Theories of International Politics and Zombies

by Daniel W. Drezner

  THEORIES OF

  INTERNATIONAL

  POLITICS

  AND ZOMBIES

  DANIEL W. DREZNER

  PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

  PRINCETON AND OXFORD

  Copyright © 2011 by Princeton University Press

  Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

  Princeton, New Jersey 08540

  In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street,

  Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

  press.princeton.edu

  All Rights Reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Drezner, Daniel W.

  Theories of international politics and zombies / Daniel W Drezner.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-691-14783-3 (pbk : alk. paper) 1. International relations—Philosophy. 2. Zombie films—History and criticism. I. Title.

  JZ1305.D74 2011

  327.101—dc22

  2010034287

  British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

  This book has been composed in Janson Text

  Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For my son Sam, who thought this was

  “way cooler” than my other books;

  and my daughter Lauren, for reassuring me

  that “there are no zombies in this land.”

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Introduction…to the Undead

  The Zombie Literature

  Defining a Zombie

  Distracting Debates about Flesh-eating Ghouls

  The Realpolitik of the Living Dead

  Regulating the Undead in a Liberal World Order

  Neoconservatism and the Axis of Evil Dead

  The Social Construction of Zombies

  Domestic Politics:

  Are All Zombie Politics Local?

  Bureaucratic Politics:

  The “Pulling and Hauling” of Zombies

  We're Only Human:

  Psychological Responses to the Undead

  Conclusion…or So You Think

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  References

  Index

  PREFACE

  Fifteen years ago, on a cross-country drive, I stopped to visit Graceland. By the time my tour hit the Jungle Room, it was obvious that the thirty-odd people walking through Elvis Presley's mansion fell into two groups. The first contingent was thoroughly, utterly sincere in their devotion to all things Elvis. They were hardcore fans, and Graceland was their Mecca, their Jerusalem, and their Rome. Many of them sounded convinced that the King was still walking the earth. They gasped when they saw the jumpsuit collection, bedazzled by its grandeur.

  The second group of tourists was equally delighted to be at Graceland, but for a different reason. These people took great pleasure in the kitschy nature of all things Elvis. To them, a mansion that preserved the aesthetics of green shag carpeting and mirrored walls was both funny and tacky. They gasped when they say the jumpsuit collection, bedazzled by how ridiculous they thought it was.

  As we ambled along, the sheer professionalism of our tour guide struck me. Her task was not an easy one. She had to provide a veritable font of Elvis knowledge to all of the intense devotees. At the same time, she also had to acknowledge the absurdist nature of the experience for of the rest of the tour group.

  With subtle changes in her facial expressions and slight adjustments in her tone of voice, our guide accomplished her task brilliantly. At no point in time did she diminish Elvis in the eyes of his devout followers. Still, I believe everyone left Graceland that day thoroughly satisfied with their visit.

  Think of this book as my tour of a different kind of Graceland, only with a lot more footnotes. Oh, and zombies.

  Thus said the Lord God unto these bones:

  Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you,

  and ye shall live. And I will lay sinews upon

  you, and bring up flesh upon you, and cover

  you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye

  shall live; and ye shall know that I am the Lord.

  So I prophesized as I was commanded; and as

  I prophesized, there was a noise, and behold a

  commotion, and the bones came together, bone to

  its bone. And I beheld, and, lo, there were sinews

  upon them, and flesh came up, and skin covered

  them above; but there was no breath in them.

  —EZEKIEL 37:5-8

  INTRODUCTION

  …TO THE UNDEAD

  There are many natural sources of fear in world politics—terrorist attacks, lethal pandemics, natural disasters, climate change, financial panic, nuclear proliferation, ethnic conflict, global cyberwarfare, and so forth. Surveying the cultural zeitgeist, however, it is striking how an unnatural problem has become one of the fastest-growing concerns in international relations. I speak, of course, of zombies.

  Whether they are called ghouls, deadites, post-humans, stenches, deadheads, the mobile deceased, or the differently animated, the specter of the living dead represents an important puzzle to scholars of international relations and the theories we use to understand the world. What would different theories of international politics predict would happen if the dead began to rise from the grave and feast upon the living? How valid—or how rotten—are these predictions?

  Serious readers might dismiss these questions as fanciful, but concerns about flesh-eating ghouls are manifestly evident in popular culture. Whether one looks at films, songs, games, or books, the genre is clearly on the rise. As figure 1 shows, the release of zombie films has spiked since the dawn of the new millennium; according to conservative estimates, more than one-third of all zombie films were released in the past decade.1 Figure 2 suggests that these estimates might be understated. According to one recent analysis, zombies became the most important source of postapocalyptic cinema during the last decade.*

  Figure 1. Popular and scholarly interest in zombies.

  Sources: Wikipedia, Web of Science.

  Figure 2. Interest in zombies since 2000.

  Sources: Amazon.com, Wikipedia.

  Nor is this interest limited to celluloid. A series of zombie video games, including the Resident Evil and Left 4 Dead franchises, was the precursor for the renaissance of zombie cinema. The undead are now on television shows, such as Comedy Central's Ugly Americans and AMC's The Walking Dead. Over the past decade, zombies have also seeped onto the written page. The popular literature ranges from how-to survival manuals,2 to children's books,3 to revisionist early Victorian fiction.4 Comic book series such as The Walking Dead and Marvel Zombies have spread rapidly over the past five years. One book editor gleefully told USA Today that “‘in the world of traditional horror, nothing is more popular right now than zombies. The living dead are here to stay.’”5 A cursory scan of newspaper databases shows a steady increase in post-human mentions over the past decade (see figure 3). Clearly, the living dead have lurched from marginal to mainstream.

  Figure 3. Media mentions of zombies. Source: Lexis-Nexis

  One could dismiss the zombie trend as merely feeding a mass public that craves the strange and bizarre. Such an explanation would be only skin-deep. Popular culture often provides a window into the subliminal or unstated fears of citizens, and zombies are no exception. Some cultural commentators argue that the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks are a primary cause for renewed intere
st in the living dead, and the numbers appear to back up this assertion (see figure 2).6 Certainly the subsequent anthrax attacks in the autumn of 2001 raised fears about bioterrorism and biosecurity.7 As Peter Dendle notes, “It is clear that the zombie holocausts vividly painted in movies and video games have tapped into a deep-seated anxiety about society.”8 Zombies have been an obvious metaphor for medical maladies, mob rule, and Marxist dialectics.*

  Some international relations scholars would posit that interest in zombies is an indirect attempt to get a cognitive grip on what former U.S. secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld famously referred to as the “unknown unknowns” in international security.9 Perhaps, however, there also exists a genuine but publicly unacknowledged fear of the dead rising from the grave and feasting upon the entrails of the living. Major universities and police departments have developed “mock” contingency plans for a zombie outbreak.10 An increasing number of college students are playing Humans versus Zombies on their campuses to relieve stress—or perhaps to prepare for the inevitable army of the undead.11 Outdoor Life magazine has run a “Zombie Guns” feature, stressing that “the only way to take ‘em out is with a head shot.”12 Biosecurity is a new imperative among national governments.13 The government of Haiti has laws on the books to prevent the zombification of individuals.14 No great power has done the same in public—but one can only speculate what these governments are doing in private.

  One must be wary of overstating the case—after all, flesh-eating ghouls are not the only paranormal phenomenon to spark popular interest. Over the past decade, aliens, ghosts, vampires, wizards, witches, and hobbits were also on the tip of everyone's tongue. For some, the specter of zombies pales in comparison to other paranormal creatures. The disdain of cultural elites has abetted this perspective by placing zombies in the derivative, low rent part of the paranormal spectrum—a shuffling, stumbling creature that desires only braaaaiiiiiinnnnnnns. Twenty-five years ago, James Twitchell concluded, “the zombie is an utter cretin, a vampire with a lobotomy.”15 Despite the zombie renaissance in popular culture, they are still considered disreputable. Paul Waldmann observed in 2009 that “in truth, zombies should be boring…what's remarkable is that a villain with such little complexity has thrived for so long.”16 In 2010, the Academy Awards presented a three-minute homage to horror cinema, and only a millisecond was devoted to any zombie film—far less than that Chucky doll. No zombie has the appeal of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter or the Twilight series' Edward Cullen.

  Zombies, in contrast to vampires, do not thrive in high schools.

  From a public policy perspective, however, zombies merit greater interest than other paranormal phenomenon. In contrast to vampires or demons, scientists and doctors acknowledge that some variation of a zombie could exist in our physical world.* Zombies possess a patina of plausibility that vampires, ghosts, witches, demons, or wizards lack; the creation of a zombie does not necessarily require a supernatural act. Indeed, this plausibility of zombies can be seen in expert surveys. A recent poll of professional philosophers showed that more than 58 percent of philosophers believed that zombies could exist on some level. In contrast, fewer than 15 percent of the same respondents were prepared to believe in God.* Given the raft of religion and theology departments in the academy, it seems churlish for scholars to neglect the question of reanimated corpses snacking on human flesh.

  The traditional narrative of the zombie canon also looks different from stories about other paranormal beings. Zombie stories end in one of two ways—the elimination/subjugation of all zombies, or the eradication of humanity from the face of the earth.17 If popular culture is to be believed, the peaceful coexistence of ghouls and humans is a remote possibility. Such extreme all-or-nothing outcomes are less common in the vampire or wizard literatures. There are far fewer narratives of vampires trying to take over the world.18 Instead, creatures of the night are frequently co-opted into existing power structures. Indeed, recent literary tropes suggest that vampires or wizards can peacefully coexist with ordinary teens in many of the world's high schools, provided they are sufficiently hunky.19 Zombies, not so much. If it is true that “popular culture makes world politics what it currently is,” then the international relations community needs to digest the problem posed by flesh-eating ghouls in a more urgent manner.20

  * * *

  *Phelan 2009. Zombies are clearly a global cinematic phenomenon. Beyond the United States, there have been Australian, British, Chinese, Czech, German, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mexican, and Norwegian zombie fl icks. See Russell 2005 for an exhaustive filmography.

  *In one of the more interesting interpretations, Grady Hendrix (2008) concludes that Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's 28 Weeks Later (2007) is “an effective metaphor for the unstoppable, global spread of Starbucks.” For more general discussions of how zombies are used as metaphors, see Aquilina and Hughes 2006; Comaroff and Comaroff 2002; Cooke 2009, chap. 7; Fay 2008; Harper 2002; Kay 2008; Lauro and Embry 2008; Newitz 2006; Paffenroth 2006; Russell 2005; and Webb and Byrnard 2008.

  *Berlinski 2009; Davis 1985, 1988; Efthimiou and Gandhi 2007; Koch and Crick 2001; Littlewood and Douyon 1997. In the main, these possibilities adhere closely to the traditional Haitian notion of the zombie as a human revived via voodoo and devoid of free will, rather than the flesh-eating ghouls that started with George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968).

  *Data from the PhilPapers Survey of 3,226 professional philosophers and others carried out in November 2009 (http://philpapers.org/surveys/). The philosophical definition of zombie (a being identical to humans in every way except lacking in consciousness) is somewhat different from the vernacular meaning (a reanimated corpse intent on eating human fl esh). There is some conceptual overlap between the two meanings, however. As David Chalmers (1996, 96) puts it, “all is dark inside” for both categories of zombies.

  THE ZOMBIE LITERATURE

  It would be reckless to proceed with any discussion of the zombie problem without first reviewing the literature on the subject. Thankfully, the living dead are now the focus of rigorous scholarship, as figure 1 demonstrates. The humanities are replete with cultural decompositions of flesh-eating ghouls.1 Philosophers have chewed over the conceivability and metaphysical possibility of zombies at some length.2

  The natural sciences have started attacking the zombie question. Zoologists have looked at the presence of zombielike creatures elsewhere in the animal kingdom.3 Biologists have researched the disease-transmission properties of humans biting humans.4 Forensic anthropologists have considered how long zombies can persist while their body decomposes.5 Physicists have explored the best place to hide from the “random walk” pattern of zombielike bodies.6 Computer scientists are working frantically to ward off online zombies, or botnets.7 Mathematicians recently modeled the theoretical spread of zombies, and offered some sobering conclusions: “An outbreak of zombies infecting humans is likely to be disastrous, unless extremely aggressive tactics are employed against the undead.…A zombie outbreak is likely to lead to the collapse of civilization, unless it is dealt with quickly.”8 This study has provoked some critical feedback, however.9

  This brief survey of the zombie literature reveals an immediate and daunting problem. The humanities and the hard sciences have devoted attention to the problem posed by reanimated corpses feasting upon human flesh. The social sciences, however, are curiously absent from this line of inquiry. As of July 2010, the advisory board for the Zombie Research Society does not contain a single social scientist.10 When social scientists mention zombies, they do so only for metaphorical reasons.11 While economists have rigorously modeled the optimal macroeconomic policies for a world of vampires,12 they have yet to flesh out a zombie consumption function. Despite their mob tendencies, sociologists have not analyzed the asocial sociability of zombies. Political science has abjectly failed to address the policy responses and governance issues associated with the living dead. When compared to work in cognate disciplines, the social s
ciences in general—and international relations in particular—suffer from a zombie gap.

  This dearth of scholarly inquiry should gnaw at international relations scholars and policymakers alike. Classical authors were clearly aware of threats posed by the living dead, as the opening passage from Ezekiel suggests. In The Art of War, Sun Tzu stressed the importance of fighting when on “death ground,” clearly anticipating the imminent threat posed by the undead. In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides recounted how a “plague that showed itself to be something quite different from ordinary diseases” would lead to general lawlessness and chaos. When Thomas Hobbes described the state of nature as one of “continuall feare, and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short,” zombies were either on his mind or outside his door.13

  In contrast, recent scholarship has been either inarticulate or brain-dead on the subject. Modern international relations theorists have eagerly delved into other paranormal phenomena—including UFOs, wizards, hobbits, and vampires—but not zombies.14 It is genuinely surprising that more scholarship in world politics has not been devoted to the living dead.

  From a policymaking perspective, further research into flesh-devouring ghouls is also warranted. As powerful decision makers have demonstrated in recent years, low-probability events can elicit hyperbolic policy responses if the predicted effects are severe.15 Former vice president Richard Cheney believed that extreme measures were warranted if there was even a 1 percent chance of a severe terrorist attack.16 If a policy analyst applies this logic to the undead, then preventive measures are clearly necessary. Even if the probability of a zombie uprising is much smaller, the dead rising from the grave and feasting on the living represent a greater existential threat to humanity than nuclear terrorism. Indeed, the living dead literally embody what Jessica Stern calls a “dreaded risk.”17