The Currency of Fantasy: Popular Culture’s Discourse in International Relations

Abstract

The “facts” of international politics constituting the first-order representations of political life, could be reflected in popular entertainment as a second-order or fictional representation. It significantly demonstrates that the discourse of Popular Culture is powerful and implicated in IR studies. In turn, it also identifies two correlated conceptions: one is that pop culture, as a humanist and anthropological methodology, if contextualized, could be applied to analyse international issues; the other is, a nation could constitute its discourse in international politics via its popular culture, as a soft power.