Looking at a television franchise like Battlestar Galactica
(BSG) is no longer news within the discipline of International
Relations. A growing number of scholars in and out of IR are
studying the importance of cultural artifacts popular or otherwise
for the phenomena that make up the core of our discipline.
The genre of science fiction offers the analyst an opportunity
that cannot be matched by more mimetic genres, namely the chance to
look at how sets of widely-circulating expectations of the social
serve to constrain authors as they work to introduce as yet
unexplored problematiques, the fantasy aspect in much of science
fiction storytelling is premised simply on a material difference.
As such, while the physical setting of a science fiction tale might
appear novel, its imaginative life world will likely retain many
elements of the world we already live in and which we can readily
recognize as similar to our own. For Critical IR scholarship then,
BSG presents an opportunity to examine how these purported
homologies or elements of redundancy between the fantastic and the
real have been drawn and perhaps to consider, too, whether the show
can teach us things about world politics, its various logics and
structures, which we might not otherwise be sensitive to. Tackling
some of the key contemporary issues in IR, the writers of BSG have
taken on a range of important political themes and issues,
including the legitimacy of military government, the tactical
utility of genocide, and even the philosophical implications of
artificial intelligence technologies for the very category of what
it means to be 'human'. The contributors in this book explore in
depth the argument that one of the most important aspects of
popular culture is to naturalize or normalise a certain social
order by further entrenching the expectations of social behaviour
upon which our mentalities of rule are founded.
This work will be of interest to student and scholars of
international relations, popular culture and security studies.
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