ABSTRACT

International relations scholarship can be seen to “deal largely with the domain of high politics … war, peace, trade-disputes, international law and so on” (Nexon and Neumann 2006, 17). This is the result of a long-standing scientific tradition within the discipline, predicated upon the analysis of observable effect, within which the researcher “seeks to discover a truth or origin that somehow escapes the necessity of interpretation” (Bleiker 2001, 511). It is an approach which has long afforded popular culture little disciplinary significance, with the two fields merely conceived of as being “potentially interconnected, yet ultimately separate” (Grayson, Davies, and Philpott 2009, 155). Despite a lingering “elitist contempt” (Leonard 2004, 1), however, there is now also a general acceptance of the use of artefacts of popular culture as a valid basis upon which to conduct the analysis of political phenomena (Grayson, Davies, and Philpott 2009; Kangas 2009; Robinson 2015). Described as the “aesthetic turn” (Bleiker 2001; Kangas 2009), this approach values popular culture for its potential ability to “reveal [the] key dynamics underpinning contemporary politics that might not register properly if expressed through the formal conventions of academia or political argumentation, even as it is complicit in reproducing them” (Grayson, Davies, and Philpott 2009, 5). This is a practice which has resulted in a diverse range of analyses, many of which are identified by Robinson (2015, 451-452), including the examination of science-fiction (Buzan 2010; Weldes 1999), Game of Thrones (Carpenter 2012), Harry Potter (Nexon and Neumann 2006), comics (Dittmer 2007) and zombie fiction (Blanton 2013; Drezner 2011).