Playing Geopolitics: Utopian Simulations of International Relations

ABSTRACT

Games and simulations have new prominence in the social sciences. This presentation traces their use in geopolitics and international relations, utilizing a complexity theory/assemblage approach to view them as systems with emergent properties produced through players’ engagement. These games are enrolled in larger assemblages of pedagogy, foreign policy creation, and the inter-state system. These games function as utopias in which reductionist theories of neoclassical geopolitics and realist international relations can be seen to function. Model United Nations and Statecraft are examples of the way in which this occurs in practice, with realist assumptions coded into the games’ spaces. However, observation of, and interviews regarding, actual gameplay indicate that other forms of space are emergent, and offer alternative visions of geopolitics that may be more just.


SPEAKER

Jason Dittmer is Reader in Human Geography at University College London. He is the co-editor of Mapping the End Times: American Evangelical Geopolitics and Apocalyptic Visions (Ashgate, 2010) as well as the author of Popular Culture, Geopolitics, and Identity (Rowman and Littlefield, 2010) and Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero: Metaphors, Narratives, and Geopolitics (Temple University Press, 2012).

R.S.V.P - v.fox@uws.edu.au