Theories of International Politics and Zombies

by Daniel W. Drezner

  Because the postulated effects of zombies appear to be so dire in film and fiction, more strategic planning should be devoted to this scenario. It is certainly possible that any counter-zombie contingency plans will disintegrate at first contact with the undead enemy.18 Nevertheless, the planning process itself can improve future policy responses.19 If the past decade of military incursions teaches us anything, it is the dangers of conducting foreign policy with only a facile or superficial knowledge about possible enemies. Traditional tools of statecraft like nuclear deterrence, economic sanctions, or diplomatic démarches would be of little use against the living dead.* Zombies crave human flesh, not carrots or sticks. A deep knowledge of zombies—and the possible policy response to zombies—is required in order to avoid both overreactions and underreactions.

  The rising popularity of zombies is in and of itself another reason for further investigation. Research suggests that exposure to paranormal narratives increases the likelihood of individuals to believe in their existence.20 Such beliefs have a viral quality—that is, exposure to other people's beliefs will increase the likelihood of accepting that same belief, regardless of its logical plausibility.21 As zombies bleed into popular culture, more people will come to believe, fear, and dread their existence. Fear is a powerful emotion that can profoundly affect policymaking across several dimensions.22 A phobia of the living dead could lead to self-defeating policy responses in the same way that the fears of terrorist attacks led the post-9/11 U.S. military to torture prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Clearly, public fears of being devoured by flesh-eating ghouls can only be allayed by rigorous scholarship.

  In many ways, international relations is the missing link in most discussions of how to cope with a zombie uprising. The undead menace usually goes global in the zombie canon. These stories lack a basic grounding in world politics, however. Narratives about the living dead use small communities or families as their unit of social analysis. The effect of national governments or international relations is barely discussed—even though logic suggests that the living dead would provoke some kind of policy response. As Jonathan Maberry observes, “most of the major entries in the genre have military, police, or civilian defense as part of the backstory.”23 The problem is that these responses are either dismissed or glossed over quickly to get to the apocalyptic portion of the story.24 Even if official policy responses are suboptimal, they should be factored into our expectations about how the world would respond when the dead walk the earth—and how international relations would look afterward.

  What follows is an attempt to satiate the evergrowing hunger for knowledge about the interaction of zombies and world politics. Alas, some lines of academic inquiry are simply not feasible. Human subjects committees would impose a formidable barrier to experimental methods. The rare nature of zombie outbreaks make statistical approaches unsuitable. Nevertheless, there are many possible ways to proceed—develop a new theoretical model, interview experienced policymakers about their experiences with zombielike scenarios, create powerful computer simulations, or search for other modalities.

  Looking at the state of international relations theory, however, one quickly realizes the absence of consensus about the best way to model world politics. There are multiple existing paradigms that attempt to explain international relations. Each of them has a different take on how zombies affect world politics and how political actors would respond to the living dead. I have therefore decided to flesh out how existing international relations theories would predict what would happen in response to an outbreak of zombies.* What would these theories predict would happen? What policy recommendations follow from these theories? When will hiding and hoarding be the right idea?

  This analysis is useful not merely because of a possible zombie threat but as a way to stress test our existing theories of international politics. Scholars, commentators, and policy analysts rely on deductive theories as a cognitive guide in a complex world. The more observational implications that flow from these theories, the greater their explanatory leverage over known unknowns and unknown unknowns.25 One measure of their explanatory leverage is their ability to offer useful and counterintuitive predictions in the wake of exogenous shocks to the system. Surely an army of the ravenous living dead would qualify as such a shock.

  Zombie denialists might argue that since there is minimal chance of the dead rising from the grave and feasting upon the living this exercise will yield little in the way of enlightenment. This ignores the ways in which world politics is changing, and the need for international relations scholarship to change with it. Traditionally, international relations has been concerned with the interactions among nation-states. Many current security concerns, however, center on nontraditional threats. A growing concern in world politics is the draining of power from purposive actors to the forces of entropy.26 In the most important ways, flesh-eating ghouls are an exemplar for salient concerns about the global body politic. Zombies are the perfect twenty-first-century threat: they are not well understood by serious analysts, they possess protean capabilities, and the challenge they pose to states is very, very grave.

  I will rely on two sources of evidence to buttress the theoretical paradigms. The first data source is the social science literature on events akin to an attack of the undead: pandemics, disasters, bioterrorism, and so forth. Past responses to calamitous events can inform our expectations of how states and nonstate actors would respond to the presence of reanimated and ravenous corpses.

  The second data source is the fictional narratives about zombies that exist in popular culture. In recent years, policymakers have relied on the creators of fictional narratives for insights into “out of the box” threat scenarios and outcomes.27 Similarly, international relations scholars have branched out beyond standard statistical analyses and comparative case studies for their empirical analysis. These scholars have used simulations and agent-based modeling to test their theories.28 The use of fictional narratives as a data source for theory building—particularly horror and science fiction—has become more common in recent years.29

  To be sure, there are some dangers with this approach that should be acknowledged at the outset. First, the narratives of film and fiction might be skewed in ways that could bias our analysis.30 Perhaps people would respond to a real night of the living dead in a different manner than George Romero or Max Brooks posit. This possibility will be considered—but as we shall see, there is a hidden heterogeneity to the zombie canon. There are a sufficient number of variations to the traditional ghoul narrative to illuminate each of the major international relations paradigms.*

  Second, pursuing a paradigmatic approach to explain the field of international relations has some drawbacks. Some might argue that paradigmatic debates have yielded much more heat than light. The predictive power of these approaches has been underwhelming.31 Other scholars posit that calling these different theoretical approaches “paradigms” gives them a coherence and completeness that they lack.32 As will be seen, some of the concepts in one paradigm bleed over into others, as they rely on similar actors and processes.

  Nevertheless, these paradigms do help to clarify what different international relations theorists believe is important in world politics. Whether researchers admit it or not, all coherent international relations work proceeds from some paradigmatic assumptions. A theoretical attack of the undead can further reveal how these different approaches diverge in their predictions. In eliding some internal theoretical disputes, however, I fully acknowledge that I am committing some conceptual violence to these paradigms. In fairness, however, the undead would likely do far worse.

  Before proceeding with the variegated predictions of different international relations theories, a few definitions and distractions must be addressed.

  * * *

  *The use of nuclear weapons in particular would be a catastrophic mistake in a zombie-infested world. Ghouls cannot be deterred, stripping the one useful trait such weapons possess. Nuclear weap
ons would no doubt incinerate massive numbers of zombies. Unlike human beings, however, the undead would survive any radioactive fallout from the nuclear blast. Indeed, zombies carrying lethal doses of radiation would pose a double threat to humans as they stumbled around: death by radiation, or reanimation by zombie bite. If any government was so foolhardy as to launch a first strike, it would create the only thing worse than an army of the living dead: a mutant, radioactive army of the living dead.

  *Space constraints prevent a fuller discussion of how some theories—such as Marxism or feminism—would cope with flesh-eating ghouls; they would appear to have more explanatory leverage in analyzing the traditional Haitian or voodoo zombies. I would ordinarily encourage these paradigms to focus on flesh-eating ghouls, but in this instance I am wary. To be blunt, this project is explicitly prohuman, whereas Marxists and feminists would likely sympathize more with the zombies. To Marxists, the undead symbolize the oppressed proletariat. Unless the zombies were all undead white males, feminists would likely welcome the posthuman smashing of existing patriarchal structures.

  *To sidestep the myriad controversies that plague the community of zombie enthusiasts, my primary empirical focus will be on the major works in the zombie canon: George Romero's films, Max Brooks's novels, and the most popular works released over the past decade.

  DEFINING A ZOMBIE

  Definitions of zombies range from the philosophical one of a human being without consciousness to the anthropological one of a person buried and then resurrected by a conjurer. Consistent with the Zombie Research Society, I choose to treat the zombie as a biologically definable, animated being occupying a human host, with a desire to eat human flesh.1 This definition is at variance with the etymology of the word zombie in West African and Haitian voodoo rituals. Those reanimated corpses, however, do not represent a transnational security threat—indeed, these “traditional” zombies are usually described as the most obedient of laborers. All modern works in the zombie canon are rooted in the kind of ghoul that first appeared in George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968). Because they can spread across borders and threaten states and civilizations, it is flesh-eating ghouls that should animate the concern of international politics scholars and policymakers.

  From a national security perspective, the three relevant assumptions about zombie behavior are as follows:

  1. Zombies desire human flesh; they will not eat other zombies.

  2. Zombies cannot be killed unless their brain is destroyed.

  3. Any human being bitten by a zombie will inevitably become a zombie.

  Every modern zombie narrative adheres to these rules. These criteria do eliminate some of the ur-narratives that laid the foundation for the zombie canon, such as Richard Matheson's 1954 novel I Am Legend or Don Siegel's 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers.2 Nevertheless, any zombies that satisfy these rules would have a pronounced impact upon international relations. In turn, however, the nature of international relations would affect the global response to an attack of flesh-eating ghouls.

  DISTRACTING DEBATES ABOUT FLESH-EATING GHOULS

  There is significant variation in zombie capabilities across the canon—and vigorous debate within the zombie studies community over these differences.1 In most of the literature, zombies cannot talk, and do not retain any attributes of their human identities. There are distinguished exceptions, however, in both film (Dan O'Bannon's Return of the Living Dead, 1985; Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror, 2007) and fiction.2 In most of the narratives, only humans can turn into zombies; in the Resident Evil franchise, however, dogs and birds are affected as well. It is usually assumed that there are no gender differences among the walking undead, but recent films provide some unusual exceptions.* Whether zombies have desires beyond the consumption of human flesh is unclear. Most narratives do not discuss this question, but the Italian zombie films of the 1980s, as well as Peter Jackson's Dead Alive (1992), suggest that ghouls lust after other ghouls. There is no consensus about how long a zombie can exist before decomposing. Obviously, most works assume that a human being needs to die before becoming a zombie—but most scholarship also counts Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later (2002) and Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's 28 Weeks Later (2007) to be part of the canon. In those films, the “rage virus” does not exactly kill the infected; they merely transform into bloodshot, bloodthirsty maniacs in less than thirty seconds.

  Surveying the state of the zombie literature, the two sharpest disagreements are about their origins and their capabilities. This provides us, as social scientists, with an excellent means to determine whether zombie-specific variables—their origins and their speed—have a dramatic effect on international relations. If the same outcomes persist regardless of variation in these variables, then they are unimportant as causal factors.

  The greatest variation in zombie narratives is their origin story: what caused the dead to reanimate and prey upon the living? The reasons provided range from the extraterrestrial to the technological to the microbiological to the supernatural. In George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968), it is suggested that a returning space probe contaminated Earth with a heretofore unknown form of radiation. Technology can contribute to the creation of the living dead. Stephen King used a computerized “pulse” in Cell.3 In the Resident Evil franchise, the Umbrella Corporation biologically engineered the “T-virus.” Max Brooks attributed the source of zombies to the Solanum virus, which in his 2006 novel World War Z has its origins at the bottom of China's Three Gorges Dam reservoir.4 In Z. A. Recht's novel Plague of the Dead (2006), the virus originates in central Africa.5 In Jackson's Dead Alive, the bite of a Sumatran “rat monkey” creates the first batch of undead. The narrator in Ruben Fleischer's Zombieland (2009) offers a simple explanation: “Mad cow became mad person became mad zombie.”

  Supernatural explanations have also been provided in the literature. In Brian Keene's zombie novels, demonic possession is responsible; Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978) provides the most iconic explanation in the canon: “When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.”* For Michael Jackson, the dead start to walk in their masquerade for the murkiest of reasons: the evil of the “Thriller.”

  Clearly, there is no consensus on what causes the reanimation of corpses into flesh-eating automatons. For our concerns, this discord is diverting but irrelevant. From a foreign policy/national security perspective, the primary reason to be concerned about the cause of zombies is to adopt preventive measures and policies with which to handle zombie-infested jurisdictions. As antiterrorism and homeland security policies suggest, however, massive investments in prevention cannot be 100 percent foolproof. It only takes one zombie to create an army of the undead.

  Unfortunately, the very multiplicity of causal mechanisms makes prevention both highly unlikely and prohibitively expensive.6 A truly preemptive doctrine would require a comprehensive and draconian list of policy measures. It is unlikely that any government would be both willing and able to block all relevant research efforts into biological, nuclear, and computer technology, monitor and prevent any religious interference that could stir up the undead, and ward off the evil of the Thriller. Even powerful governments will lack both the foresight and the capabilities to block all of the possible causal mechanisms though which the dead can be resurrected.

  This is especially true given that, in most of the origin stories, the emergence of zombies is accidental rather than intentional. The complexity of precautionary measures could increase the likelihood of the living dead stalking humankind by increasing the probability of a “normal accident.”7 U.S. efforts to develop countermeasures to bioterrorism, for example, have actually increased the supply of deadly toxins, thus concomitantly increasing the probability of an accident triggering the unintended release of a biotoxin to the outside world.8 In the case of bioterrorism, however, at least the federal government could point to the existence of prior attacks to validate preventive measures. Without a prior history of zombie attacks for
justification, no government could produce a cost-benefit analysis to warrant extensive precautionary policies.

  International relations scholarship is less concerned with the cause of zombies than their effect on world politics. To use the language of social science, flesh-eating ghouls are the independent variable. As it turns out, the creators of zombie narratives largely share this position. It is telling that these stories usually provide only perfunctory explanations for how “Zombie Zero” was born. In Night of the Living Dead, for example, Romero only provided a causal explanation when pressured by the film's distributors.9 Multiple commentators have correctly observed the reason for this lack of concern; these stories are always set after the outbreak, as civilization itself is threatened.10 Like international relations scholars, the creators of zombie narratives are more interested in how the living dead affect human institutions. The absence of consensus about what causes zombies might be vexing—but, for our purposes, it is not problematic.

  An even fiercer doctrinal dispute involves how fast zombies can move.11 From Romero's Night of the Living Dead through Brooks's World War Z, the living dead walked, shuffled, lurched, crawled, or stumbled—but they did not run. Recent zombie survival manuals stress this point.12 Brooks is particularly emphatic, asserting, “Zombies appear to be incapable of running. The fastest have been observed to move at the rate of barely one step per 1.5 seconds.…The average living human possesses a dexterity level 90 percent greater than the strongest ghoul.”13 Beginning with 28 Days Later, however, the idea of “fast zombies” has made serious inroads into the canon. In Zack Snyder's 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead, zombies sprinted at high speeds. In Zombieland, the undead spread because they were faster than the aerobically challenged Americans. Frozen Nazi zombies were able to traverse difficult, snowy terrain at high speed in Tommy Wirkola's Dead Snow (2009). This need for speed prompted George Romero to rebut the idea of fast zombies in Diary of the Dead (2008). His protagonist explained early on that “dead things don't move fast.…If you run that fast, your ankles are gonna snap off.”