ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ongoing cascade of popular cultural artefacts produced in the Anglophone West which critically depict Vladimir Putin, with the aim of exploring popular culture’s contribution to the political valence of Putin as an actor in International Relations (IR). The focus is primarily on the period from 2011 forward, reflecting Putin’s assumed and actual return to the office of president of the Russian Federation, which from a geopolitical standpoint marks a dramatic change in the status of Russia’s post-Soviet evolution (cf. Rywkin 2012; Krickovic 2014; Luhn 2015). I argue that Putin thus represents a continuation of the Western trope of the ‘all-powerful tsar’, while simultaneously functioning as a new type of geopolitical actor – that is, an international super-villain. By focusing on the increasingly-complex and influential nexus between popular culture and world politics (see Grayson et al. 2009; Murray 2010; Caso and Hamilton 2015), this chapter aims at identifying and interrogating key aspects of IR as imagined realities which are shaped by mass-mediated representations, and specifically those of a satirical nature (see, e.g., Ridanpää 2009; Dodds and Kirby 2013; Brassett 2016). (See Chapter 7 of this volume on satirical uses of visualizations in the global context.) Reflecting Roland Bleiker’s contention that ‘representation is always an act of power’ (2012: 24) and responding to Linda Åhäll’s call to move beyond simple analyses of popular cultural artefacts to treating them as a form of political communication (2015: 65), this chapter is situated within the field of popular geopolitics. 1 My methodology is influenced by the new media scholar David Beer (2013) and guided by political geographer Jason Dittmer’s (2014, 2015) recent work on assemblage in geopolitics. My mixed-methods approach connects the institutional production of geopolitics (e.g., via state actors, foreign policy elites/think tanks and state-dominated media outlets [RT]) to popular consumption and (re-)production of everyday understandings of how IR actually works. Given the ‘assembled’ nature of such ‘knowledge’, there is a necessary blurring of the lines between insider/outsider, real/imagined, material/expression and goals/results. Consequently, the ensuing analysis uses assemblage thinking to bring together (popular culture) objects and (geopolitical) infrastructures to 292interrogate the various ‘lines of sight’ (Dittmer 2014) associated with US-UK-Russian relations.
