Toward an international relations theory of zombies
By DANIEL W. DREZNER | FOREIGN POLICY
There are many sources of fear in world politics -- terrorist attacks, natural disasters, climate change, financial panic, nuclear proliferation, ethnic conflict, 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....
The specter of an uprising of reanimated corpses ... poses a significant challenge to interpreters of international relations and the theories they use to understand the world. If the dead begin to rise from the grave and attack the living, what thinking would -- or should -- guide the human response? How would all those theories hold up under the pressure of a zombie assault...?
For some international relations thinkers, the interest in all things ghoulish might represent an indirect attempt to get a cognitive grip on what former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once referred to as the "unknown unknowns" in international security. Or perhaps there exists a genuine if publicly unacknowledged fear of the dead rising from their graves and feasting upon our entrails. Major universities have developed mock contingency plans for a zombie outbreak, and an increasing number of college students have been found to be playing "Humans vs. Zombies" on their campuses, whether to relieve stress or prepare for the invasion of the undead. The Haitian government takes the threat seriously enough to have a law on the books to prevent outbreaks of zombiism. No great power has done the same publicly, but one can only speculate on what plans are being hatched behind closed doors....
