the back was only for residents of the surrounding apartment complex) staring at a Brorsons Church as the sun dipped reverently behind its red brick. While the setting was perfect, the beer—which is brewed by the owners’ father—proved to be the one disappointment of the day, lacking the effervescence (or “brus”) that had otherwise characterized the afternoon’s menu (perhaps knowing that organic beers are less bubbly, the pub only serves its libations in “half” portions, or 20cl).

Running short on time, I dashed back towards inner city intent on finding the newly-opened pub that had come highly recommended by a publican across the Baltic Sea in Malmö, Sweden. After one wrong turn, I located Himmeriget (Åboulevard 27), co-owned by Mikkel’s “evil twin” Jeppe. Small and serious, this little spot offered up ten craft drafts, of which almost half were American in origin, including one from my own hometown of Dunedin, Florida. Recognizing the value of this well-curated list, I settled on 25ml of a low-alcohol, cherry-laced sour from the California-based Lost Abbey brewery and purchased a “to-go” can of Evil Twin Mission Gose, an ale brewed with salt and coriander with a bit of eucalyptus thrown in for good measure.

With my memorable jaunt winding down, I meandered back across Queen Louise’s Bridge, smiling at the growing crowds of 20-somethings who were congregating on the span’s northern edge, filling the benches to catch the late-afternoon rays of a setting sun. There were more than a dozen little parties forming, each working up a good amount of hygge (that untranslatable Danish word for ‘making a cozy space’) with their six-packs of canned Tuborg, one of Denmark’s two mega brewers. While I was tempted to linger and let the Indian summer vibe overtake me, I decided to hurry back to my hosts in northern Copenhagen, knowing full well that a home-cooked meal awaited me, with plenty of hygge on offer.

Note: The blog post originally appeared at E-International Relations on 30 October 2016. The original post can be found at: http://www.e-ir.info/2016/10/30/amazon-american-or-israeli-the-pitfalls-of-un-iversalising-wonder-woman/.

Back in 2009, Barack Obama’s smiling visage graced the cover of The Amazing Spider-Man #583 just a week before his presidential inauguration, while this year Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appeared on a variant cover of Civil War II: Choosing Sides #5, sporting boxing gloves and ready to take on his (political) foes. While comic book junkies like me recognised these events as major milestones on the road to mainstream recognition of the link between popular culture and world politics, they pale in comparison to what happened earlier this week. Wonder Woman, a fictional character that dates back to the early 1940s, has prompted an international backlash at the United Nations. The controversy stems from a 21 October 2016 ceremony in which the superhero was named a UN Honorary Ambassador for the Empowerment of Women and Girls. As the UN web page on the project notes:

The Wonder Woman campaign will highlight what we can collectively achieve if women and girls are empowered – along with examples of women and girls who have made and are making a difference every day by overcoming barriers and beating the odds to reach their goals.

Accordingly, the campaign encourages people to speak out against discrimination, work against gender-based violence, support leadership opportunities for women and girls, promote access to quality education, and to generally celebrate ‘real life’ wonder women everywhere.

In the wake of the honour, more than 600 UN staff signed a petition criticising the choice due to concerns associated with her appearance (namely that she is a ‘large breasted, white woman of impossible proportions’) and that she sports a U.S. flag-themed costume. In excess of 10,000 other people have joined the UN staff in criticising the decision.  As the petition rightly points out, the choice of ‘an overtly sexualised image’ is a curious one if the goal is to promote empowerment of women and girls on the global stage. The petitioners go on to argue that an ‘animated character surely cannot be charged with what is a very important role’ (though as they point out, it is not unprecedented given that Tinkerbell and Winnie the Pooh were previously tapped for such outreach). Lending support to the concerns of the anti-Wonder Woman campaigners, a recent New York Times article cited a number of high profile women in global governance who have come out against the decision to grant this role to Wonder Woman, particularly in the immediate aftermath of the appointment of (another) man to lead the organisation at a juncture where many UN-watchers had predicted the ascent of the first female secretary general. Most dramatically, the ceremony resulted in an exceeding rare protest within the UN chambers and severe criticism of Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information Cristina Gallach, the highest UN official to attend (Ban Ki-moon had been set to speak at the event but was a no-show).

These well-argued and undeniable criticisms of the choice of Wonder Woman, however, only scratch the surface of the potential pitfalls of the selection of Princess Diana of Themyscira as the new face of women’s empowerment. Created by American psychologist William Moulton Marston and his wife Elizabeth Holloway Marston, Wonder Woman (inspired by the birth control advocate Margaret Sanger and whose voluptuous figure was purportedly based on that of their ‘cohabitant’ Olive Byrne), is a decidedly complex character if one considers the full arc of her narrative. A demigoddess fashioned out of clay, Diana once ruled an island of Amazons, who were supposedly created to protect a ‘man’s world’, but later abandoned the mission to establish their own distaff society. However, in the context of World War II, Diana chose return to this original calling (in the forthcoming Wonder Woman film [2017], the Great War becomes the catalyst for this origin story as Diana takes on the ‘Hun’ in defence of American democracy). As historians of the comic book industry have pointed out, the original Wonder Woman was quite the feminist, often binding her (male) victims in what many have labelled as a soft rendering of sadomasochistic fantasies.

However, in the über-conservative 1950s, Wonder Woman, like other comic book heroines, was ‘domesticated’ and, owing to the puritanical Comics Code Authority (1954), fleeced of her fetish for bondage. While always (and somewhat inexplicably) an American patriot, her advocacy of the ‘American way’ mirrored that of other alien or immigrant superheroes of the day (most notably Superman and Aquaman). During the second half of 1970s, Wonder Woman burst onto the small screen in her own television series starring Lynda Carter (who appeared at the UN appointment ceremony). Reflecting changing gender dynamics, the maturation of the U.S. sexual revolution, and the country’s bicentennial Kulturkampf, the show revelled in schmaltzy patriotism and (the promise of) sex. In the 1990s, Wonder Woman discarded her star-and-stripes costume for a straps-and-black leather version, harking back to her S&M roots and prompting a firestorm of criticism from the American right. As part of DC Comics growing film franchise, Wonder Woman is now appearing on the big screen and being played by the Israeli model and actor Gal Gadot. With a well-received cameo in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) and her own feature film on the way, the most recent iteration of the first female superhero is alive and well.

As the emissary of man-free society, a feminist-inspired dominatrix, an American jingoist of the first order, a paragon of U.S. interventionism, and a star vehicle for one of Israel’s top models, there is no shortage of reasons why the choice of Wonder Woman is a dangerous one for the UN. While the organisation is no doubt dedicated to universalising positive attitudes to the empowerment of women and girls, it will be nearly impossible to avoid sustained criticism of the ‘mascot’ for the current campaign. Given the retrograde attitudes towards the promotion women’s rights in many member states in the Islamic world, anti-American sentiment among major world powers like China and Russia, the sexism accompanying the rising tide of nationalist-conservative sentiment in developed countries, and feminist concerns about overtly sexualised representations of women in comic books, Wonder Woman seems doomed.

However, as anyone who reads comic knows, you can’t keep a superhero down for long.
Echoing the spirit behind the UN’s decision to promote Wonder Woman to the level of ambassador, Carolyn Cocca, author of Superwomen: Gender, Power, Representation (Bloomsbury, 2016) argues in her blog Talking Comic Books: ‘Not only do we still need Wonder Woman, but we also need many more wonder women’. Not because we need to see more buxom, lasso-wielding goddesses taking on super-powered villains, but because we need to see more women – of colour, of differing abilities and body types, and of all sexual orientations – taking positions of power. Given that DC Entertainment now has a female president, Diane Nelson (who was on hand at the UN ceremony), perhaps things are moving in the right direction.


 

Note: The blog post originally appeared at E-International Relations on 23 August 2016. The original post can be found at: http://www.e-ir.info/2016/08/23/commercialized-nationalism-on-display-at-the-olympics/.

With the closing of the Games of the XXXI Olympiad in Rio de Janeiro, it is both timely and pertinent to reflect on the power of national image through the medium of sport. Every four years, the Olympics provides the most visible stage for the televisual performance of national identity, while at the same time, creating conditions for the throaty expression of nationalism back at home. While no war will be ended at the games, nor will any treaty be signed, the chance for countries to go head-to-head on a (purportedly) level playing field is a unique experience, comparable only to the World Cup. At the games, dedicated men and women compete for the glory of their homeland, typically clothed in the colours of their nation, while their countrymen cheer them on often waving flags as ‘proof’ of their loyalty. In this highly choreographed and purposefully affective environment, nationalism is the coin of the realm.

With nearly 11,000 athletes representing more than 200 countries and watched by billions around the world, this spectacle is the most effectively mediated form of international relations possible, putting to shame the United Nations General Assembly or any ‘real world’ geopolitical event. Certainly scholars have long recognized the Olympics qua an international competition as an important adjunct to IR and geopolitics; however, in this post I want to focus on another aspect of the games: TV commercials. Two advertisements in particular caught my eye this year, each showcasing American nationalism against the backdrop of the Olympic Games, which, incidentally, saw Team U.S.A. take home more medals than in any time since the Soviet-bloc boycotted games in 1984. Adding to the euphoria was the realization that the U.S. became first national team to crack the 1,000-medal mark in the history of the modern games, more than doubling the count of its nearest competitor (in all fairness, the U.S. was helped to win their 121 medals by the absence of a sizeable portion of the Russian team, banned from competition as punishment for state-sanctioned doping during the winter games held in Sochi, Russia, two years prior).

The first of these advertisements was for the Samsung Galaxy Note 7. Billed as the ‘sexiest large-screen phone ever’, this stylus-enabled device sells for upwards of $1,000 USD. In the commercial, Austrian actor Christoph Waltz assumes a variety of personae, beginning with that of an effete European gentleman sitting in a well-appointed study overlooking the Alps where he is taking high tea. ‘Americans’, he sniffs, ‘I don’t understand you. Always working all the time: busy, busy, busy’. He then dismissively draws the viewers’ attention to the mobile phone is his hand, lamenting that now ‘we’ can do ‘even more’ (work, that is). The visual narrative then shifts, with Waltz in ethnic drag (and, in one case, actually drag as well) portraying a variety of ‘stereotypical’ upwardly-mobile Americans: a new mum on a stationary bike with her infant strapped to her chest in a BabyBjörn so she can update her Facebook profile photo; a dreadlocked vacationer in a tropical waterfall using the phone to stay in touch with the office; a plaid-clad everyman using the handset’s Bluetooth to buy a giant fountain at a Home Depot stand-in; and a high schooler winning the robotics challenge due to the ‘extra curriculum’ supposedly abetted by the device.

Making a direct reference to supposedly ‘lazy’ Europeans, he states, ‘You get more done before 8:00AM than the rest of the world and we are hours ahead of you’, before going on to tell ‘us/U.S.’ that ‘You’re never happy just winning something…you’re only happy winning everything’. In the third act of the commercial, which showcases the ‘greatest most influential nation’ in the world’s ‘tireless ambition’, Waltz assumes the visages of iconic American patriots, from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln to astronaut James B. Irwin, before realizing that his (materialistic) dreams can also come true. All he needs is to become a hard-working American (visually realized with the closing shot of his blond, preppy family in front of a McMansion draped in the stars-and-stripes). And how does he do this? Of course, with his hard-working mobile phone. In his meticulous, urbane, and seemingly care-free existence, Waltz presents an American-viewing audience with the epitome of continental Europeanness. But the lesson learned here is that despite our transatlantic neighbours’ seeming happiness achieved through an appropriate work-life balance, they all just want to become Americans at the end of the day.

The advertisement is curious on multiple levels. First, is the casting of Waltz, who is most-known for playing savagely racist characters like SS-Standartenführer Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds (2009) and the real-life Belgian colonist, who served as inspiration for ‘Kurtz’ in Heart of Darkness, Léon Rom in The Legend of Tarzan (2016). Beyond Waltz’s filmic associations with the darkest manifestations of Social Darwinism, the politics of race are (inadvertently) on display throughout the commercial, whether via Waltz’s ‘white Rasta’ pantomime or the Aryanesque patriarchal domesticity of the achieved ‘American dream’ (white plantation-style home, blonde wife, blond kids, yellow Labrador Retriever). Second, the notion that South Korea’s largest chaebol is the driving force behind American ‘success’ fails to pass the red-face test when placed in context. Although Samsung, with its over-the-top (American) nationalist chest-thumping, has actually outdone Cadillac, which in its commercial for the 2014 ELR Coupe, struck a similar chord. The latter ad, widely-condemned for both its jingoism and elitism, denounced ‘other countries’ (specifically France, as evidenced by a sly ‘n’est-ce pas’ at the end of the ad) for ‘taking the whole month of August off’ (and which made a similar reference to the lunar roving vehicle as interplanetary evidence of American ‘success’).

The other commercial that underscored the Olympian extravaganza as the optimal zone for engaging in national-identity building was an extended version of Budweiser’s rebranding campaign. In the summer of 2016, the fourth-most popular beer in the country officially changed its name to ‘America’. Given that this temporary departure in nomenclature explicitly occurred as part of the 2016 presidential campaign, the framing of the name-change through the summertime medium of the Olympics should be of no surprise. Importantly, Budweiser has stated it will revert to original product name after the November election and that the redesign, which includes the national motto E pluribus unum, is meant to ‘inspire drinkers to celebrate America and Budweiser’s shared values of freedom and authenticity’. Coming from Budweiser, a company that began by pilfering its name and style from the Bohemian brewery Budvar, and is now owned by the Belgian-Brazilian conglomerate Anheuser-Busch InBev, the notions of ‘authenticity’ and ‘Americanness’ are equally suspect. However, unlike the almost unbearable whiteness of the Samsung commercial, the Budweiser TV spot is at pains to sculpt a multiracial America, where block-parties and low-income jobs contrast sharply with the Waltzian U.S.A. of über-pampered and propertied elites (also of note, the Bud ad also includes footage of athletes, thus linking the medium to the message).

In these duelling depictions of the American dream, we are witness to two very different versions of America, which strangely parallel the narratives of presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The Samsung commercial portrays an America of intellectual labour, white privilege, and vertiginous wealth, ‘made great’ by behaviours and habits that reflect Trump’s now infamous conflation of ‘sacrifice’ and ‘success’. Whereas, the Budweiser-imagined realm presents an America defined by faces of many colours, a people bound together by manual labour, hard knocks, and not-to-be-taken-for-granted moments of camaraderie. The Samsung ad begins by looking at America as a ‘negative’, but in the end resolves that with the ‘right’ attitude (complemented by accumulation, wealth, and whiteness), it can be the best in the world; in other words, a highly contingent form of patriotism. Alternatively, the Bud commercial revels in an everyday America, a nation that already is great and not something that needs to be changed. Herein we see an organic and unequivocal patriotism, much like the one that was (somewhat surprisingly) on display at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The Olympics are over, but the U.S. is just beginning to wrangle over which form of banal nationalism it prefers: the (un)American dream of Christoph Waltz as an immigrant Trump wanna-be, or the workaday reality of a patchwork nation downing cans of ‘America’. Whichever direction the country decides to go, it should not be overlooked that giant overseas corporations (dutifully supported by local advertising agencies) are taking an increasingly important role in telling Americans exactly who they are.

Note: The blog post originally appeared at E-International Relations on 15 June 2016. The original post can be found at: http://www.e-ir.info/2016/07/02/a-renewed-anglo-american-alliance-putins-potential-bregret/.

It seems that all the Western foreign policy elites seem to be in intellectual lockstep when it comes to the ‘common sense’ aphorism that Brexit is an early Christmas present for Russian president Vladimir Putin. The French geopolitician Dominique Moïsi, speaking in an NPR roundtable about the West’s purported decline following Brexit, even went as far as to state that the two forces of jihadism and Putinism were handed a great victory on the 23rd of June when Great Britain held its now infamous referendum to decide whether the country should #Leave or #Remain in the European Union. I for one would seek to challenge the conventional wisdom that the UK’s exit from the EU will necessarily be a boon to a ‘revanchist Russia’ (as Moïsi puts it). While the real-world supervillain VVP may certainly be emboldened by the turmoil that Britain’s departure has triggered, he may come to suffer from the world’s most acute case of ‘Bregret’ in the coming decade as the UK’s departure from the Union brings it closer to the U.S.

While many citizens and even certain media elites on both sides of the Atlantic conflate and confuse NATO and the EU, the two entities are very different things. Moreover, it is often forgotten that the Anglo-American alliance precedes and supersedes both these post-Cold War institutions. In fact, the geopolitical foundation upon which the so-called ‘special relationship’ is built ranks as perhaps the most enduring international partnership of all time. Following the fratricidal War of 1812, Washington and London entered into an alliance of convenience cemented by the Monroe Doctrine, the U.S.’s first attempt at international policing (and one which, at least initially, was only viable with the support of the British Navy and was originally suggested by British Foreign Minister George Canning). Since then, the U.S. and the UK have stood shoulder-to-shoulder on nearly every major geopolitical issue (with NATO serving as the most far-ranging evidence of the trust and loyalty that connects the U.S. and the UK). For some 200 years, two world wars, and a global geopolitical conflict the likes of which history has never witnessed (i.e. the Cold War), Britain and America have been allied so closely that barely an inch of daylight passed through (let’s try to forget the Falkland Islands War, shall we?).

Freed of its membership in the political superstructure of the European Union, but still the leading military European power within NATO (with the fifth-largest armed forces in the world), Great Britain will be positioned to operate independently of the will of Paris, Berlin, and Rome vis-à-vis the Russian Federation. Economically and cultural isolated from the Continent in the wake of Brexit, it is highly probably that the UK will seek (and find) succour across the North Atlantic, whether the White House is occupied by a hawkish Hillary or Brexit-thumping Trump. If the (self-serving) Russophile Marine Le Pen moves into the Élysée Palace at some point in the future, or if the indefatigable Angela Merkel backtracks on her new-found anti-Putinism or is replaced by a more pliant Chancellor, a post-Brexit 10 Downing Street will be free to act independently of its (former) European partners and will be more likely to consult closely if not exclusively with Washington. Given such a scenario, the UK will not need to be a ‘poodle’ to make its presence felt and its participation valued in the overlapping and often contradictory schema that is the United States’ foreign policy network of networks. Instead, England (however ‘little’ may it become) will be able to rightly (re)assume the role of the off-shore balancing ‘bulldog’, ready to bark and bite (particularly at the Eurasia ‘bear’).

As Britannia moves away from Europe (in spirit if not body), it will only become more ensconced in its Anglophone cocoon of geopolitical partners, epitomised by the ‘secretive, global surveillance’ agreement known as the Five Eyes, which links the UK to the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Should relations with France and other ‘transit’ countries for migrants from the Middle East and North Africa deteriorate in what portends to be a slow and messy UK-EU divorce, we are likely to see Britain turn ever more critical of its erstwhile European partners, and this will like translate into a bolder posture against Putin (assuming he sticks around for a few more terms). While Barack Obama may have warned Britain about sending it to the ‘back of the queue’ on trade deals (a hollow threat from a lame-duck president who might just have been bluffing), the UK—in an act that otherwise smacks of incredible short-sightedness—may have just put itself head-and-shoulders above all other U.S. allies with its decision to quit the grand European project. And if so, Putin’s wide smile may just start to fade.

Note: The blog post originally appeared at E-International Relations on 15 June 2016. The original post can be found at: http://www.e-ir.info/2016/06/15/is-it-time-for-an-iranian-american-buddy-film/.

While the question may seem strange, even provocative, it is time to start asking Hollywood to think about the prospect of an Iranian-American buddy film. Back in 1988, Arnold Schwarzenegger—the future Govenator of the U.S. state of California—starred with Saturday Night Live veteran Jim Belushi in the crime-thriller Red Heat. IMDB describes the plot as such: ‘A tough Russian policeman is forced to partner up with a cocky Chicago police detective when he is sent to Chicago to apprehend a Georgian drug lord who killed his partner and fled the country’. Certainly the reviews of the film were less than stellar, yet the fact that a major motion picture paired up an agent of the Soviet state with an American cop in an effort to combat a combined threat to both their nations was a major milestone in the evolution of 1980s geopolitical cinema. By linking the interests of the USSR and the USA., Red Heat provided a bold contrast to Rambo III, Little Nikita, The Living Daylights, and other films of second-half of the 1980s, cinematically reflecting the budding international ‘bromance’ between the stridently anti-communist Ronald Reagan and the Soviet reformer Mikhail Gorbachev. In its own rather curious way, Red Heat also represented a prescient harbinger of post-1991 Russophobic Hollywood cinema in that it dealt with the unleashing of the dark underbelly of the Eurasian mafia on the West (a theme that would be repeated ad nauseam through the 1990s and beyond in films as diverse as Little Odessa [1994], Training Day [2001], and The Dark Knight Rises [2012]). In their collaborative efforts to bring to justice a home-grown Soviet threat, Red Heat marked a major turn in pop-culture’s collective assessment of the Soviet Union. Given the tectonic shift in the West’s orientation towards the Islamic Republic, is it not time for a similar treatment from Hollywood vis-à-vis Iran?

Admittedly, there are significant differences in the nature of the U.S.-Iranian relationship when compared to that of the America and the USSR back in the late 1980s. Unlike Reagan and Gorbachev, Barack Obama is not buddying up to either the Supreme Leader of Iran or its president, Hassan Rouhani, nor are there any overtures of this nature emanating from the Sa’adabad Complex. However, Washington and Tehran are  increasingly finding themselves to be (often uncomfortable) bedfellows on the same side of many issues in the so-called ‘Greater Middle East’, from countering the spread of Daesh/ISIL to promoting increased economic ties in the Persian Gulf to stabilizing Afghanistan. With the large and influential Persian community in the United States and a younger generation of pro-American Iranians moving into their late 20s and early 30s, the stage is set for a transformation of the ‘enemy image’ of Iran akin to what occurred with the Soviets at the end of the Cold War—that is if Hollywood gets on board (a pretty big ‘if’). Certainly, a large number of structural hurdles hamper any such trend in this direction, not least of which is Americans’ pervasive distrust of ‘Middle Easterners’ rooted in hoary Orientalist attitudes toward Muslims. Sadly, these prejudices have been on dramatic display in the current election cycle wherein the presumptive Republican Party nominee, Donald Trump, has repeatedly called for a ‘ban’ on Muslim immigrants (a talking point that he has doubled-down on since the tragic mass-shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in mid-June).

Yet, there is a possibility for challenging the West’s dominant IR narrative and reworking U.S.’s geopolitical imaginary of Iran via popular culture, assuming there is will on the part of cultural producers. Following in the footsteps of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, with its well-developed relationship between a U.S. war journalist and her Afghan fixer, it is possible to move to the next stage, i.e., a U.S.-Iranian buddy film set in the Middle East. The possible plotlines are limitless, but I for one can imagine a narrative wherein an erudite, Western-educated, and religiously-observant member of the Revolutionary Guards partners up with a foul-mouthed, atheist FBI agent from Brooklyn to track down a missing shipment of enhanced uranium (thus contextualizing the recent Iranian nuclear deal and the tentative détente between the two countries).

Originally intended for delivery to the Russian Federation but diverted by a corrupt FSB agent to a wild-eyed ISIL terrorist in southern Lebanon, the missing uranium is the conceit that brings together these two ‘buddies’ so they can save Tel Aviv from a drone-delivered ‘dirty bomb’ attack. Of course, our heroes spend half the film arguing about the superiority of their respective systems, stereotyping of each other’s cultures, and debating about Israel. However, they do bond over food, seeking out the best falafel cafés on their trek from Muscat to Jeddah to Damascus, thus adding a bit of mirth to the otherwise serious subject matter. Sprinkle in a bit star power (I’m thinking a tanned and bearded Eric Bana against a clean-shaven Christian Bale reprising his American Hustle accent), work in some sweeping shots of Dubai, Mecca, and Jerusalem, and make a couple of hackneyed references to Moscow’s complicity in ‘weaponizing’ the migrant crisis in Europe and you’ve got yourself a summer 2017 blockbuster. Stranger things have happened.

Note: The blog post originally appeared at E-International Relations on 20 April 2016. The original post can be found at: http://www.e-ir.info/2016/04/20/a-berlin-ankara-axis-against-satire/.

The past two weeks saw the ZDF satirist Jan Böhmermann become the latest victim in Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s transnational campaign to silence any voices he dislikes, particularly when those voices come from those who do not like him. Sadly, we have all become familiar, even blasé about Ankara’s readiness to curtail free speech and imprison journalists, academics, and comedians alike. Now it seems that Berlin is providing an unwelcome fillip to this behaviour. Following Böhmermann’s reading of an obscene poem targeted at Erdogan, German Chancellor Angela Merkel waded into the fray condemning the German comedian’s actions as indefensible, thus passively suggesting that he may face prosecution. It is illegal under German law to insult foreign leaders. Yes, you read that correctly: Germany has a law that prohibits its citizens from impugning Vladimir Putin and, until about eight years ago, one George W. Bush. On April 15, a German judge cleared the way for Böhmermann to be charged with violation of Paragraph 103 which carries up to a three-year jail sentence (incidentally, the German government plans to repeal the now-controversial law in 2018).

While I agree that the poem – which includes sophomoric attacks on the smell of Erdogan’s faeces, his love of bestiality, and his small penis size – lacks any redeeming genuine political or even humorous value, it remains satire given how and where it was delivered, that is on Böhmermann’s television program Neo Magazin Royale, which any viewer would recognise as modelled on the classic structure with an introduction with a bit of stand-up comedy, a few songs, and silly bits or skits, sometimes followed by an interview with a live guest (Note: Böhmermann and his staff have gone on hiatus until at least May 2016). The venue, while not the only consideration, demands we recognise Böhmermann’s tasteless attack on Erdogan as a form of free speech, something that Merkel supposedly is ready to defend to the nth degree. Yet, as many analysts have pointed out, Berlin needs its increasingly paranoid and authoritarian Turkish partners to ensure that the current deal to stanch the flow of refugees and economic immigrants from continuing to flow into the Balkans and from there to Germany and other points in Northern Europe.

In such a highly charged political environment, we are seeing that European values associated with free speech might just be more malleable than once thought. At the turn of the millennium, Kazakhstan’s diplomatic corps in London asked Tony Blair’s government to ‘ban’ Borat (i.e., Sacha Baron Cohen) for his unflattering portrayal of the Central Asian republic. The British response was (thankfully) predictable: a polite speech about the entrenched nature of political humour as a natural right in liberal democracies. However as we have seen from the reaction to Charlie Hebdo’s purposefully inciting form of satire, many in Europe are increasingly wary of ‘offending’ sensitive readers outside the confines of the European Union. Perhaps this is understandable given that many of the French magazine’s barbs have been directed at religious groups, i.e. collections of private individuals, while attacks on public figures like the Pope have been accepted as part and parcel of the French tradition of social critique.

The Böhmermann case, if in fact charges are brought, represents something altogether different, given that heads of state, particularly imbecilic or nasty ones, should be fair game for comedy. What use is satire if you cannot go after the ones at the top of the political pyramid? Even in the Middle Ages, Europe made room for lampooning the liege, whether through the court jester or the charivari inversions of the carnival. We must thank Erdogan for bringing to light this ridiculous German law which represents a dangerous example of political correctness in its worst form. As one commentator noted, ‘This is not Watergate, but it has probably a lot more impact on real politics than the average journalist makes in his lifetime.’

Though not necessarily intended to draw out the importance of the popular culture-world politics continuum, the emerging Berlin-Ankara axis of enforced ‘taste’ in satire shows just how important cultural producers are becoming in bringing important issues to light in a world where print is dead, news is entertainment, and Facebook is the primary vehicle for learning about what country blew up today. Having just returned from a European International Studies Association workshop on the relationship between popular culture and world politics in Tubingen, Germany and passing through the Frankfurt train station where there was large sign in Arabic and English directing refugees to information centres, these issues are certainly on my mind. While I tend to eschew activism in my own writing, I cannot help but use this platform to issue a call for those of us working the field of education and policy to demand from our leaders – all of them – that we should be able to make fun of them. Letting the Erdogans of the world gain sway over the Merkels will make for a very unfunny place.

Note: The blog post originally appeared at E-International Relations on 7 March 2016. The original post can be found at: http://www.e-ir.info/2016/03/07/fantasies-of-occupation-occupation-and-the-man-in-the-high-castle/.

Last year saw the premiere of two television series about the politics of occupation. A Norwegian production Okkupert (‘Occupied’), which premiered on TV 2 in Norway and is currently available on the Netflix platform, and The Man in the High Castle, Amazon’s first foray into television programming. The first, based on an original idea by internationally renowned detective writer Jo Nesbø, is set in the near future. The United States, having attained energy independence and learned the lessons of failed interventionism in the war-torn Middle East, has unilaterally withdrawn from NATO just as a newly elected Green Party government in Norway decides to abandon all oil and natural gas extraction in favour of an untested renewable energy project based on thorium. The result: a European Union-sanctioned Russian ‘velvet glove’ invasion of the Scandinavian country to restart petroleum production. The second is set in 1963, and is an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s alternative history (published the same year) wherein Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan divide up a defeated America, leaving only a narrow neutral zone in the Rockies. Both series have received critical acclaim while also generating controversy. The latter’s visually evocative advertising campaign on New York City subway cars resulted in a quick denunciation by the Anti-Defamation League who found the ads offensive, while Vyacheslav Pavlovsky, the Russian ambassador in Norway, condemned Occupied as an example of the “worst traditions of the Cold War”, aimed at frightening “Norwegian viewers with a non-existent threat from the east”.

To those of us who spend our days (and nights) plumbing the depths of the popular culture-world politics continuum, it comes as no surprise that Occupied appeared when it did. Clearly Nesbø’s ‘original idea’ was a response to Russia’s similar (real-world) operation in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, and is somewhat plausible given that Norway provides more than 10% of the EU’s oil and a third of its natural gas (more than Russia). The parallels between Norway and Ukraine are numerous: both countries are non-EU members that possess a border with Russia, as well as share(d) governance over a piece of territory, namely Svalbard and Sevastopol, and both countries’ national identities are rather fragile and new entities (Ukraine is obsessed with differentiating itself from Russia, Norway from Sweden). Remove NATO from Norway or add it to Ukraine and the parallels deepen further. Moving beyond the explicit dynamics of the plot, there is a deeper fear addressed in the series, that of immigration abetted by EU policies (or lack thereof). While the Africans and Muslims portrayed in the series are marked as integrated and loyal citizens, there is a rabid anti-immigration theme that presents in Occupied with the Russians who have ‘snuck’ across the border becoming the object of vicious hatred.

Having just returned from Oslo, I can state that the question of immigrants and ‘national values’ were swirling all around me wherever I was in the city, despite a seemingly successful policy of integration when compared to that of UK, France, Germany, or many other European countries. In defence of the show’s producers, Occupied is really about the pressures placed on a society in an untenable situation, and that is where the series succeeds where many other geopolitical dramas have fallen short of the mark. Still, in these situations, we are able to tease out palpable fears a given society has about themselves and their place in the world. Thus, Occupied represents a raw and honest vision of the here and now for a Norway that is outside the EU, but ultimately governed by its actions and inaction.

Popular culture as a mechanism for representing contemporary realities is, unfortunately, totally absent in The Man in High Castle. In addition to being bogged down by a distended and uninteresting ‘love story’, the series continues to beat the dead horse of anti-Nazism that has so well-served cinema (and its televisual complement) for nearly seven decades, spanning The Great Dictator (1940) to the recent Oscar-winner Son of Saul (2015). As a dedicated fan of Dick’s oeuvre and The Man in the High Castle in particular (which I read at the age 18), I have long anticipated the adaptation of this important work. Yet, when it arrived, that enthusiasm turned to ashes in my mouth, given its appearance in a year when a leading Republican candidate for the U.S. Presidential nomination, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, stated that the U.S. is living in 'a Gestapo age' and that the country today is 'very much like Nazi Germany'. These preposterous claims followed a venomous debate over healthcare reform with Obamacare being regularly labelled by the far right as a latter-day Aktion T4 program for America’s old and sick. Extending the Nazi analogies, many on the American left increasingly see the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump, as a Hitler-in-waiting for the country (or at least the harbinger of American authoritarianism), particularly given his plans to ban Muslim immigration, advocating of killing terrorists’ families, xenophobic attacks on major trading partners, and a (temporary) failure to reject the endorsement of former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke. Sadly, I have come to the conclusion that Amazon green-lighted the project to tap into the simmering angst and anti-government sentiment that pervades Obama’s America on both sides of the political divide.

The Man in the High Castle is the perfect ‘distraction’ for a country riven by increasingly bitter culture wars, a debilitating struggle between neo- and post-racism, and a complete breakdown in civil discourse. Viewers can sit back in the comfort of their living rooms and wish for a ‘better time’ when a genocidal external enemy brought the country together, rather than dealing with the very real divisions that exist today in dealing with immigration, reproductive rights, healthcare, and foreign policy.

Note: The blog post originally appeared at E-International Relations on 24 November 2015. The original post can be found at: http://www.e-ir.info/2015/11/24/homelands-popular-geopolitics-gets-punked/.

October represented another high point in the popular culture-world politics continuum spectrum. Following the airing of a recent episode of the Emmy award-winning Showtime series Homeland (2011- ), based on a Israeli thriller called Hatufim (‘Prisoners of War’), the producers admitted that the ‘Arab graffiti artists’ it had employed to lend ‘authenticity’ to a Beirut cityscape (filmed in Germany) shaped by the presence of Syrian refugees had used the opportunity to tune up Homeland as a racist and xenophobic blight on the West’s geographical imagination of the Islamo-Arab world. Tasked with marking up the walls of a set in a Berlin exurb with Arabic-language graffiti, artists Heba Amin, Caram Kapp, and ‘Stone’—who ended up being committed activists—used their access to a global media product to highlight the show’s depiction of Arabs as surreptitious and incorrigible terrorists, transgressively performing a sort of contratextual reading of the series through interstitial text and marginalia that would have made Edward Said proud. The hand-writing was literally on the wall in this case: ‘Homeland is racist‘, ‘Homeland is a joke, and didn’t make us laugh’, and most perplexing to a culturally-tone deaf audience, ‘Homeland is a watermelon’ (sadly, this rather easy to tease out metaphor – assuming one does not have even basic intercultural competence – seems to have become a reason to demean its creators).

While right-wing pundits gleeful glommed onto the story in a guilt-free and unreflective bemoaning of the evils of political correctness (lounging in the umbra of Donald Trump’s ceaseless diatribes against any systemic form of respect for our fellow human beings, particularly those who are not white, male, and filthy rich), the main stream media has instead decided to chastise the structural weaknesses of contemporary Anglophone televisual production. Shows like Homeland seek to replicate or even exceed the gravitas of filmic production, yet they are driven by the predictable and prosaic cost restrictions associated with any TV series. For most journalists, this was just an example of not paying attention. Let’s have a laugh at Homeland for its failure in oversight and move on. Both of these camps are missing the bigger picture.

Activists who are living with the deleterious outcomes of the prejudices they feel come (at least partly) from globalized mediated representation that emanates from a recondite marriage between the Pentagon and Hollywood found their voice and delivered some much needed payback. Combining new and old media, popular geopolitical TV got punked by popular geopolitical pop-art with a pedigree that predates pixels by at least 2,000 years (we know the Romans were doing it in Caesar’s day). What does it all mean? This is the consummate question that we ask ourselves when we, as IR specialists, delve into the PWPC continuum. Frankly, I’m not comfortable providing an answer at this junction and that is why I was compelled to write this particular blog post. I know that this is a transformative as well as subversive act, one which represents nothing more or less than the beginning of a swelling tidal wave that will transform the popular discourses of power and privilege in the decades that will come.

This act is a physical realization that the pop-culture canvas is not just palimpsest to be altered after the artist finishes the painting, it can be subverted even in the process. Evidently, the ‘Europeanized’ Arabs employed by Homeland to inject a bit of the ‘real’ into the fake of their geopolitical imaginary backfired, or did it? Homeland, like its Israeli predecessor, has always been about asking and answering disturbing questions associated with identity, otherness, and securitization in times of terror. Call me a conspiracy theorist but the ‘revelation’ that a handful of ideologically driven Muslims has interrupted the geopolitical messaging of a reliably statist treatment of the unending ‘War on Terror’ seems a bit too convenient for me.

While I do not doubt that the young artists who used their one-time enviable position as ‘Arabs in Germany’ to make a difference, it is also plausible that producers were completely aware of the geopolitical prank and sweatily anticipating being ‘embarrassed’ by their own ‘oversight’. If one looks back at the big budget Hollywood films that have ‘offended’ folks overseas (The Interview, Borat, 300, Hostel, etc.), there is always a silver lining (or to update the metaphor, I should say a ‘green’ one, i.e. higher revenues). Cultural producers in the West are increasingly courting controversy as they engage political subjects associated with international affairs as there is little downside (excepting the pro-North Korean hack of Sony, of course). Many see this phenomenon as a new form of propaganda, but that is a bit facile. In the past, no propagandist ever worried about profits other than those of an ideological nature. In the contemporary neoliberal milieu, return on investment matters. Consequently, a show like Homeland might just be showing us the bleeding edge of what is in store for us as we embark on our collective popular-geopolitical future.

Note: The blog post originally appeared at E-International Relations on 22 September 2015. The original post can be found at: http://www.e-ir.info/2015/09/22/vvp-is-vladimir-putin-the-super-villain-weve-all-been-waiting-for/.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin makes Dr. Evil look like Charlie Brown. Naive, parochial, and satisfied by small victories (which always lay beyond his grasp). Putin, or at least the man who returned to the presidency of the Russian Federation in 2012, is a proper super-villain, more reminiscent of a Lex Luthor, Dr. Doom, or Sauron (obviously, not a Darth Vader as that role was long-ago assumed by former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney).

Like all great villains who are governed by the immutable laws of the comic book narrative, Putin attempts to change rather than maintain the status quo. It is up to the ‘heroes’ (some more ‘super’ than others) of the West to maintain the way things are, be they the fair-and-balanced Wonder Woman (Angela Merkel), the nerdy-yet-resilient Spider-Man (Barack Obama), or the aloof-and-frequently-absent off-shore balancer Gandalf (David Cameron). Yet even in concert, this league of extraordinary gentlepersons cannot seem to counter the nefarious designs of VVP. He shoots whales with crossbows, dives the Black Sea in submersibles, molests children in broad daylight, rides ponies over mountains in a state of amazing shirtlessness, and conquers those who challenge him in the Soviet martial art of sambo, all while starting a Ukrainian civil war in his spare time. He is the enemy we in the West secretly wish for. Keep your Kim Jong-ils, your Idi Amins, your Saddam Husseins, even your Slobodan Miloševićs. They’ve got nothing on VVP (I will avoid a reference to Adolf Hitler here as this is just unfair given the reservoir of pop-cultural resonance produced by Hollywood over the past seven decades). Putin is, according to one very wry mash-up video, the ‘most interesting man in the world’.

I recently presented a paper on this topic at a conference on ‘Russian Culture in the Era of Globalisation’ (University of Leeds). While this post does not exactly replicate the content of this essay, it does reprise its themes, those being that popular culture does not only matter in contemporary IR, it is frighteningly important in determining the predisposition of various publics towards foreign policy messaging. However, this is old pat. While those scholars who command the upper echelons of IR scholarship continue to labour under the myth that popular culture is both impervious to measurement and ultimately irrelevant, those of us who ‘beaver away’ like Solzhenitsyn in exile in the magical-realistic realm that is popular culture-world politics continuum demand more of our work. We expect our scholarship to explain things of which we are only marginally aware.

In the case of Putin-mania in the West (a very different animal than what exists in Russia proper), the super-villain frame is a self-sustaining and organic phenomenon that produces a powerful feedback loop that should be observed with an unflinching gaze. The more we in the West aggrandize Putin’s (super)villainy-cum-political mastery, either through effigies on House of Cards, Internet memes, or YouTube videos, the stronger VVP becomes in his relationship to our ‘heroes’. Nina Khrushcheva, the scion of a bête noir of the West in his own right, has actually made the bold claim that VVP is feeding off the West’s representation of him qua a super-villain, thus giving us more of what we demand as a viewing audience and concomitantly adding to his own puissance in global affairs. Thus, like a Baudrillardian dreaming of a Qaeda-style attack prior to 9/11, we are the authors of our own geopolitical narrative, no matter how nightmarish it becomes.

Does this then take away the agency of Vladimir Putin? Yes and no. Putin understands us and we understand Putin. Like a James Bond villain seeking world domination—or at a minimum the manipulation of some geopolitical lever that will bring unfair dividends back to the man or woman who pulls it—Putin sees in the world system as a grand game to be played. He is the ultimate game theory IR practitioner, and we in the West slavishly adhere to our own rose-coloured Weltanschauungs despite their ineffectiveness in countering our ‘foe’. Putin, who took his time in the wilderness (placing his shill Dmitry Medvedev in his stead) with aplomb, akin to the Joker languishing in Arkham Asylum or Magneto’s retreat to Genosha, has returned to his role as ‘geopolitical enemy number one’, as he was incautiously and presciently labelled by Mitt Romney in 2012. Putin—and no other—sits happily upon this throne, and we thank him for it. Like Osama bin Laden circa 2000, VVP, while real enough, is more a figment of our popular-geopolitical imagination, and one which we cannot live without.

 

Note: The blog post originally appeared at E-International Relations on 28 May 2015. The original post can be found at: http://www.e-ir.info/2015/05/28/scourging-paganism-past-and-present-the-tragic-irony-of-palmyra/.

Over the past several days I have been somewhat perplexed, if not perturbed by the news media coverage of the impending destruction of pagan sites, particularly the iconic Temple of Baal and later Roman ruins, at Palmyra in ISIL-occupied Syrian territory. If the destruction of these sites does take place, it will continue ISIL’s carefully calculated strategy of publicly and performatively erasing pagan history from the Islamic Middle East. On Euronews, BBC World, and other international media (including Catholic media outlets), a familiar refrain has emerged among (mostly European) commentators, including representatives of UNESCO, bemoaning ISIL’s architecture-razing rampage in Nimrud and elsewhere as ‘cultural genocide’, and affront to the very foundations of Western civilisation. However, there is a bitter irony at work here, particularly when one focuses a critical gaze upon how we engage with historical memory, the idea of Europe, and the notions of cultural and religious ‘cleansing’.

By all accounts, the medieval knitting together of Europe under the Emperor Charlemagne serves as the historical basis of what we today call ‘Western civilization’ by initiating a return to the transnational integration that had once characterised the Roman Empire. This king of the Franks’ empire-building also served as the ideological wellspring of the very concept of a unified ‘Europe’, manifested most visibly by the establishment of the European Economic Community in 1957 (a geopolitical space that almost perfectly mapped Charlemagne’s domains, minus a standoffish Switzerland). Today, most Europeans see Charlemagne through rose-coloured glasses, a great hero who unified warring nations and ushered in an era of economic prosperity, cultural renaissance, and intellectual advancement. This pater Europae, or ‘Father of Europe’, is so revered that he commands one of the most precious pieces of geography in all of Europe, the plaza just outside the doors of Notre-Dame Cathedral on the Île de la Cité, Paris. Yet, this reverential view of Carolus Magnus carefully omits his role in the mass-murder of untold thousands of pagans, as well as a merciless eradication of pagan sites of worship across northern Europe.

Some 4,500 pagan Saxon captives lost their lives in the bloodbath known as the Massacre of Verden, a powerful message of the Sword to those who would not accept the Cross. Also as part of the Saxon Wars (772-804), Charlemagne ordered the destruction of the Irminsul, or ‘Tree of the Universe’, in the foothills of the Teutoberg, in a calculated effort to present himself as a ‘true leader of the Christian faith and enemy of paganism’. These are just two of the most (in)famous instances of Charlemagne’s decades-long campaign to annihilate polytheism across the Continent. Surely, in the cold light of unbiased historical reflection, the slaughter at Verden compares neatly to ISIL’s execution of 600 Yazidis in northern Iraq in May 2015, while the destruction of the Saxon’s sacral world-tree should be seen as even more abhorrent than any of ISIL’s acts of demolition, given that it was the veritable axis mundi for Germanic pagans, not some historical relic of an ancient faith dead for nearly two millennia.

However, history is about forgetting, not remembering. The sanitised myth of Charlemagne is a necessity for modern Europe, a transnational polity built on transnational cooperation, cultural respect, and economic integration. True, Charles the Great laid the groundwork for the ‘idea of Europe’, but he also rooted a deep and pernicious religious intolerance into the DNA of the Continent. Seven centuries later, the same lands where his troops forced conversions and slaughtered those pagans who remained faithful to their old gods would again be the site of a series of catastrophic religious wars lasting from 1524 to 1648.

For those of us who teach history, and particularly the role of religion in history, it is important to remember that politics, militancy, and faith often go hand in hand. Sadly there is nothing novel about ISIL’s use of public executions of ‘infidels’ to intimidate their enemies and rally support amongst supporters and attract possible allies, nor is the destruction of symbols of one’s political predecessors as a display of power anything new. What matters is how the historical record decides to render these acts in the distant future. As paganism scholar Michael Strmiska points out in his essay on ‘The Evils of Christianization: A Pagan Perspective on European History’, medieval paganism’s contribution to the patrimony of Europe has all but been blotted out and the actions of those state and non-state actors who purged the every last pagan from the Continent are forgiven their crimes by the passage of time. While this is not a likely scenario for ISIL, it does force us to confront how we view the past, and more specifically the creation of ‘Europe’ which, as the 2004 row over its ‘Christian roots’ proves, is forged on a misremembered past which confines millennia of paganism to the dustbin of history.

Note: The blog post originally appeared at E-International Relations on 10 March 2015. The original post can be found at: http://www.e-ir.info/2015/03/10/slainte-the-performative-geopolitics-of-the-irish-pub/http://www.e-ir.info/2015/02/15/hic-sunt-dragones-hhttyd-2-and-ir-theory/.

This coming week will see another celebration of St. Patrick’s Day, the 17 March festival honouring the Romano-British missionary who brought Christianity to the Emerald Isle. In practice, however, St. Patrick’s Day serves as a convenient excuse for sloughing off the winter blues by donning kelly green and ‘Kiss Me, I’m Irish’ t-shirts, listening to jigs, attending parades, and—most importantly—drinking to excess (Lenten restrictions on alcohol consumption are lifted for a day in many Catholic dioceses for purposes of ‘observance’). Once confined to Ireland, celebrations have spread via the Irish diaspora, becoming popular in Great Britain, North America, the Antipodes, Argentina, and farther afield. The Irish pub tends to be the primary locus of St. Patrick’s Day revelry. Once a forlorn redoubt for marginalised Hibernian immigrants living in low-income districts, Irish pubs are now big business, often being situated in city centres commanding a well-heeled clientele. From Copenhagen to Dubai to Ulan Bator, the Irish pub has made its mark. Backed by the marketing power of Diageo, the world’s largest producer of spirits, St. Patrick’s Day has been turned into a genuinely international holiday. As more and more people around the world flock to Irish pubs for a bit of craic (fun), and compounded by the rapidly expanding popularity of beer and whiskey consumption worldwide, a highly circumscribed aspect of ‘Irishness’ is being folded into the fabric of our creolized global culture.

With the internationalisation of the Irish pub, as well as its unflagging popularity across the United States, Canada, Australia, and the UK, it is interesting to note what I refer to as the ‘performative geopolitics’ that typically characterise the space of these drinking establishments. Upon entering the cloistered, bric-a-brac laden space that is the typical Irish pub, any first-time visitor is likely to be surprised at how (geo)political the environment is. Common to nearly all Irish pubs is an obsession with the Irish flag; however, it is not only the familiar green, white, and orange of the Republic of Eire that one sees; the more militant green-and-gold Erin go Bragh (‘Ireland forever’) flag of the nineteenth-century Irish nationalists will also adorn the walls. Maps abound in most of these watering holes as well, performing geopolitics through a carefully framed visualisation of space. Historic maps showing the Irish Free State often sit side-by-side with wishful maps adorned with the slogan ‘26+6=1’, an espousal of the desire of many Irish to see the Republic absorb the counties of Northern Ireland (a goal that for many has been delayed but not deferred by the 1998 Good Friday Agreement). In terms of the aural ambiance, any stop at a pub worth its salt will result in the visitor hearing one or two ‘rebel songs’, i.e., ditties extoling the fight for Irish independence or the campaign against British occupation of the northern counties. Even one’s choice of drink bleeds political identity, from the Black-and-Tan (a porter-and-pale ale beer cocktail that invokes the Royal Irish Constabulary Reserve Force) to the Irish Car Bomb (a mixture of Guinness, Bailey’s Irish Cream and Jameson’s whiskey that refers to the Provisional IRA’s favoured tool of terror).

Most explicit is the visual-textual hagiography of the founders of the Republic, from the revolutionary Michael Collins to the statesman Éamon de Valera. These demigods of Irish political mythology loom large in many an Irish pub (sometimes joined by the leader of Sinn Féin Gerry Adams), looking down on the patrons as the nip their Bushmills or quaff a pint of Murphy’s stout. In more high-minded taverns, these visages are situated alongside the Isle’s literary luminaries like William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, and Oscar Wilde, perhaps even sharing the space with Irish-American presidents, including John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton (all strong supporters of Ireland even as they maintained the U.S.’s ‘special relationship’ with Great Britain). In the more politically acute pubs, one might even be confronted with pictures of slain fighters from the Easter Rising (1916), the 1919 text of the Forógra na Saoirse (‘Declaration of a Free State’), or the preamble to the Constitution of the Irish Free State (1922).

Unlike the English pub, which is less prevalent but nonetheless popular around the world, the Irish saloon exudes a clarion geopolitical message (and one which does not accurately represent increasingly multicultural Eire’s place within the European Union alongside its old enemy, the United Kingdom). Whereas the English pub roots itself in a lost imperium and distant Victorian mores, the Irish pub boldly defines geopolitical codes and visions, which it expects its denizens to adopt (at least while imbibing within its walls). While this geopolitical aesthetic may seem innocuous or banal at first blush, it is nonetheless important if it accomplishes the task of influencing the worldview of the patron. So on this St. Paddy’s Day, take a look around at the walls and ceilings of the pub as you nurse your pint of stout. No doubt, you will see that the Irish War of Independence, while won, is not yet done. It is still being fought every day through a performative aesthetics, the likes of which any propagandist would be proud.


 

Note: The blog post originally appeared at E-International Relations on 15 February 2015. The original post can be found at: http://www.e-ir.info/2015/02/15/hic-sunt-dragones-hhttyd-2-and-ir-theory/.

As the 87th Academy Awards ceremony looms, those of us in IR naturally cast our gaze towards the field of nominees to see which films engage the discipline. For those of us interested in popular culture’s impact on international relations, we might even indulge in a bit navel-gazing about which these ‘important’ movies might produce long term impacts on global affairs. Certainly, there are a number of much-talked about motion pictures which could fit the bill. First and foremost is Clint Eastwood’s adaptation of U.S. Navy Seal Chris Kyle’s autobiography American Sniper. With more than 160 confirmed kills and a career that links the East Africa embassy bombings, 9/11, and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the film’s (fictionalized) plot knowingly engages key issues in IR, especially terrorism and Islamist insurgency, while glorifying the U.S. mission in the Middle East. A number of other films address IR in historical ways. The Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game hinges on military-technological prowess in World War II and touches on wartime Western-Soviet espionage, while Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel nostalgically interrogates Habsburg imperial paranoia and even taps into the issue of internally displaced persons (IDPs).

However, the most relevant IR nominee this year is not to be found among those up for Best Picture, but instead in the category of Animated Feature Film. How to Train Your Dragon 2, despite its unwieldy (and off-putting) title provides a sophisticated, substantive, and sustained treatment of multiple IR theories, juxtaposed against one another in a way that belies the film’s description as children’s fare.

For those readers not familiar with the How to Train Your Dragon 3D computer-animated action-fantasy franchise, the first instalment premiered in 2010. In it, Hiccup (Jay Baruchel), the ne’er-do-well son of a burly Viking chieftain, Stoick the Vast (Gerard Butler), wounds a dragon attacking his village. Subsequently, he befriends the creature and eventually rallies his dragon-fearing friends and family to join into an alliance with the beasts against an existential foe (a cannibalistic behemoth that poses a threat to humans and dragons alike). While the first film was beautifully rendered and well-received, it was morally simplistic and followed a hackneyed pattern of ‘parents just don’t understand’, righteous rebellion, and parent-child reconciliation. However, the second film, as a number of critics pointed out, takes a darker, more serious turn. Five years after the events of the first movie, Hiccup has turned his settlement into a glorious realm of Viking-dragon cooperation, girded by mutual respect and benefit, a medieval utopia. However, the ‘peace’—a major theme of the narrative—is shattered when Hiccup tangles with a mercenary band of dragon-catchers while (imperially) surveying new lands astride his trusty dragon, Toothless. We discover these trappers work for the power-hungry Drago Bludvist (Djimon Hounsou), who is building an army of monsters.

Hiccup, an unyielding and self-actualized advocate of (post-)liberalism, articulates a plan for ensuring the peace through dialogue with Drago, while his father responds to the security dilemma in strictly realist terms, ordering an immediate lock-down of the settlement with no one coming in or going out. We discover that the dragon-master Bludvist had long ago wiped out a band of Viking leaders who not submit to his will, with Stoik alone escaping the carnage. He dourly intones: ‘A man who kills without reason cannot be reasoned with’, echoing the all-too-familiar discourse of contemporary realist orientations towards North Korea, Syria, ISIL, etc.

Predictably, Hiccup flees before his father’s reactionary securitization scheme can be realized, surrendering himself to the dragon-catcher Eret (Kit Harington), who espouses as pessimistic neo-Marxist worldview based on systems, economic interests, and the incontestable power of elites. Shortly thereafter, Hiccup is reunited with his mother, Valka (Cate Blanchett), thought dead for 20 years, discovering that she is a dragon-master in her own right. She informs her son that she had championed the cause of the dragons against the phobic hatred of her fellow Vikings, and when confronted with the choice of killing a dragon to save her infant son (Hiccup), she chose instead to reject violence and joined a sort of dragon commune far from the realm of human conflict. In classic feminist IR fashion, she eschews both the (interstate) behaviour of warring factions and the biological differences of this ‘queer’ species of highly intelligent reptiles. Her abdication of her ‘motherly duties’ in support of dragon-kind seems not to have weighed on her at all, though she eventually does ask Hiccup to ‘begin again’ once she sees in him a kindred spirit (drawn in stark opposition to her memory of her husband’s dragon-slaying über-masculinity). However, she will not countenance ‘negotiations’ with Bludvist, thus situating the (American-voiced) protagonist Hiccup in an isolated position of idealism, trapped between a realist and a feminist (both voiced by non-American, but Anglophone actors).

Eventually, we meet (the West African-voiced) Drago, who eerily resembles a dreadlocked Muammar Qaddafi. He is the first person of colour to be introduced in the film series, thus insouciantly producing an East-West distortion of the narrative. In classical Orientalist fashion, Bludvist wears animal skins, abuses his toadies, and has unexplained magical powers: he has tamed a gargantuan ‘Bewilderbeast’ that can manipulate other dragons through mind control (thus blending the hoary fear of totalitarianism with the dangerous ‘Eastern mastermind’). Following a scene in which Toothless is mentally enslaved by the forces of evil, Hiccup is transformed into an avenging liberal, protecting ‘his people’ from the forces of blind destruction. Faced with challenges from all sides, the ‘negotiator-in-chief’ Hiccup transforms into an idealist warrior-king, returning his land to peace and prosperity so dragons and humans can again live side-by-side. What could be more American than that (particularly given the puissant metaphor of the dragon-as-nuclear-weapon)?

While this analysis may smack of an ‘over-reading’ of a rather innocent text, I would argue that animated films, particularly Disney and Pixar movies, have a long history of trading in subtle political messaging. If one thus accepts that popular culture is politics then what should we take away from HTTYD-2? At the very least that Hollywood—at nearly every turn—seeks to reinforce the notion of American military might as a force for good in the world, even when things get ugly. Whether it involves a sniper’s rifle or a dragon’s fireball, American power is righteous, honourable, and final.
 

Note: The blog post originally appeared at E-International Relations on 2 February 2015. The original post can be found at: http://www.e-ir.info/2015/02/02/why-popular-culture-why-now/.

With this new blog channel being launched by E-International Relations, it seems appropriate to ground the posts that will appear in this space in the coming months and years. In order to do so, I wish to respond to two rather unoriginal questions: ‘Why Popular Culture?’ and ‘Why Now?’ I will start with the latter of these two queries first, before returning to the former.
Looking back over the past two months, there are a number of pressing issues in the realm of international relations that demand our attention: US-Cuban rapprochement; the collapse of Yemen’s political system; the resumption of hostilities in eastern Ukraine; the supplication of Western governments to a new head of House Saud; the threat to the EU posed by Greece’s new anti-austerity program; etc. However above all, two stories have captured the ‘popular imagination’ (a politically pregnant phrase, if there ever was one): North Korea’s hack of Sony over the impending release of The Interview and the Charlie Hebdo massacre. In both instances, these IR imbroglios were situated somewhere in the middle of what a group of Newcastle scholars have labelled the ‘popular culture-world politics continuum’.

As I discussed in my 23 December 2014 E-IR article on the subject, U.S. President Barack Obama’s last major political speech of U.S. in 2014 zeroed in on Pyongyang’s culpability in cyber-attack with laser-like precision. Within weeks, it was revealed that the Pentagon had already verified North Korean involvement in the hack, clearly reinforcing the link between popular culture and global affairs in a way we have not seen since the controversy over the depiction of Kazakhstan by the Cambridge-educated jokester Sacha Baron Cohen. More interestingly from the perspective of the PCWP continuum, the film itself (when it finally released via a series of online delivery platforms) engaged in a rather sublime sort of IR in its own right, particularly towards the end of the narrative. Spoiler Alert: Once the Western ‘heroes’ dispatch Kim Jong-un, North Korea undergoes a rapid and massive political change, aurally set to the Scorpions’ power ballad ‘Winds of Change’ (1990). Given the popular linkage of the song to the denouement of the Cold War and the reunification of Germany, The Interview thus knowingly becomes a site of IR rather than just a pawn in international brinksmanship. This is only reinforced in the movie’s representation of a nearly instantaneous adoption of the Skype and other new media by the North Koreans, eager to embrace the technologically-abetted consumerism of the West, bringing the whole controversy full circle.

In the case of the Charlie Hebdo attacks perpetrated by two French-born brothers Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, the purported reason for the shooting, which left eleven people dead at the offices of the satirical weekly, was revenge for cartoon depictions of the Prophet Muhammad.
Eerily reminiscent of the furore caused by the Jyllands-Posten cartoon controversy, but with a much bloodier blowback, the Charlie Hebdo shootings placed a spotlight on ‘Western values’ associated with ‘free speech’, but also reminded us of the influence and indeed power of popular culture in a world no longer bound by national borders. Today, there is a deterritorialised global media milieu where any artefact can move quickly from one part of the world to another, prompting unpredictable results (as was the case with the amateurish, quasi-pornographic ‘film’ Innocence of Muslims which prompted violent riots in parts of the Middle East and a number of Muslim countries in 2012). In the wake of the attacks, the hashtag #jesuischarlie and various other forms of digitally-mediated protest became common around the globe, further imbricating popular culture in political behaviour and, by extension, world politics.

Despite the fact that many established scholars in the field of IR continue to dismiss or minimize the role of popular culture in the discipline, it is becoming increasingly evident that understanding popular culture’s role in international relations is not only necessary, it is vital. Popular culture not only reflects power in the international system, it also constitutes it. To continue to treat films, comic books, video games, YouTube videos, social-networking phenomena, and other forms of popular culture as data ‘outside’ the realm of ‘proper’ IR is not only intellectually irresponsible, it is dangerous.

This blog channel will attempt to make sense of the relationship between pop culture and world politics. Sometimes we will fail, sometimes we will succeed, but in every instance, we will make sure that we take popular culture seriously. If we can all agree on one thing following the Charlie Hebdo massacre, if I can borrow from Pierre Bourdieu, it is that when we speak of popular culture, we are speaking of politics.

Originally published in the Journal Of Global Change and Governance.

District 9, this year’s most politically engaging film, is not set in Washington, Moscow, or Beijing, but in alternative reality Johannesburg that looks surprisingly like the apartheid-era version of the South African city. However, the politics of director Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 are not your grandfather’s politics. Instead, we are given a taste of the dark future, with a bitter chaser from the past.

The premise of the film revolves around an attempt to resettle members of an alien species who have been stranded on Earth for 20 years. After their spaceship broke down over 1980s Johannesburg, the euphemistically named Multinational United, a private military company (PMC) cum multinational weapons manufacturer, successfully “rescued” the aliens—who numbered more than one million—from their derelict ship, resettling them in a sprawling ghetto at the edge of the meridional metropolis.

After two decades, the stranded visitors have become a hopeless lot. Derogatively deemed “Prawns” due to the their arthropod characteristics, the aliens evince all the characteristics of an imperially subjugated underclass: they have traded away all their possessions for cat food (which serves as a mild stimulant); they are leaderless; and they have become dependent on the paltry support given them by MNU, which—by the way—is intensely interested in studying their formidable weaponry which is seemingly unusable by humans (the ability to conduct experiments on the aliens and stockpile their technology seems to be MNU’s imperial concession for establishing and supplying District 9).

Filmed in mock documentary style, District 9 follows the efforts of an MNU bureaucrat as he initiates the mass transfer of Prawns to a new site (District 10), which lies some 240 kilometers away from the city. The scene is set with “man on the street” interviews with local (mostly black) South Africans who—ghostly echoing the sentiments frequently expressed by apartheid-era whites about black Africans—condemn the Prawns’ criminality, lax morals, and high birth rates (the population has swelled to more than 2 million since first contact). “Move them out” is the constant refrain.

Interspersed into the narrative are interviews with the relevant “experts”: sociologists and spokespeople for aid agencies who narrate the pathetic contours of human-Prawn coexistence with emotional distance and academic interest. Like those historians of today who are charged with explaining apartheid and, in doing so, must interrogate and ultimately, though involuntarily, validate (at least on a political level) the evil that was. viscerally portrays the dehumanizing effects of the apartheid regime: this is especially true when Wikus encounters the unusually self-confident and articulate Christopher Johnson (the Anglicized Christian and surnames of the aliens is meant to signify the imperial practice of giving black Africans similar names), an alien whom the viewer earlier witnessed collecting a mysterious fluid from scattered bits of alien technology. Christopher ultimately refuses to sign the eviction notice, arguing that he has 24 hours to do so. With this simple act, Christopher proves himself to be one of the few aliens literate in English. Stymied, Wikus immediately changes tactics and threatens to remove Christopher’s son from their home due “unsafe conditions” for the minor. Such tactics are reminiscent of racist “do-gooder” policies which ominously echo the histories of Native Americans, Australian aborigines, and other colonial peoples who had their children ripped away by whites who wanted to “save them” from their parents’ “backward” ways.

Following an accident with the unknown extraterrestrial fluid that Christopher Johnson has been collecting, Wikus begins to “go native”—first literally, and then figuratively. The substance sickens and then steadily transforms Wikus into a Prawn, beginning with his left hand and forearm. This fact is quickly recognized by his father-in-law who seeks to finally harness the power of his vast stores of hitherto useless alien weaponry. Recognizing that he is a nothing more than a guinea pig slated for eventual organ harvesting, Wikus flees the clutches of MNU. His only hope for survival lies in District 9. Before the film turns to the rather pat battle sequences that guaranteed its success with the critical male tween/teen demographic, we are once again reminded both of Apartheid and late 19th century prohibitions on miscegeny when MNU traduces Wikus by announcing that he became infected while having carnal relations with the “Other.” Hounded and abandoned by his own race, Wikus eventually comes to view the Prawns as equals and abandons his own imperial mindset.

While District 9 may be read as a simple allegory for apartheid, watching the film causes one to remember and fret about Max Weber’s definition of the state, i.e., a human community that has a legitimate monopoly on violence within a given territory. By this definition, the state has retreated (or surrendered) in the world of District 9. In the film, there are no parliaments, no presidents, no governors, and no police; in fact, the South African state is absent throughout the entirety of the motion picture. Instead, the main purveyor of power is the multinational private military contractor MNU, which has supplanted the role of the military and relieved the state of the burdens of accountability. As Valerie Spelling points out in Altered States: The Globalization of Accountability (2009), “Even if sensible on the surface, the use of combat PMCs by states presents a significant challenge to the state from a Weberian point of view.” We see this maxim proved true in District 9.

It is interesting to note the dissonance between Blomkamp’s short film Alive in Joburg (2005) and his full-length version, District 9. In Alive in Joburg, the term “government” is used regularly and it is clear that the state is charged with managing the “alien problem” as the extraterrestrials roam from their encampments and riot against the conditions in which they are kept. Just a few years later, however, the director saw fit to erase the state from his narrative altogether. The rapidly dissipating capacity of the state to project its power into all its spaces is laid bare in Blomkamp’s world, one in which the corporate greed and violent non-state actors determine the future (a set of circumstances for anyone familiar with Blackwater’s adventures in Iraq).

Besides MNU, the other pretender to power is the Nigerian militia that maintains internal control of District 9. The head of the gang, Obesandjo, epitomizes that frightening trend in African politics (he exhibits shades of the mystical and maniacal head of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, Joseph Kony) identified so vividly in Robert Kaplan’s 1994 Atlantic article “The Coming Anarchy.” Obesandjo is obsessed with the Prawns and believes that by eating Wikus’ xenic arm he will absorb the alien’s power. Such cannibalistic fantasies provide us with a celluloid depiction of Kaplan’s archetypal sub-Saharan African warlord whose authority is “based on irrational spirit power” and “juju” (Nigeria, a paragon of the weak state, banned the film because it portrays the country and people “in a bad light”).

While we may revile Kaplan for his ham-handed—borderline racist—analysis of political trends in the developing world, we must remember that his was a cautionary tale for the entire planet. The generic “Africa” portrayed in “The Coming Anarchy” mirrors the one we have seen mass-mediated in films such as Tears of the Sun (2003), The Constant Gardener (2005), and Blood Diamond
(2006), and for those of us who study global change and governance, this “African” present is prologue for the global future. District 9 just goes a little further in unveiling the post-Westphalian dystopia that we are lurching towards.