“The Dark Side…and the Light” — Star Wars and International Affairs

This article is published as part of Fridays With MUNPlanet , and its special series dedicated to world politics. The aim of this series is to bring you the analysis of global affairs by the established and upcoming scholars, decision-makers and policy analysts from various world regions. This week, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson (American University) discusses the ways popular culture can be engaged to “generate insights about international affairs”. The popular culture “artifacts” and works of fiction such as Star Wars, to Jackson, have “numerous potential benefits both for international affairs practitioners and for those generally interested in international affairs”, but they have to be studied carefully. The author argues thatStar Wars “does sensitize us to similar gestures made in the course of debates and discussions of political and social alternatives”, while “being reminded of the moral and ethical dimensions of our social and political actions.”

For reasons that are perhaps too complicated to go into here, many scholars of and commentators on international affairs are also pop-culture geeks of one variety or another. Thus we get books like Theories of International Politics and Zombies and Battlestar Galactica and International Relations, as well as the slew of op-eds and blog posts that accompany the release of many big-budget science fiction and fantasy films and television programs: everything from the economics of the Death Star to the interplay of realpolitik and ethical norms in Game of Thrones. Certainly a lot of people who spend time thinking about diplomacy, foreign policy, and international institutions seem to also spend a lot of time thinking about popular culture.

I do not think this is a mere scholarly indulgence. The study of pop-cultural artifacts, particularly the study of speculative fiction, has numerous potential benefits both for international affairs practitioners and for those generally interested in international affairs — especially those interested enough to have participated in simulations of UN processes! But that study has to be done carefully and correctly, lest we end up in fruitless debates about, for example, whether the Klingons and the Romulans in the Star Trek franchise “really are” the Russians and the Chinese respectively, or whether the Marvel Cinematic Universe version of Black Widow is a better or worse character than the one we see in the comic books. There is a difference between taking popular culture seriously as a site for gaining insight into international affairs, and just having fan conversations about particular novels and films — just as there is a difference between talking in general about a country and seriously representing its positions in a simulated Security Council discussion.

In their edited book Harry Potter and International Relations Daniel Nexon and Iver Neumann lay out a four-part typology for the study of popular culture in international affairs that serves as an insightful way of organizing various approaches to speculative fiction, including the Star Wars franchise (currently, canonically, composed of seven films, two animated television series, and a few novels, with more on the way). While in my view the most useful way to engage pop-cultural artifacts to generate insights about international affairs is their fourth category, I will briefly explicate their first three categories before I make my case.

You can read the full article on MUNPlanet.

Cover Image: The Imperial Senate (starwars.wikia)