International Politics and Film: Space, Vision, Power

1         FILM AND INTERNATIONAL POLITICS

In Syriana (2005), CIA agent Bob Barnes (George Clooney) is sent to the fictional Middle-Eastern state from which the film takes its title. A complex thriller is constructed around the murky world of inter-state relations, corporate greed and the everyday lives of those caught up in the attempts of more powerful agents to exert some kind of control over energy resources. In this sense the film nicely captures much of what we are interested in exploring in this book, for we take ‘international politics’ to not just refer to the most dramatic instances of inter-state conflict (such as war) but to a much broader and, in many ways, more mundane set of practices which constitute the political world. Moreover, we see these practices as restricted not just to nation-states (though they remain significant international actors) but as extending to a whole range of actors and interests, including, as Syriana suggests, a variety of agents and sites such as CIA operatives, migrant workers, energy analysts, lawyers and their families.

Still, at first glance, many might think that the stuffy world of international politics might have little to do with film and other forms of popular culture. When we were both studying political geography and international relations at British universities in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was filled with sombre accounts of men (in the main) and particular agents, sites and processes such as diplomats, international summits and foreign policy analysis, respectively. Film and other popular media such as television would have been seen as either entertainment and/or mechanisms for representing the unfolding dramas of international politics. In retrospect, this, we would argue, is a rather restricted view of both international politics and popular culture, including film, and one that inadvertently reveals particular disciplinary engagements.

For us popular media (such as film and television), and social media platforms (such as YouTube and Twitter) help to constitute international politics. Even if we restrict our understanding of the latter to a focus on the interaction of nation-states in an international arena, we would argue that the visual is a crucial element in the enactment of ‘states’ and the ‘international arena’. As with film, we might draw attention to a whole series of creative processes ranging from the choreography of world leaders and their press appearances to scouting for filming locations and the assembly of sets. But the visual is also critical to the exercise of geopolitical power as states and their leaderships attempt to frame and demarcate (including hiding from sight) events, sites and processes.

Perhaps we could even claim that international politics is like film in the sense that it has its generic qualities. When President Bush famously announced in May 2003 that US combat operations were complete, he did so standing on an aircraft carrier mimicking the generic conventions of the techno-thriller, and specifically a classic Reagan-era film, Top Gun (1985). Having allegedly flown a naval aircraft onto the deck of the aircraft carrier, Bush emerged in flying suit to dramatically present himself as Commander in Chief, and after changing into a sombre suit and tie he announced in a more statesmanlike manner that hostilities were formally ending in Iraq. The aircraft carrier was actually stationed off the Pacific coast at the time but the intent was surely to use the generic conventions of the techno-thriller to create a particular visual aesthetic involving hyper-masculine agents, force projection, technological sophistication and a determination to prevail against enemies. While ridiculed at the time by his critics, the ‘event’ itself highlighted the role of creativity and visual practices associated with movie making, and as William Gibson (1991) notes, the technological thriller might be seen as a cultural response to anxieties regarding American ‘failures’ in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s.

While this so-called ‘Top Gun’ moment neatly reminds us how film, geopolitics and war might interact with one another, this books aims to bring the discipline of International Relations (hereafter IR), and the related field of Critical Geopolitics, into closer contact with visual studies in general, and film studies in particular. While there is evidence of scholarly interest, it is only comparatively recently that IR scholars have begun to think about this relationship between international politics and popular culture, including film as more than simply mirror-like (for example, for an early study see Gregg 1998; for more theoretically sophisticated work see Light 2001; Weber 2001, 2006; Shapiro 2008). In other words, there was a tendency to think of film acting as simply a representational medium, one that rather imperfectly represented the complex business of war, diplomacy, statecraft, intelligence and the like. Alternatively, a temptation existed to look at something like the Harry Potter film series [2001–11] and then seek to discern visual and narrative ‘clues’ as to what this might tell us about international politics.

Cold War geopolitics as the intersection of masculinity, technology and US power (Top Gun, 1985)

President George Bush and his ‘Top Gun moment’ aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003

The starting position adopted here is to argue that popular media such as film are an intrinsic part of contemporary international politics. Over the last decade, a corpus of work has emerged that contends that international politics can be understood in ways that are not exclusively founded on social science methodologies and associated rational actor paradigms (see, for example, Bleiker 1997; Weldes 1999; Sharp 2000; Weber 2005; Bleiker and Hutchinson 2008; Shapiro 2008). Indeed, some of the very best scholarship now emerging in IR and political geography is exploring how art, film, photography and television not only critique and unsettle taken-for-granted assumptions about the state and state-centric cartographies but also helps to constitute those state-centric cartographies (see Shapiro 2008; Danchev 2009). Film does provide a rich resource for thinking critically about the dominant modes of representation and associated ways of knowing and feeling about international politics, but it is also vital to recognise the interrelationship between the visual medium and international politics.

It can, as the following chapters suggest, also help to re-populate and reclaim the disembodied tendencies within realist and idealist studies of international politics. ‘Realism’ refers to a body of theory and practice which tends to prioritise analytical attention on the geopolitics of the state within a supposed anarchical international system. ‘Idealism’, on the other hand, refers to to an intellectual tradition, which explores the conditions and possibilities for states to co-operate with one another in the international arena. Both realism and idealism assume that the international system is composed of states and that in the absence of a unified world government, they are forced to operate in an uncertain and dangerous global arena. Realism and idealism also tend to be, as a consequence, largely preoccupied in trying to better understand and even predict the behaviour of states and the international system. In both cases, popular culture in any sense has frequently been neglected in favour of focusing on the serious business of understanding governing elites and their strategic behaviour and reasoning.

As Cynthia Weber (2001) notes, many scholars working within a realist IR framework would not even consider popular media such as film and television worthy of consideration. However, in her estimation, film can be used to puncture some of the central ‘myths’ underlying IR theorising such as international anarchy as a ‘cause’ of war. She uses a variety of films to bring to the fore how IR theorists depend upon certain narratives and images to sustain particular understandings of states and the international system, rejecting the notion that the state and the international system are pre-given. This notion is perhaps best explained by David Campbell when he notes:

If we assume that the state has no ontological status apart from the many and varied practices that bring it into being, then the state is an artifact of a continual process of reproduction that per-formatively constitutes its identity. The inscription of boundaries, the articulation of coherence and the identification of threats to its sense of self can be located in and driven by the official discourses of government. But they can equally be located in and driven by the cultural discourses of the community, and represented in sites as ‘unofficial’ as art, film and literature. (2003: 57)

Another way to further unsettle some of the dominant modes of enquiry in IR, then, is to consider how international politics is literally grounded in particular places. The border, for example, is one place or set of places where divisions between the national and the international are identified, visualised, normalised and secured. State-sanctioned authorities such as border patrol guards and immigration officials are not the only actors involved in the making and unmaking of the border though. People and commodities play their part in consolidating, legitimating and subverting the border. They contribute to making visible the border, and the enactment of the visual is itself an expression of geopolitical power. While the border might offer the chimera of security, it can also provide a source of anxiety, as fears are expressed about the flow of drugs, terror and ideas imperilling a ‘homeland’. The role of ‘distant others’ can often be crucial in these particular representations of international politics as can the apparent visual imperative to be seen to be doing something to protect the border by fortifying it. The notion of who belongs and who does not belong becomes all the more urgent in ‘exceptional times’, such as the on-going War on Terror. Even inside the border, some bodies and faces are more visible than others as governments increasingly encourage their citizens to look out for ‘suspicious behaviour’. Additionally, the way in which notions of the ‘global’ connect to particular places is noteworthy – while terms such as ‘globalisation’ may have an abstract quality, the connection and intensification of social relations have had distinct consequences for individuals and communities.

It is within these three ideas – the performativity of international politics, the spatialisation of political practice, the role of the visual – that we situate our approach to film and international politics. Thus the first key aim of this book is to argue that film is not just useful to students of international politics because it reflects certain ‘real-world’ truths, but because film plays a part in the very constitution of the political world in the first place – it is performative. As Luiza Bialasiewicz et al. argue:

States are made possible by a wide range of discursive practices that include immigration policies, military deployments and strategies, cultural debates about normal social behaviour, political speeches and economic investments. The meanings, identities, social relations and political assemblages that are enacted in these performances combine the ideal and the material. They are either made or represented in the name of a particular state but that state does not pre-exist those performances. (2007: 406–7)

The second key aim is, then, to argue that it is crucial to attend to the problematic of space. In this regard our approach can be situated as emerging from a body of work known as Critical Geopolitics. Whilst not necessarily a cohesive or singular entity, Critical Geopolitics is a broadly post-structuralist approach to the study of international politics that seeks to both re-affirm the significance of geography within international relations whilst also avoiding the reduction of ‘geography’ to a static, unchanging set of features. In other words, critical geopolitics sees the spaces of international politics not as just a ‘backdrop’ against which real politics is played out, but as implicated in the performative relations that constitute the realm of international affairs.

A third element that we wish to stress is the role of vision within geopolitical accounts of the world: the manner in which some things, some people, some objects are made more visible than others. Critical Geopolitics emerged, in part, as a critique of the imperial school of geopolitics associated with the early twentieth-century writings of figures such as Halford Mackinder, and accompanying conceits that it was possible to comprehend the world in an all-encompassing and disembodied manner. For Mackinder, advances in geographical knowledge at the end of the nineteenth century offered possibilities for imagining global space in new ways, which in turn offered ways of thinking strategically about global political space. In an address to the Royal Geographical Society in London, in 1904, Mackinder claimed: ‘For the first time we can perceive something of the real proportion of features and events on the stage of the whole world, and may seek a formula which shall express certain aspects of geographical causation in universal history’ (1904: 422; emphasis added).

For Mackinder and other writers in the emerging field of geopolitics at that time, vision, or the ability to conceive of global space in particular ways, was an important precursor to their ambition of developing theories of global strategy. Mackinder saw this as primarily predicated upon the complete mapping of the known world, but other ways of comprehending spatial relations were of course also emerging in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not least cinema itself. As John Agnew contends, ‘the modern world is defined by the imaginative ability to transcend the spatial limits imposed by everyday life and contemplate the world conceived and grasped as a picture… The geopolitical imagination’s most defining feature is the conception of the world as a single, if divided physical-political entity’ (1998: 11). Mackinder saw such visualisation practices as unproblematic, as a function of objective, scientific knowledge rather than subjective, embodied perspective. Taking inspiration from the work