Theories of International Politics and Zombies

Metadata

• Author: Daniel W. Drezner
• Full Title: Theories of International Politics and Zombies
• Category: #books

Highlights

• US Strategic Command has developed CONPLAN 8888, entitled “Counter-Zombie Dominance.” Its very first line reads, “This plan was not actually designed as a joke.” (Location 133)
• There are far fewer narratives of vampires trying to take over the world.20 Instead, creatures of the night are frequently co-opted into existing power structures. (Location 165)
• The undead do not feel pain, nor are they terribly active on social media networks. (Location 243)
• It is unlikely that any government would be both willing and able to block all relevant research efforts into biological, nuclear, and computer technology, monitor and prevent any religious interference that could stir up the undead, and ward off the evil of the Thriller. (Location 386)
• To use the language of social science, flesh-eating ghouls are the independent variable. (Location 397)
• Fast Zombies Slow Zombies Supernatural Origins Cross-border security problem Cross-border security problem Scientific Origins Cross-border Security problem Cross-border Security problem (Location 438)
• There are many varieties of realism,1 but all realists start with a common assumption—that anarchy is the overarching constraint of world politics. Anarchy does not mean chaos or disorder but instead the absence of a centralized, legitimate authority. (Location 468)
• For realists, the primary actors are those that can guarantee their own survival—namely, states. Because force is the ne plus ultra of power, the actors that count are those with the greatest ability to use force—states with sizable armed forces. (Location 472)
• In a world of anarchy, the only currency that matters is power—the material capability to ward off pressure or coercion while being able to influence others. If one state amasses more and more power, other states will have an incentive to balance against that state so as to prevent it from dominating everyone.2 The anarchic global structure makes it impossible for governments to fully trust each other, forcing all states to be guided solely by their own national interests. (Location 475)
• States will consider the distribution of gains when thinking about cooperating with another actor. The question for realists like Kenneth Waltz is not “will both of us gain?” but “who will gain more?” (Location 480)
• Even realist scholars who believe in power maximization allow that the “stopping power of water” will likely deter any state from global overreach. (Location 490)
• Most interactions with other human groups lead inexorably to violent conflict. Once Rick’s group manages to establish sovereignty over a prison complex, it triggers a security dilemma with the neighboring territory of Woodbury. Relations between Rick’s group and The Governor’s group quickly become zerosum. As enduring rivals, The Governor and Rick attack each other again and again and again in a seemingly endless cycle of conflict. (Location 518)
• To realists, a plague of the undead would merely echo older plagues and disasters. (Location 529)
• Second, small supporter states would fear that powerful countries would use a global quest against zombies as a subterfuge to augment their own capabilities and interests. (Location 564)
• In the end, realists—particularly American realists—would no doubt evoke the cautionary words of former president John Quincy Adams and warn against going abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.” (Location 579)
• In a world of sophisticated zombies, alliances between human states and zombie states are possible. Indeed, any government that tried to develop a grand coalition targeting the undead would immediately trigger the security dilemma. (Location 596)
• A more passive strategy would be to encourage what John Mearsheimer labels “bait and bleed” and “bloodletting” strategies.21 In these instances, realist states would try to foment conflict between antizombie states and the ghouls themselves, profiting at the relative losses incurred by both sides. (Location 599)
• All liberals nevertheless share a common belief: cooperation is still possible in a world of anarchy. Liberals look at world politics as a non-zero-sum game. Mutual cooperation on issues ranging from international trade to nuclear nonproliferation to disease prevention can yield global public goods on a massive scale. (Location 624)
• The benefits generated by cooperation are often nonexcludable—in other words, anyone will benefit from broad-based cooperation even if they themselves do not cooperate. (Location 631)
• The conundrum for liberals is that while an outcome of mutual cooperation is better than one of mutual defection, all are best off in a situation in which they can unilaterally defect. (Location 634)
• Conditions that lengthen the shadow of the future increase the likelihood of cooperation. The longer one’s time horizon, the greater the rewards from mutual cooperation are in comparison to the fleeting benefits from free riding. (Location 639)
• Liberals advocate an open global economy in order to foster complex interdependence and lock in incentives for governments to cooperate. (Location 663)
• The refrain in Jonathan Coulton’s song “Re: Your Brains,” written from a zombie’s point of view, best encapsulates the implacable nature of the zombie bargaining position: All we want to do is eat your brains We’re not unreasonable; I mean, no one’s gonna eat your eyes All we want to do is eat your brains We’re at an impasse here; maybe we should compromise: If you open up the doors We’ll all come inside and eat your brains (Location 670)
• The liberal paradigm provides a simple, rational answer: the living dead have the longest possible shadow of the future. John Maynard Keynes famously commented that “in the long run, we are all dead.” In the long run, the undead still have to interact with each other—and therefore they have the strongest of incentives to cooperate.10 If zombies hang together, then humans face the danger of hanging separately. (Location 704)
• The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention publicly pledged to provide technical assistance to “international partners” should the dead start to rise from the grave.11 (Location 713)
• The liberal paradigm would predict two significant loopholes that could form within the confines of a global counterzombie regime. First, some countries might fail to provide timely information about zombie outbreaks until the problem had escalated beyond local control. (Location 745)
• China behaves in a similar manner in World War Z—going so far as to trigger a crisis with Taiwan to disguise the extent of China’s own zombie problem.26 (Location 757)
• Second, it would not be surprising if nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) devoted to the defense of the living dead acted as an impediment to their eradication. (Location 761)
• To use the lexicon of liberals, most governments would kill most zombies most of the time. (Location 783)
• the social construction of reality, and the importance of identity in explaining and interpreting behavior on the world stage. (Location 799)
• Constructivists argue that transnational norms are a powerful constraint on action in world politics. Nuclear weapons, for example, are the most powerful destructive force in human history—but they have not been used in combat since 1945. Social constructivists argue that, over time, a taboo has developed regarding their use. (Location 807)
• Identities are developed or constituted through mutual recognition—authoritative actors are considered legitimate in the international community not only because of self-recognition but because others recognize them as legitimate. Actors—including but not limited to states—define themselves in part by distinguishing themselves from the “other.” (Location 813)
• If confronted with the exogenous shock of the undead, constructivists would undoubtedly argue that zombies are what humans make of them. (Location 841)
• Most constructivists would instead posit that a Kantian “pluralistic counter-zombie security community” in which governments share sovereignty and resources to combat the undead menace is more likely. (Location 846)
• Anthropological research further suggests that only with extreme resource scarcity will communities of people turn on each other.14 (Location 852)
• Intentionally or unintentionally, constructivists argue that the consistency of the zombie narrative socially constructs “apocalypse myths.” As Frank Furedi observes, “The experience of disasters—major and minor—is a social phenomenon which is mediated through the public’s cultural imagination.”17 Cultural narratives that suggest panic, disaster, and mayhem can have real-world effects. (Location 862)
• If a critical mass of flesh-eating ghouls were to emerge, however, then the constructivist paradigm offers a very different prediction. Constructivists would predict an emergent “norm cascade” from the proliferation of the living dead.20 A norm cascade functions like peer pressure: as people witness others adhering to a particular standard of behavior, they are more likely to conform to that standard of behavior as well. As a larger fraction of individuals are converted to the undead persuasion, the remaining humans would feel significant material and social pressure to conform to zombie practices. (Location 882)
• one of the most basic yet underdiscussed aspects of zombies is their objectification of human bodies. (Location 908)
• one can posit that a feminist approach to international relations is best suited to assess and evaluate the effect of the living dead. (Location 912)
• feminists observe that the realities of world politics—and the international relations theories of world politics—are constructed to marginalize these gendered realities and, by extension, the role of women. (Location 924)
• The puzzles that animate realists or liberals—the causes of war, the ways states advance their national interests—are framed in such a way as to keep gender on the margins of discourse. (Location 927)
• “Malestream” scholars believe that their job is to model the world as it is; feminist scholars believe that, in part, their role is to expose the heavily gendered structure of world politics in order to change it for the better. (Location 933)
• Feminist approaches stress that even during periods of peace among nation-states, the world is not really that peaceable toward women. (Location 936)
• a significant body of research suggests that states that codify gender equality and restrict discrimination are more secure across a variety of dimensions.9 In other words, governments with more feminist-friendly policies are also more secure from external threats. It logically follows that the threat of the living dead should accelerate those emancipatory policies, thereby benefitting the marginalized even more. (Location 942)
• Poststructuralists highlight that any individual exists at the intersection of multiple mutually altering identities. In a world of intersectionality, international relations is not only heavily gendered but also structured to marginalize issues of race and sexual orientation. (Location 991)
• poststructuralists would argue that it is worth considering the ways in which the living dead could eviscerate gendered structures in modern society. (Location 1009)
• Analysts differ in their treatment of networks. Some scholars view the entirety of a network as a single, coherent actor; others view the nodes as the actors, with network ties and structures functioning as constraints on those actors. (Location 1030)
• The zombies hate us for our freedoms—specifically, our freedom to abstain from eating human brains. (Location 1059)
• Neoconservatives would scoff at the realist contention that zombies are like every other actor in world politics and at the liberal contention that global governance structures could cope with the zombie menace. This school of thought would instead recommend an aggressive and militarized response to ensure the continued hegemony of the human race. (Location 1062)
• Moderate neoconservatives would adopt a more nuanced position; they would posit that, after creating a human outpost in the center of zombie-infested territory, humans in neighboring zombie-afflicted nations would be inspired to rise up and liberate themselves from their undead oppressors. (Location 1073)
• Over the long run, military forces would likely be enmeshed in a protracted, bloody insurgency from the undead. Indigenous human populations would quickly lose faith in the US military’s ability to quell the zombie hordes. (Location 1092)
• The structure of domestic institutions, the state of public opinion, or the constellation of interest group pressures can affect a wide array of foreign policy and national security initiatives. At a minimum, domestic pressures can exert powerful constraints on the foreign policy leader’s negotiating tactics and positions when bargaining with other actors.1 (Location 1108)
• Paradoxically, a failure to implement early measures will force governments to pursue more extreme measures—which, in turn, will be likely to trigger a greater public backlash. (Location 1180)
• The structural dependence of the state on capital suggests that if the zombie problem were to persist, these firms could impose a more serious constraint on adaptation and mitigation strategies.13 Corporate pressures on governments to outsource security functions to private contractors—with lucrative contracts, of course—would be intense.14 Resistance against the elimination of conventional big-ticket military contracts would be fierce. Pharmaceutical companies would lobby for massive subsidies in an effort to develop cures and vaccines for the undead problem—even if such treatments were medically improbable. Defense contractors would resist eradication strategies in favor of approaches that would permit the warehousing and testing of captured ghouls. (Location 1191)
• Domestic pluralist pressures could sabotage multilateral efforts to stop ghouls from snacking on human flesh.15 (Location 1198)
• Robert Putnam has talked about how the “two-level games” of domestic and international politics can cause domestic weakness to be translated into international bargaining strength.20 If (Location 1238)
• The key word here is primarily. As much as the liberal, realist, and constructivist paradigms might claim to be exclusively systemic in their provenance, all of them dip into both second image (domestic politics) and first image (individuals) at certain points. (Location 1242)
• Classic works on bureaucratic politics have modeled foreign and security policies as the outcome of “pulling and hauling” among multiple organizations with different agendas.3 (Location 1255)
• Other organization theorists argue that political institutions are like “organized anarchies” in which bureaucratic entrepreneurs hawking their solutions are searching for problems rather than the converse. (Location 1257)
• A prominent form of confirmation bias in international relations is fundamental attribution error. When interpreting the behavior of other actors, individuals will often treat allies and adversaries in different ways. (Location 1403)
• When they perceive themselves to be losing ground, individuals will be more willing to take risky gambits in an effort to resuscitate their fortunes.12 (Location 1425)
• First-image theorists argue that this cluster of psychological attributes leads to a “hawk bias” in foreign affairs.13 When confronted with a possible adversary, the psychological response by individual policy makers will lead to more confrontational policies. (Location 1427)
• Confirmation bias would ensure that any new data about zombies would simply reinforce their enemy status. Prospect theory would guarantee that leaders, when faced with initial losses from undead attacks, would double down with risky strategies designed to reclaim the status quo. The hawk bias might exaggerate conflict with humans, but it would appear to promote just the right attitude toward the living dead. (Location 1435)
• Interest in the living dead has shifted from a focus on zombies to a focus on the zombie apocalypse. The television shows that been inspired by AMC’s The Walking Dead do not necessarily have zombies, but rather a postapocalyptic setting. Such shows include TNT’s Falling Skies and The Last Ship, NBC’s Revolution, and FX’s The Strain, as well as National Geographic’s reality show Doomsday Preppers. Similarly, Marc Forster’s film World War Z premiered in the summer of 2013, when the end of the world was also captured in Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion, Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim, M. Night Shyamalan’s After Earth, Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen’s This Is the End, and Edgar Wright’s The World’s End. It is not just zombies that have crested culturally—it is the end of the world. (Location 1598)
• There will always be a place in zombie lore for the grim, unrelentingly dour postapocalyptic visions of George Romero, and of Robert Kirkman’s series The Walking Dead (2010–). That said, popular culture also needs more narratives like Max Brooks’s World War Z (2006), Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies (2011), or even Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (2012), in which the adaptability, ingenuity, and creativity of human beings is also put on full display. (Location 1632)

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title: Theories of International Politics and Zombies longtitle: Theories of International Politics and Zombies author: Daniel W. Drezner url: , source: kindle last_highlight: 2023-06-08 type: books tags:

Theories of International Politics and Zombies

Metadata

• Author: Daniel W. Drezner
• Full Title: Theories of International Politics and Zombies
• Category: #books

Highlights

• US Strategic Command has developed CONPLAN 8888, entitled “Counter-Zombie Dominance.” Its very first line reads, “This plan was not actually designed as a joke.” (Location 133)
• There are far fewer narratives of vampires trying to take over the world.20 Instead, creatures of the night are frequently co-opted into existing power structures. (Location 165)
• The undead do not feel pain, nor are they terribly active on social media networks. (Location 243)
• It is unlikely that any government would be both willing and able to block all relevant research efforts into biological, nuclear, and computer technology, monitor and prevent any religious interference that could stir up the undead, and ward off the evil of the Thriller. (Location 386)
• To use the language of social science, flesh-eating ghouls are the independent variable. (Location 397)
• Fast Zombies Slow Zombies Supernatural Origins Cross-border security problem Cross-border security problem Scientific Origins Cross-border Security problem Cross-border Security problem (Location 438)
• There are many varieties of realism,1 but all realists start with a common assumption—that anarchy is the overarching constraint of world politics. Anarchy does not mean chaos or disorder but instead the absence of a centralized, legitimate authority. (Location 468)
• For realists, the primary actors are those that can guarantee their own survival—namely, states. Because force is the ne plus ultra of power, the actors that count are those with the greatest ability to use force—states with sizable armed forces. (Location 472)
• In a world of anarchy, the only currency that matters is power—the material capability to ward off pressure or coercion while being able to influence others. If one state amasses more and more power, other states will have an incentive to balance against that state so as to prevent it from dominating everyone.2 The anarchic global structure makes it impossible for governments to fully trust each other, forcing all states to be guided solely by their own national interests. (Location 475)
• States will consider the distribution of gains when thinking about cooperating with another actor. The question for realists like Kenneth Waltz is not “will both of us gain?” but “who will gain more?” (Location 480)
• Even realist scholars who believe in power maximization allow that the “stopping power of water” will likely deter any state from global overreach. (Location 490)
• Most interactions with other human groups lead inexorably to violent conflict. Once Rick’s group manages to establish sovereignty over a prison complex, it triggers a security dilemma with the neighboring territory of Woodbury. Relations between Rick’s group and The Governor’s group quickly become zerosum. As enduring rivals, The Governor and Rick attack each other again and again and again in a seemingly endless cycle of conflict. (Location 518)
• To realists, a plague of the undead would merely echo older plagues and disasters. (Location 529)
• Second, small supporter states would fear that powerful countries would use a global quest against zombies as a subterfuge to augment their own capabilities and interests. (Location 564)
• In the end, realists—particularly American realists—would no doubt evoke the cautionary words of former president John Quincy Adams and warn against going abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.” (Location 579)
• In a world of sophisticated zombies, alliances between human states and zombie states are possible. Indeed, any government that tried to develop a grand coalition targeting the undead would immediately trigger the security dilemma. (Location 596)
• A more passive strategy would be to encourage what John Mearsheimer labels “bait and bleed” and “bloodletting” strategies.21 In these instances, realist states would try to foment conflict between antizombie states and the ghouls themselves, profiting at the relative losses incurred by both sides. (Location 599)
• All liberals nevertheless share a common belief: cooperation is still possible in a world of anarchy. Liberals look at world politics as a non-zero-sum game. Mutual cooperation on issues ranging from international trade to nuclear nonproliferation to disease prevention can yield global public goods on a massive scale. (Location 624)
• The benefits generated by cooperation are often nonexcludable—in other words, anyone will benefit from broad-based cooperation even if they themselves do not cooperate. (Location 631)
• The conundrum for liberals is that while an outcome of mutual cooperation is better than one of mutual defection, all are best off in a situation in which they can unilaterally defect. (Location 634)
• Conditions that lengthen the shadow of the future increase the likelihood of cooperation. The longer one’s time horizon, the greater the rewards from mutual cooperation are in comparison to the fleeting benefits from free riding. (Location 639)
• Liberals advocate an open global economy in order to foster complex interdependence and lock in incentives for governments to cooperate. (Location 663)
• The refrain in Jonathan Coulton’s song “Re: Your Brains,” written from a zombie’s point of view, best encapsulates the implacable nature of the zombie bargaining position: All we want to do is eat your brains We’re not unreasonable; I mean, no one’s gonna eat your eyes All we want to do is eat your brains We’re at an impasse here; maybe we should compromise: If you open up the doors We’ll all come inside and eat your brains (Location 670)
• The liberal paradigm provides a simple, rational answer: the living dead have the longest possible shadow of the future. John Maynard Keynes famously commented that “in the long run, we are all dead.” In the long run, the undead still have to interact with each other—and therefore they have the strongest of incentives to cooperate.10 If zombies hang together, then humans face the danger of hanging separately. (Location 704)
• The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention publicly pledged to provide technical assistance to “international partners” should the dead start to rise from the grave.11 (Location 713)
• The liberal paradigm would predict two significant loopholes that could form within the confines of a global counterzombie regime. First, some countries might fail to provide timely information about zombie outbreaks until the problem had escalated beyond local control. (Location 745)
• China behaves in a similar manner in World War Z—going so far as to trigger a crisis with Taiwan to disguise the extent of China’s own zombie problem.26 (Location 757)
• Second, it would not be surprising if nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) devoted to the defense of the living dead acted as an impediment to their eradication. (Location 761)
• To use the lexicon of liberals, most governments would kill most zombies most of the time. (Location 783)
• the social construction of reality, and the importance of identity in explaining and interpreting behavior on the world stage. (Location 799)
• Constructivists argue that transnational norms are a powerful constraint on action in world politics. Nuclear weapons, for example, are the most powerful destructive force in human history—but they have not been used in combat since 1945. Social constructivists argue that, over time, a taboo has developed regarding their use. (Location 807)
• Identities are developed or constituted through mutual recognition—authoritative actors are considered legitimate in the international community not only because of self-recognition but because others recognize them as legitimate. Actors—including but not limited to states—define themselves in part by distinguishing themselves from the “other.” (Location 813)
• If confronted with the exogenous shock of the undead, constructivists would undoubtedly argue that zombies are what humans make of them. (Location 841)
• Most constructivists would instead posit that a Kantian “pluralistic counter-zombie security community” in which governments share sovereignty and resources to combat the undead menace is more likely. (Location 846)
• Anthropological research further suggests that only with extreme resource scarcity will communities of people turn on each other.14 (Location 852)
• Intentionally or unintentionally, constructivists argue that the consistency of the zombie narrative socially constructs “apocalypse myths.” As Frank Furedi observes, “The experience of disasters—major and minor—is a social phenomenon which is mediated through the public’s cultural imagination.”17 Cultural narratives that suggest panic, disaster, and mayhem can have real-world effects. (Location 862)
• If a critical mass of flesh-eating ghouls were to emerge, however, then the constructivist paradigm offers a very different prediction. Constructivists would predict an emergent “norm cascade” from the proliferation of the living dead.20 A norm cascade functions like peer pressure: as people witness others adhering to a particular standard of behavior, they are more likely to conform to that standard of behavior as well. As a larger fraction of individuals are converted to the undead persuasion, the remaining humans would feel significant material and social pressure to conform to zombie practices. (Location 882)
• one of the most basic yet underdiscussed aspects of zombies is their objectification of human bodies. (Location 908)
• one can posit that a feminist approach to international relations is best suited to assess and evaluate the effect of the living dead. (Location 912)
• feminists observe that the realities of world politics—and the international relations theories of world politics—are constructed to marginalize these gendered realities and, by extension, the role of women. (Location 924)
• The puzzles that animate realists or liberals—the causes of war, the ways states advance their national interests—are framed in such a way as to keep gender on the margins of discourse. (Location 927)
• “Malestream” scholars believe that their job is to model the world as it is; feminist scholars believe that, in part, their role is to expose the heavily gendered structure of world politics in order to change it for the better. (Location 933)
• Feminist approaches stress that even during periods of peace among nation-states, the world is not really that peaceable toward women. (Location 936)
• a significant body of research suggests that states that codify gender equality and restrict discrimination are more secure across a variety of dimensions.9 In other words, governments with more feminist-friendly policies are also more secure from external threats. It logically follows that the threat of the living dead should accelerate those emancipatory policies, thereby benefitting the marginalized even more. (Location 942)
• Poststructuralists highlight that any individual exists at the intersection of multiple mutually altering identities. In a world of intersectionality, international relations is not only heavily gendered but also structured to marginalize issues of race and sexual orientation. (Location 991)
• poststructuralists would argue that it is worth considering the ways in which the living dead could eviscerate gendered structures in modern society. (Location 1009)
• Analysts differ in their treatment of networks. Some scholars view the entirety of a network as a single, coherent actor; others view the nodes as the actors, with network ties and structures functioning as constraints on those actors. (Location 1030)
• The zombies hate us for our freedoms—specifically, our freedom to abstain from eating human brains. (Location 1059)
• Neoconservatives would scoff at the realist contention that zombies are like every other actor in world politics and at the liberal contention that global governance structures could cope with the zombie menace. This school of thought would instead recommend an aggressive and militarized response to ensure the continued hegemony of the human race. (Location 1062)
• Moderate neoconservatives would adopt a more nuanced position; they would posit that, after creating a human outpost in the center of zombie-infested territory, humans in neighboring zombie-afflicted nations would be inspired to rise up and liberate themselves from their undead oppressors. (Location 1073)
• Over the long run, military forces would likely be enmeshed in a protracted, bloody insurgency from the undead. Indigenous human populations would quickly lose faith in the US military’s ability to quell the zombie hordes. (Location 1092)
• The structure of domestic institutions, the state of public opinion, or the constellation of interest group pressures can affect a wide array of foreign policy and national security initiatives. At a minimum, domestic pressures can exert powerful constraints on the foreign policy leader’s negotiating tactics and positions when bargaining with other actors.1 (Location 1108)
• Paradoxically, a failure to implement early measures will force governments to pursue more extreme measures—which, in turn, will be likely to trigger a greater public backlash. (Location 1180)
• The structural dependence of the state on capital suggests that if the zombie problem were to persist, these firms could impose a more serious constraint on adaptation and mitigation strategies.13 Corporate pressures on governments to outsource security functions to private contractors—with lucrative contracts, of course—would be intense.14 Resistance against the elimination of conventional big-ticket military contracts would be fierce. Pharmaceutical companies would lobby for massive subsidies in an effort to develop cures and vaccines for the undead problem—even if such treatments were medically improbable. Defense contractors would resist eradication strategies in favor of approaches that would permit the warehousing and testing of captured ghouls. (Location 1191)
• Domestic pluralist pressures could sabotage multilateral efforts to stop ghouls from snacking on human flesh.15 (Location 1198)
• Robert Putnam has talked about how the “two-level games” of domestic and international politics can cause domestic weakness to be translated into international bargaining strength.20 If (Location 1238)
• The key word here is primarily. As much as the liberal, realist, and constructivist paradigms might claim to be exclusively systemic in their provenance, all of them dip into both second image (domestic politics) and first image (individuals) at certain points. (Location 1242)
• Classic works on bureaucratic politics have modeled foreign and security policies as the outcome of “pulling and hauling” among multiple organizations with different agendas.3 (Location 1255)
• Other organization theorists argue that political institutions are like “organized anarchies” in which bureaucratic entrepreneurs hawking their solutions are searching for problems rather than the converse. (Location 1257)
• A prominent form of confirmation bias in international relations is fundamental attribution error. When interpreting the behavior of other actors, individuals will often treat allies and adversaries in different ways. (Location 1403)
• When they perceive themselves to be losing ground, individuals will be more willing to take risky gambits in an effort to resuscitate their fortunes.12 (Location 1425)
• First-image theorists argue that this cluster of psychological attributes leads to a “hawk bias” in foreign affairs.13 When confronted with a possible adversary, the psychological response by individual policy makers will lead to more confrontational policies. (Location 1427)
• Confirmation bias would ensure that any new data about zombies would simply reinforce their enemy status. Prospect theory would guarantee that leaders, when faced with initial losses from undead attacks, would double down with risky strategies designed to reclaim the status quo. The hawk bias might exaggerate conflict with humans, but it would appear to promote just the right attitude toward the living dead. (Location 1435)
• Interest in the living dead has shifted from a focus on zombies to a focus on the zombie apocalypse. The television shows that been inspired by AMC’s The Walking Dead do not necessarily have zombies, but rather a postapocalyptic setting. Such shows include TNT’s Falling Skies and The Last Ship, NBC’s Revolution, and FX’s The Strain, as well as National Geographic’s reality show Doomsday Preppers. Similarly, Marc Forster’s film World War Z premiered in the summer of 2013, when the end of the world was also captured in Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion, Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim, M. Night Shyamalan’s After Earth, Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen’s This Is the End, and Edgar Wright’s The World’s End. It is not just zombies that have crested culturally—it is the end of the world. (Location 1598)
• There will always be a place in zombie lore for the grim, unrelentingly dour postapocalyptic visions of George Romero, and of Robert Kirkman’s series The Walking Dead (2010–). That said, popular culture also needs more narratives like Max Brooks’s World War Z (2006), Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies (2011), or even Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (2012), in which the adaptability, ingenuity, and creativity of human beings is also put on full display. (Location 1632)