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INTRODUCTION
. . . TO THE UNDEAD
There are many natural sources of fear in world poli-
tics—terrorist attacks, lethal pandemics, natural disas-
ters, climate change, nancial panic, nuclear prolif-
eration, ethnic conict, 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 rela-
tions. 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 interna-
tional relations and the theories we use to understand
the world. What would different theories of inter-
national 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 esh-eating ghouls are
manifestly evident in popular culture. Whether one
looks at lms, songs, games, or books, the genre is
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INTRODUCTION
POPULAR AND SCHOLARLY INTEREST
IN ZOMBIES
350
Movie
releases
Scholarly
publications
Number
300
250
200
150
100
50
0
1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s
Figure . Popular and scholarly interest in zombies.
Sources: Wikipedia, Web of Science.
clearly on the rise. As gure shows, the release of
zombie lms has spiked since the dawn of the new
millennium; according to conservative estimates,
more than one-third of all zombie lms were released
in the past decade.
Figure suggests that these esti-
mates might be understated. According to one recent
analysis, zombies became the most important source
of postapocalyptic cinema during the last decade.*
Nor is this interest limited to celluloid. A series of
zombie video games, including the Resident Evil and
*Phelan . Zombies are clearly a global cinematic phenom-
enon. Beyond the United States, there have been Australian, Brit-
ish, Chinese, Czech, German, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean,
Mexican, and Norwegian zombie icks. See Russell for an
exhaustive lmography.
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INTRODUCTION
INTEREST IN ZOMBIES SINCE 2000
Movie releases
Books with “zombies” in title
200
150
100
50
0
2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009
Figure . Interest in zombies since .
Sources: Amazon.com, Wikipedia.
Left Dead franchises, was the precursor for the re-
naissance of zombie cinema. The undead are now on
television shows, such as Comedy Central’s Ugly Amer-
icans and AMC’s The Walking Dead. Over the past de-
cade, 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 Vic-
torian ction.
4
Comic book series such as The Walk ing
Dead and Marvel Zombies have spread rapidly over
the past ve 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 men-
tions over the past decade (see gure ). Clearly, the
living dead have lurched from marginal to mainstream.
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INTRODUCTION
MEDIA MENTIONS OF ZOMBIES
1,500
1,000
2,500
2,000
500
0
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009
Figure . Media mentions of zombies. Source: Lexis-Nexis.
One could dismiss the zombie trend as merely feed-
ing a mass public that craves the strange and bizarre.
Such an explanation would be only skin-deep. Popu-
lar 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 , , terrorist attacks are a pri-
mary cause for renewed interest in the living dead,
and the numbers appear to back up this assertion (see
gure ).
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Certainly the subsequent anthrax attacks
in the autumn of 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 anx-
iety about society.”
8
Zombies have been an obvious
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INTRODUCTION
metaphor for medical maladies, mob rule, and Marx-
ist 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 de-
fense Donald Rumsfeld famously referred to as the
“unknown unknowns” in international security.
9
Per-
haps, however, there also exists a genuine but pub-
licly unacknowledged fear of the dead rising from
the grave and feasting upon the entrails of the living.
Major universities and police departments have de-
veloped “mock” contingency plans for a zombie out-
break.
0
An increasing number of college students
are playing Humans versus Zombies on their cam-
puses to relieve stress—or perhaps to prepare for the
inevitable army of the undead.
Outdoor Life maga-
zine has run a “Zombie Guns” feature, stressing that
“the only way to take ’em out is with a head shot.”
2
Biosecurity is a new imperative among national gov-
ernments.
3
The government of Haiti has laws on the
books to prevent the zombication of individuals.
4
*In one of the more interesting interpretations, Grady Hendrix
() concludes that Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later
() 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 ; Comaroff and
Comaroff ; Cooke , chap. ; Fay ; Harper ; Kay
; Lauro and Embry ; Newitz ; Paffenroth ;
Russell ; and Webb and Byrnard .
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INTRODUCTION
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, esh-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 cul-
tural elites has abetted this perspective by placing
zombies in the derivative, low rent part of the para-
normal spectrum—a shufing, stumbling creature
that desires only braaaaiiiiiinnnnn n ns. Twenty- ve
years ago, James Twitchell concluded, “the zombie is
an utter cretin, a vampire with a lobotomy.”
5
Despite
the zombie renaissance in popular culture, they are
still considered disreputable. Paul Waldmann ob-
served in that “in truth, zombies should be bor-
ing . . . what’s remarkable is that a villain with such
little complexity has thrived for so long.”
6
In ,
the Academy Awards presented a three-minute hom-
age to horror cinema, and only a millisecond was de-
voted to any zombie lm—far less than that Chucky
doll. No zombie has the appeal of J. K. Rowling’s
Harry Potter or the Twilight series’ Edward Cullen.
From a public policy perspective, however, zom-
bies merit greater interest than other paranormal
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INTRODUCTION
Zombies, in contrast to vampires, do not thrive in high schools.
phenomenon. In contrast to vampires or demons, sci-
entists and doctors acknowledge that some variation
of a zombie could exist in our physical world.* Zombies
*Berlinski ; Davis , ; Efthimiou and Gandhi
; Koch and Crick ; Littlewood and Douyon . 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 esh-eating ghouls that started with
George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead ().
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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 phi-
losophers showed that more than percent of
philo sophers believed that zombies could exist on
some level. In contrast, fewer than 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 ne-
glect the question of reanimated corpses snacking on
human esh.
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 eradi-
cation of humanity from the face of the earth.
7
If
popular culture is to be believed, the peaceful coexis-
tence of ghouls and humans is a remote possibility.
Such extreme all-or-nothing outcomes are less com-
*Data from the PhilPapers Survey of , professional phi-
losophers and others carried out in November (http://phil
papers.org/surveys/). The philosophical de nition of zombie (a
being identical to humans in every way except lacking in con-
sciousness) is somewhat different from the vernacular meaning (a
reanimated corpse intent on eating human esh). There is some
conceptual overlap between the two meanings, however. As David
Chalmers (, ) puts it, “all is dark inside” for both categories
of zombies.
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INTRODUCTION
mon in the vampire or wizard literatures. There are
far fewer narratives of vampires trying to take over
the world.
8
Instead, creatures of the night are fre-
quently co-opted into existing power structures. In-
deed, 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
suf ciently hunky.
9
Zombies, not so much. If it is
true that “popular culture makes world politics what
it currently is,” then the international relations com-
munity needs to digest the problem posed by esh-
eating ghouls in a more urgent manner.
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