Your humble blogger is typing these words in Seattle.  I'll be presenting tomorrow on Theories of International Politics and Zombies at ZomBcon 2011. 

[Um... does tha fact alone merit a blog post?--ed.]  Good point.  There are two other zombie-and-me events this week. 

From 7-9 PM EST this Wednesday, I'll be the "Expert to Discuss How Theories of International Relations Could Salvage Humanity from Global Zombie Apocalypse" according to this press release.   That's because I'll be delivering the Centre for International Governance Innovation's Signature Lecture on Zombies, the G20 and International Governance in Waterloo, Canada.  Not any old zombie lecture -- the signature one.  If you don't live in Waterloo, don't worry, you can sign up for the free, live webcast of the lecture. 

As a warm-up for that lecture, however, might I suggest, the night before, watching Zombies: A Living History.  It will be aired on the History Channel on Tuesday, October 25, at 8 PM.  The filmmakers interviewed me for half a day, so I'll pop up now and again. 

Here's the extended trailer:

Enjoy your weekend! 

Your humble blogger went to see Contagion over the weekend for two reasons.  First, Slate movie critic Forrest Wickman concluded his review by calling it, "the most believable zombie movie ever made." He's not the only one to make the zombie connection, and well, now I've got some skin in that game.  Second, the FP editors have asked me to review other disaster scenarios, so I figured I'd just pre-empt their request and join the legions of moviegoers who get their ya-yas seeing Gwyneth Paltrow die on film be entertained. 

So, let me provide the MASSIVE SPOILER ALERT klaxon here and get to the assessment.  How well did Steven Soderbergh and company portray what would happen if a lethal pandemic were to break out? 

OK, good news first:  in terms of both accuracy and suspense, Contagion is a far, far better film than, say, either Outbreak or The Andromeda Strain.  The first reason is that Soderbergh does not bother with the anti-government paranoia that those earlier films possessed in their DNA.  Instead, the treatment of the Centers for Disease Control, Department of Homeland Security, and World Health Organization officials is fair.  They are depicted as flawed but well-meaning bureaucrats, getting some decisions right and some wrong.  They also speak in jargon, a surprising amount of which makes its way into the film.  I fully expect to see the term "R-0" bandied about by news anchors the next time a flu bug breaks out.  A CDC official utters the two most chilling words in the entire movie -- "social distancing" -- to describe the necessary freak-out by citizens to avoid human contact with other humans as a way of slowing the spread of the virus.  That's the perfect dash of bureaucratese. 

The second reason is that Soderbergh almost perfectly nails the first stage of the pandemic.  Unlike, say, most zombie or other apocalyptic films, Soderbergh doesn't get to the breakdown of social order in the first reel.  He takes his time, which helps to amp up the pressure and make it seem all the scarier when things do seem to break down (Matt Damon's character is the perfect vessel here; Damon's best work is in his reaction shots to other people behaving badly).  He also deftly demonstrates in the first ten minutes how globalization would abet the spread of any kind of superbug. 

Despite this slow ratcheting up, I haven't seen a director kill off so many Hollywood starlets since Joss Whedon. 

The third reason is that the movie, intriguingly enough, does not end in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.  Consistent with the arguments I made in Theories of International Politics and Zombies, humans prove to be just as adaptable as the biological threats to humans. 

That said, here are my beefs: 

1)  Really, the blogger is the Big Bad in the movie?  Really?  The villian of the piece is Jude Law's crudely-named Alan Krumwiede, who detects the spread of the virus early but hawks a homeopathic remedy to enrich himself.  Exactly how he gets rich doing this is not entirely clear -- he has some shady meetings with a hedge fund manager, but it's not entirely clear why, after gaining fame and fortune, he doesn't start acting differently as more attention gets paid to him.  It's also presumed that Krumwiede has the monopoly of blogging on the issue -- I'm pretty sure that as he gained popularity, a few other health bloggers would try to cut him down to size. 

Neither Soderbergh nor his screenwriter Scott Z. Burns like bloggers, like, at all.  At one point the virologist played by Elliott Gould tells Krumwiede, "Blogging is not writing.  It's graffiti with punctuation."  Hah!  That shows what Soderbregh knows -- us bloggers are lucky if we remember to use commas, much less semicolons.  

Look, as a founding member of the International Brotherhood of Policy Bloggers, I can't claim that actors like Krumwiede don't exist.  My skepticism is over whether they'd really wreak as much havoc as Soderbergh thinks.  Myths and rumors can spread on the Internet, but so can the corrections of those myths.  In the end, someone like Krumwiede would affect a very narrow, already paranoid subculture -- the larger effect would be minimal. 

Even if Krumwiede is an absurd villain, I also didn't buy it when the DHS official let him go free once he made bail.  At a minimum, they'd hold this guy for 48 hours without charging.  I'd also wager that they'd try to deport him too. 

One final note:  I'd love to see Lee Siegel hire Sodebergh to direct and Aaron Sorkin to write a movie about the Internet, just to see the final dystopic product. 

2)  Where the hell is the Chinese central government?  The most absurd subplot is when a WHO official gets abducted by her translator as collateral to protect his infected village.  She's held hostage for at least six months -- during which time she goes native -- until the WHO barters some (fake) vaccine for her life. 

Apparently during this entire time, the Chinese central government does not bother to intervene to try to rescue her.  This seems juuuuuuust a bit implausible.  It also leads to the next problem....

3)  Where the hell is the rest of the WHO?  Beyond Marion Cotillard's character, the WHO does not really appear in the film.  It's the CDC's show, and only their show .  They act in Contagion pretty much how they promised they would act if the zombies arrive.  Maybe that's how things would play out, but I suspect other governments and IGOs would still matter more than this film suggests.  Given that the movie virus started in China, and that the head of the WHO is also from China, they might be useful in this kind of situation. 

4)  Few second-order effects.  The virus leads to looting, crime, and other social ills, but I wish they had said something about the total economic devastation that would have occurred.  At one point after a vaccine has been developed, Matt Damon's character walks through a mall to buy his daughter a prom dress -- and 80% of the mall looks to be closed.  Soderbergh suggests a bunch of unions going on strike because they don't want to ge sick.  I'm curious what happens once they find themselves unemployed as well.   

Forget the domestic discord however, there's also...

5)  No international conflict whatsoever.  After the first 15 minutes, almost all of the action takes place in the USA.  Once a vaccine is discovered, there is no discussion of the international wrangling that would take place over scarce supplies.  No diversionary wars happen.  And so forth.  Soderbergh doesn't really address possible problems in world politics.  Because of this, the film implicitly assumes a liberal institutionalis kind of a world.  I hope he's right, but I'm not so sure myself.   

To be fair to Soderbergh and his collaborators, I'm not sure it's possible to get everything right in such a film.  Unless it's a television series I'm not sure it's possible to get all the nuances and complexities right.  Given these limitations, Contagion is a movie worth seeing.  Just bring your own Purell. 

Earlier this week Walter Russell Mead blogged about the mortal danger facing a prominent international relations theory:

American fast food continues to worm its way ever deeper into Pakistani affections. Hardee’s recently joined McDonald’s in Islamabad and both are doing well, says the Washington Post.

Since McDonald’s is also thriving in India, an IR theory is about to be put to a test. The “McDonald’s theory” holds that no two countries with McDonald’s in them will ever go to war. Once you have a middle class big enough to support hamburger franchises, the theory runs, war is a thing of the past.

I wish. The 2008 war between Russia and Georgia dealt the theory a blow; an India-Pakistan war would be the end.

Whether or not that happens, the theory is a bust. Countries often become more militaristic as their middle classes rise.

A touch a touch, I do confess it!! It appears that the collective reputation of international relations theory has been tarnished, yet -- wait a second, who came up with that theory in the first place?

As it turns out, it was not some academic IR theorist like me, but rather a Prominent Foreign Affairs Columnist of Some Renown … kinda like Mead (but not really). Yes, it was indeed Tom Friedman who first suggested "The Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention."

Mead concludes that the theory is a bust, and Wikipedia appears to back him up:

[T]he NATO bombing of Serbia proved the theory wrong, though in a later edition Friedman argued that this exception proved the rule: the war ended quickly, he argued, partly because the Serbian population did not want to lose their place in a global system "symbolised by McDonald's" (Friedman 2000: 252–253).... In 1998, McDonald's host countries India and Pakistan fought a border war over Kashmir. While not a full scale war, both countries flaunted their nuclear capabilities. At least two wars between McDonald's hosting nations have occurred since the NATO bombing of Serbia: the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon; and the 2008 conflict between Georgia and Russia over South Ossetia.

(Actually, Wikipedia is underestimating how many times the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention has been falsified … according to Wikipedia. The Kargil War was in 1999, not 1998, and according to casualty estimates, there were more than 1,000 battle deaths, which meets the standard definition of a war.)

Empirical quibbles aside, this certainly falsifies Friedman's original "strong" hypothesis of "no two countries that both have a McDonald's have ever fought a war against each other." The thing is, international relations theories are kinda like … er … zombies. Even if you think you've killed them off, they can be revived.

Let's water down Friedman's strong hypothesis a bit. Is it true that, "two countries that both have a McDonald's are significantly less likely to fight a war against each other?" Mead thinks the answer is no, but my hunch is that it would be yes. A cursory glance at the scholarly literature suggests that no one has actually tested it, so … get to it, aspiring MA thesis writers!!

That said, even if the weaker version was true, would it be useful from either a theoretical or policy perspective? I think the answer here is no, and this is one important way in which academic IR theorists do better than, say, Tom Friedman. The comparative advantage of the Golden Arches Theory is pedagogical -- it's easy to explain to anyone. The problem is that McDonald's is really an intervening variable and not the actual cause of any peace. And while IR scholars sometimes roll their eyes at democratic peace theory, the literature has produced significant progress about the ways in which that hypothesis is constrained (in a world of democratizing states, for example).

Mead is correct to observe that this particular IR theory is in trouble. I'm marginally more sanguine about the state of academic IR theory overall, however.

The rest of FP's hard-working, award-winning contributors will provide plenty of reactions to Obama's Afghanistan speech from last night.  I don't have anything new to add that I didn't say, oh, about a year ago to the week. 

So let's talk about.... Game of Thrones!!! 

Set in a fictional medieval-type world (that looks juuuuust a bit like England) with a wisp of fantasy, there's a lot for culture vultures and international relations geeks to like.  Based on a series of novels by George R.R. Martin, the first season on HBO just ended on a ratings high.  Essentially, Game of Thrones consists of a lot of palace intrigue, a healthy dollop of transgressive sex, and a whiff of zombies.  So you can see the attraction to your humble blogger. 

Having finally caught up with the entire first season, however, I'm still puzzling out the show's applicability to current world politics.  I think there are a few, but there's a bias in the show that does suggest some serious constraints [WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD]. 

On the one hand, Game of Thrones' best feature has been demonstrating the importance of strategic acumen in politics.  The  first season's protagonist, Ned Stark, is a stalwart friend, accomplished soldier, and dogged bureaucrat.  He was also a strategic moron of the first order, which was why I didn't bewail his beheading in the season's climactic moment.  Yes, it's a shame that the good man died.  The thing is, he had so many, many opportunities to avoid that end, had he only demonstrated a bit more ability to think about how his rivals would react to his actions.  Important survival trip:  don't reveal all of your plans and information to your rival until you have engaged in some rudimentary contingency planning.  Or, to put it more plainly: 

On the other hand, I'm just not sure how much the world of Westeros translates into modern world politics.  Realists would disagree, of course.  Cersei Lannister makes the show's motto clear enough:  "in the game of thrones, you win or you die."  That's about as zero-sum a calculation as one can offer.  In this kind of harsh relative gains world, realpolitik should be the expected pattern of behavior. 

Which is also part of the problem with Game of Thrones.  World politics is about the pursuit of power, yes, but it's not only about that.  What do people want to do with the power they obtain?  Social purpose matters in international affairs as well, and there's precious little of that in Game of Thrones.  Sure, there are debates about dynastic succession, but there are no fundamental differences in regime type, rule of law, or economic organization among the myriad power centers in this world.  I hope this changes in Season Two. 

My favorite touch in Game of Thrones is the words of each house in Westeros.  For House Stark, "winter is coming"; for House Lannister, "hear me roar"; for House Baratheon, "ours is the fury"; and my favority, House Greyjoy, "we do not sow."  In case you were wondering, for House Drezner, our words are, "it is time to read."  Alternatively, "Chinese food is coming." 

Readers are warmly encouraged to proffer the words of House Obama, House Clinton, House Bush, House Saud, House Putin, House Chavez, or House Singh in the comments. 

Yesterday Rush Limbaugh asked a former U.S. serviceman who called into his show a totally-hypothetical-and-not-in-any-way-designed-to-impugn-the-patriotism-of-the-sitting-president-kind of question: 

Are you aware of any military contingency plans for a president who might not be your prototypical pro-America president? Are there contingency plans to deal with a president who may not believe that the United States is the solution to the world's problems?

Marc Ambinder provides both a succinct ("No.") and a more detailed answer.  Now, some readers might take umbrage at the partisanship of Limbaugh's question, but I think it dovetails nicely with some recent research interests of my own.  In particular:  what would happen if the president was under threat of turning into a zombie? 

Let's break this down into two phases:  A) a president who's been bitten but is still clearly human; and B) an undead POTUS. 

The first situation could distort the government's initial policy responses.    After all, the actors with the most immediate stake in sabotaging any attack on zombies are those who have been bitten by zombies, and the human relatives of zombies. By definition, the moment humans are bitten, they will inevitably become zombies. This fact can dramatically alter their preferences. This change of mind occurs in many zombie films. In George Romero's Land of the Dead (2005), the character of Cholo has the most militant anti-zombie attitude at the outset of the film. After he is bitten, however, he decides that he wants to "see how the other half lives." In Peter Jackson's Dead Alive (2002), as well as Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Survival of the Dead (2010), family members keep their undead relatives hidden from security and paramilitary forces.  

Clearly, soon-to-be-ghouls and their relatives can hamper policy implementation.  One would expect a soon-to-be POTUS to order research efforts on finding a cure rather than focusing on prevention, for example. 

If the situation is unclear when the president is infected, all hell breaks lose once he becomes a member of the differently animated.  The law here is extremely murky.  From Ambinder:

The Presidential Succession Act of 1947 spells out a procedure. Let's look at 3 USC 19, subsection "E."  We're dealing with a situation where there is no President, no Vice President, no Speaker of the House and no President Pro Tempore. The law then appoints the Secretary of State as President until either the end of the current president's term in office OR someone higher in the chain of command suddenly re-appears or recovers from injuries and is able to discharge the powers of office.  (The Secretary of Defense is sixth in line, after the Secretary of the Treasury.)

This seems clear: If it's not clear, after some sort of decapitation attack, whether the President, the Vice President or the two Congressional successors are alive, or if they're all alive but disabled, then the Cabinet secretaries become acting President -- until and unless a "prior entitled individual" is able to act.

Let's say that the POTUS, the VPOTUS, the Speaker and the President Pro Tempore are all injured; only the Vice President recovers. As soon as that person is eligible, he or she can "bump" the Acting President aside whenever he wants....

The problem is that, in a catastrophic emergency, the people who need to know who is in charge might not have the resources to find this out immediately. These people are, in particular, the Secret Service, and the folks who execute lawful orders from the National Command Authority (which is another name for the commander in chief's executive powers).

Well, then what the hell happens if a president is bitten by a zombie, dies, and then becomes a zombie?  It seems to me that the Presidential Succession Act of 1947 doesn't cover this contingency. 

There is also the question of the conflicting bureaucratic imperatives that some organizations, like the Secret Service, would face in this scenario.  For example, in Brian Keene's The Rising, the U.S. government falls apart almost immediately. A key trigger was the Secret Service's difficulties altering their In divining bureaucratic preferences, where you stand depends on who you eat. standard operating procedures. After the president turned into a zombie, he started devouring the secretary of state. As a result, "one Secret Service agent drew his weapon on the undead Commander-in-Chief, and a second agent immediately shot the first." 

I think the lesson to draw here for Rush and others is that in divining both bureaucratic and presidential preferences, where you stand depends on who you eat. 

I hereby applaud Rush for being brave enough to highlight this troublesome question during a week when nothing else is going on in the world. 

Your humble blogger is media whored out taking a small vacation with the Official Blog Family at an undisclosed location somewhat removed fron the interwebs.  Blogging will happen only if thew Official Blog Wife lets me near a computer be intermittent for the rest of this week.

In the meantime, for your consideration, I give you a link to an article from the February 2011 issue of International Studies Perspectives:  Derek Hall, "Varieties of Zombieism: Approaching Comparative Political Economy through 28 Days Later and Wild Zero." 

The abstract:

 This paper argues that the frequent references to zombies in analyses of the recent global financial crisis can be harnessed as a “teachable moment” for students of Comparative Political Economy. I claim that two zombie movies in particular—Britain’s 28 Days Later and Japan’s Wild Zero—can be viewed as if they were allegories of two different national forms of capitalism that are integrated into, and affect, the global political economy in different ways. While 28 Days Later displays remarkable similarities to Marxist accounts of the origins and dynamics of capitalism in England, Wild Zero can be seen as an account of the post-1985 dynamics of the Japanese political economy and its engagement with Asia. This paper gives concrete suggestions for the use of zombie films in the classroom. It concludes with the argument that these two films help to explain why references to “zombie capitalism” cross ideological lines.

 Enjoy devouring it!

In Theories of International Politics and Zombies, I noted that "one can only speculate" what great power governments were doing to prepare for the contingency of an attack of the undead.  One could argue that the absence of any mention of zombies in the Wikileaks cables suggests that no planning has taken place -- but one would assume that scenarios involving the undead would be classified as Top Secret or higher. 

Courtesy of the New York Times' William Glaberson, however, we now know that the State of New York is thinking seriously about this problem:

Major disasters like terrorist attacks and mass epidemics raise confounding issues for rescuers, doctors and government officials. They also pose bewildering legal questions, including some that may be painful to consider, like how the courts would decide who gets life-saving medicine if there are more victims than supplies.

But courts, like fire departments and homicide detectives, exist in part for gruesome what-ifs. So this month, an official state legal manual was published in New York to serve as a guide for judges and lawyers who could face grim questions in another terrorist attack, a major radiological or chemical contamination or a widespread epidemic.

Quarantines. The closing of businesses. Mass evacuations. Warrantless searches of homes. The slaughter of infected animals and the seizing of property. When laws can be suspended and whether infectious people can be isolated against their will or subjected to mandatory treatment. It is all there, in dry legalese, in the manual, published by the state court system and the state bar association.

Uh-huh... this is for "radiological" or "chemical" contaminations.  Ok.  Right.  Wake up and smell the rotting corpses of the undead, people!!!!!

Seriously, fhe foreword of the New York State Public Health Legal Manual (.pdf) opens with the following explanation/justification: 

 

In today's world, we face many natural and man-made catastrophic threats, including the very real possibility of a global influenza outbreak or other public health emergency that could infect millions of people. While it is impossible to predict the timing or severity of the next public health emergency, our government has a responsibility to anticipate and prepare for such events. An important element of this planning process is advance coordination between public health authorities and our judicial and legal systems. The major actors in any public health crisis must understand the governing laws ahead of time, and must know what their respective legal roles and responsibilities are. What is the scope of the government's emergency and police powers? When may these be invoked, and by which officials? What are the rights of people who may be quarantined or isolated by government and public health officials?

These questions must be researched and answered now-not in the midst of an emergency-so that the responsible authorities have a readymade resource to help them make quick, effective decisions that protect the public interest.

Are planning documents like this useful?  Yes and no.  On the one hand, this kind of thing is a classic example of what Lee Clarke would refer to as a "fantasy document."  In Mission Improbable:  Using Fantasy Documents to Tame Disaster, Clarke argued that plans like these have little chance of success, because an actual crisis contains too much randomness to plan out in advance.  They serve primarily as a way for the state to soothe the the public that Someone Is In Charge and will provide control, order, and stability.  Similarly, Anthony Cordesman argued in October 2001 that pre-crisis government efforts to handle this kind of emergency are likely to disintegrate once the actual crisis emerges. 

On the other hand, as many contributors argued in Avoiding Trivia, even if the plans themselves never work out, the effort to plan can be useful both for crisis and non-crisis situations.  This kind of exercise forces bureaucrats and officials to think about what standard operatijngf procedures won't be so standard in a post-disaster environment.  It also serves as a form of mental aerobics to prepare to the truly unknown unknowns. 

So, on the one hand, kudos to the New York State legal community for thinking about these questions.  On the other hand, I doubt that things will go according to plan.  Plus, I'm really curious to hear whether they think habeas corpus applies to the living dead. 

Theories of International Politics and Zombies is now available for order, not pre-order, but order, at Amazon.com.  Right now -- blink and it will change -- TIPZ is in the top 20 ranking among Amazon's international relations books. 

To celebrate, and given the ongoing hullabaloo over the Chinese way of parenting, the subsequent claim that the Wall Street Journal Got It Wrong, and the inevitable response by the Jewish mothering clan, let me offer the following zombie perspective: 

Why Zombie Moms are Superior

(as told to Daniel W. Drezner behind protective glass)

A lot of people wonder how zombie parents raise such stereotypically ravenous kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many biters and gnawers, what it's like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I've done it. Here are some things my daughters were never allowed to do:

• attend a sleepover with breathing humans

• have a playdate with humans

• be in a school play, unless the eating of humans was called for

• complain about not being in a school play with humans

• watch TV or play computer games, especially Left 4 Dead

• choose their own extracurricular activities -- zombies have no extracurricular activities

• bite anything less than grade A braaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiinns

• not be the No. 1 student in keeping their teeth razor sharp

• play any instrument.

I'm using the term "zombie mother" loosely. I know some members of the Donner Party, West African, Papua New Guinean, Maori, and vampire parents who qualify too. Conversely, I know some mothers, almost always born in Haiti, who are not zombie mothers, by choice of their voodoo master or otherwise. I'm also using the term "human parents" loosely. Human parents come in all varieties and tastes....

Even when human parents think they're being strict, they usually don't come close to being zombies. For example, my human neighbors who consider themselves strict make their children bus their plate to the sink when they've finished dinner. Maybe. For a zombie mother, cleaning the plates is the easy part. It's teaching the children to go forage for live human braaaaaaiiiiiiins, drag them back to the house, and then devour them in full that gets tough.  They never like to finish the frontal lobe....

There are all these new books out there portraying zombie mothers as scheming, callous, overdriven people indifferent to their kids' true interests. For their part, many zombies secretly believe that they care more about their children and are willing to sacrifice much more for them than humans, who seem perfectly content to let their children turn out badly. I think it's a misunderstanding on both sides. All decent parents want to do what's best for their children. The zombies just have a totally different idea of how to do that.

Human parents try to respect their children's individuality, encouraging them to pursue their true passions, supporting their choices, and providing positive reinforcement and a nurturing environment. By contrast, the zombies believe that the best way to protect their children is by preparing them for the future, letting them see who they're capable of eating, and arming them with skills, work habits and inner confidence that no breather can ever take away. 

And if none of that works, we will always be prepared to have our limbs shot off to secure a tasty braaaaaaiiiiiiin for our children.  Would human parents to that for their kids?  I didn't think so. 

The scary part of this is how little I had to do to adapt the source material for this post.   

UPDATE:  Chas Homans alerts me to the fact that Chinese mothers might have more incommon with zombie moms than I originally thought:

In [Lac Su's] case, PTSD, which stands for post-traumatic stress disorder, could easily mean "parental trauma stress disorder." His parents, thinking he was "slow," subjected him to hours of supplemental tutoring -- and when he still failed to meet their standards, tried a different kind of intellectual supplement, making him eat an entire cow brain every Saturday until he was eight years old (emphasis added). 

Of course, zombie moms are way more unrelenting than Chinese moms.  That kid would have had to consume brains every day in a zombie household. 

Both Chuck Klosterman and Johann Hari wrote zombie trend stories this week. This comes on the heels of a prior batch of these essays -- and I know there's gonna be at least a few of these in the future. As a public service for writers contemplating these kinds of essay, here's the generic template for the "Zombies are hot. Why?" story:

Section 1: Set up premise that zombies are culturally hot right now. Mention The Walking Dead/zombie flash mobs/spike in movie releases/Minnesota court case. Ask why. Note: try to put as many references to "shambling," "shuffling," etc. as possible.

Section 2: Compare zombies to vampires. Mock Twilight series. Point out that vampires = sex and zombies = death. Observe that zombie renaissance is surprising, because individual zombies are not interesting characters like vampires. Note: if artsy essay, be sure to name-check White Zombie.

Section 3: Propose that interest in zombies is a metaphor for something else that's rotting through American/global society. Possibilities include:

a) Brainless political discourse;

b) The deadening consumerism of everyday life;

c) The plethora of daily irritants we want to destroy like so much of the undead.

Section 4: Conclude that the current era stinks, and only when things improve will these zombies disappear. Note: try to end with joke.

[And how is this template different from your book?--ed. Um... footnotes. Footnotes and international relations theory. The ingredients for a smash hit! -- ed.]  

For the rest of this week your humble blogger will be on the 2010 leg of his Zombie Talk Tour in support of the forthcoming book.  Talks are scheduled at UC-Irvine and ZomBcon.  That's right, ZomBcon.  

Blogging will be light for the next few days.  Here's a topic for discussion, however.  Apparently, the New York Times' standard operating procedure is to recycle the same story every week about how the U.S. is now lining up allies in the Pacific Rim to ward off a rising China.  The Financial Times is reporting on how the United States is encouraging India to step up inthe region.  Stronger bilateral ties with China's enduring rivals (Japan, Vietnam, India) are simply an ad hoc response to China's recent strategic missteps, however.  Chinese intentions are unclear, and if you read western pundits, there are an array of contradictory recommendations about how to suss them out. 

Question to readers:  if you had to engineer the U.S. strategy in the Pacific Rim, what would you do to deal with a rising China?  In your answer, be sure to acknowledge the risks and costs, as well as the benefits of your strategy. 

For all two of you who were curious what the cover of Theories of International Politics and Zombies will look like, well, your curiosity is about to be sated: 

I can also promise some awesome illustrations in the text. 

The topic de la semaine around here has been how, regardless or regime type, all governments face domestic politics and political constraints.  Just to push back on that theme, however, it is worth remenbering that not all political regimes were created equal.  For Exhibit A on this theme, let's wander over to Alistair Smith and Alejandro Quiroz Flores "Disaster Politics" essay for Foreign Arrairs (hat tip:  Laura Rozen): 

On January 12, 2010, Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, was struck by a 7.0-magnitude earthquake that caused widespread destruction and killed approximately 222,000 people. The next month, Chile was hit by an 8.8-magnitude earthquake -- approximately 500 times stronger than that in Haiti -- but only 500 people died.

Why the disparity? For one, Chile rigorously enforces strict building codes, so there was less immediate damage to the infrastructure near the earthquake’s epicenter. The government of President Michelle Bachelet was also quick to act once the earthquake hit. It immediately began to coordinate international and domestic relief efforts to get supplies and shelter to those in need. In contrast, there is no national building code in Haiti, and the country’s government was barely functional even before the earthquake, let alone after....

It is tempting to suggest that a country’s ability to prepare is a matter of money. After all, the United States and Japan are extremely wealthy. However, although wealth certainly matters, politics are more important....

Political survival lies at the heart of disaster politics. Unless politicians are beholden to the people, they have little motivation to spend resources to protect their citizens from Mother Nature, especially when these resources could otherwise be earmarked for themselves and their small cadre of supporters. What is worse, the casualty count after a disaster is a major determinant of the amount of international assistance a country receives. Relief funds can even enhance a nondemocrat’s hold on power if they are used to buy off supporting elites. Given such incentives, autocrats’ indifference to disaster-related deaths will continue. The fix can only be political -- leaders will not use the policies already available to mitigate the effects of natural disasters until they have the incentives to do so.

Smith and Flores have large-N data to back up their assertion.  Read the whole thing -- there's some interesting stuff I left out of the excerpt. 

This finding shouldn't be that surprising.  It's of a piece with Amartya Sen's observation that famines occur in autocracies rather than democracies.  It's also consistent with the argument Smith and his co-authors made in The Logic of Political Survival. 

If nothing else, it should tell you which kind of government you want to live under in case... well.... you know. 

Your humble blogger kindly requests all readers to take this very brief two-question survey. 

It's a matter of life and death... and, er, undeath.  Irregardless, it should be far less tortuous than this. 

There's a follow-on blog post that will come from this, I promise. 

FP was kind enough to print an excerpt from my forthcoming book in the July/August issue of the magaqzine.  The excerpt is entitled "Night of the Living Wonks."  Here's the opening paragraph: 

 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 book is entitled Theories of International Politics and Zombies, and will be released by Princeton University Press in December 2010. 

The Atlantic's Max Fisher gets what I'm going for here, noting that: 

Zombie theory sounds an awful lot like counterterrorism or cybsersecurity theory, to give just two example. But the beauty of zombie theory is that it applies too all sorts of emerging trans-national security threats, including those we have yet to anticipate or imagine.

I'm aiming for some laughs as well, but I must confess I learned a surprising amount while researching this tome. 

The FP excerpt looks at how three theories -- realism, liberalism, and neoconservatism -- would respond to the specter of the living dead.  This rankles Duck of Minerva's Charli Carpenter: 

It's interesting to note that this summary of relevant IR "theory" turns a half-eaten blinded eye to a whole range of the perspectives that might be presumed useful to comprehending this emerging transnational threat. Would not post-colonial theory help us understand the unique Haitian approach to the zombie menace? Would not constructivist IR theory contribute a more nuanced understanding of the power relations required to make the zombie community hang together, and the cultural reasons for the abject neglect of the such non-traditional threats by policymakers thus far? Would not IR feminism attune us to the impact of marauding zombie mayhem on zombie women and children, to say nothing of usefully deconstructing the gendered narrative about threats-of-the-flesh that underpins the popularity of zombie hysteria?

FP did excerpt abridged versions of the theories most commonly known inside the Beltway.  However.... that's why Charli should buy the book when it comes out!!  Just as a teaser, here's the current table of contents: 

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                                                              

THE SECOND IMAGE:  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

If IR theorists want to see constructivism applied to the problem of flesh-eating zombies, they only have to wait until December.