Hmmm...on what to reflect on a week such as this? I could write another post about Diplomatic Risk, what we did in class all week, but a) I already did that, and b) I was killed in a plane crash about halfway through the game and the undead have very little interest in the breakdown of power between nations. They tend to be more occupied with destroying society, or at least reducing it to a ragtag band of unlikely and diverse survivors who will probably have to overcome some preconceived notions about each other (and maybe even themselves) to survive the onslaught of flesh-eating corpses.
All the peoples of the world singing in perfect harmony...with a shotgun
But the impending zombie apocalypse has nothing to do with IR. Or does it? If you ask Daniel W. Drezner, international politics professor at Tufts University, zombies have quite a lot to do with IR theory. So much in fact that he's writing a book about it. Unfortunately, his website containing most of the information on the forthcoming book, Theories of International Politics and Zombies, is currently incapacitated but I was able to find an article summarizing three major strains of IR theories likely approaches to the zombie plague.
Realists would carry on like everything was normal, treating zombies like any other infectious plague. They would mostly leave it to the people to deal with the zombies themselves and expect the problem to fizzle out like all the other great plagues we've weathered as a society.
It's ok, they're just a societal phase. They will go away if we wait it out on this ledge
Liberals would take the problem somewhat more seriously but expect nations to deal with the problem on their own, never really expecting the zombies to be completely wiped out but accepting it as a fun opportunity to make some new governmental agencies and maybe a new UN sub-comittee solely for zombie killin'.
"You could say I'm in international diplomacy"
My personal favorite though, has to be the neoconservative approach. As Robert Kagan aptly said, "Humans are from earth, zombies are from hell." Rehabilitation would not be considered. Zombies threatened human hegemony. They would be completely, utterly and mercilessly annihilated. It would basically be like the end of Shaun of the Dead times a million.
HEADSHOT!
So there you have it. Enjoy your IR theory debates, but when the zombie apocalypse comes around, I'm a neoconservative.
Source: http://www.graspingforthewind.com/2010/07/27/international-relations-theory-and-zombies/
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