Bulwark Takes - 15: How a Zombie Apocalypse EXPOSES Global Politics

Episode Date: June 28, 2025

Sonny Bunch is joined by Daniel Drezner—professor at Tufts, co-host of Space The Nation, and author of the cult classic Theories of International Politics and Zombies. They discuss why zombies make the perfect lens for understanding global relations, pandemics and government response post- 2020.

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As of July 1st, yes. Congratulations and I'm sorry, I believe was what you were... That is the correct response to that title, yes. He hosts a podcast with Anna Marie Cox called Space the Nation, where you guys talk about fun sci-fi movies, books, TV shows, et cetera. You're on Substack. But the reason we are here today is because Daniel Dresdner wrote what is, to my mind, the most amusing book about politics ever written, theories of international politics and zombies. What was it? What made you want to sit down and write a textbook that posits

how humanity would deal with it through different ideological and intellectual prisons. So a couple things are going on. The first, and I cannot stress this enough, I had just been promoted to full professor, which is a big deal because it meant that like, even if this idea crashed and burned, it didn't matter. I was already a full professor. So, you know, I felt in a relatively safe position there. The original inspiration was there was a group of epidemiologists that published a paper modeling what a zombie outbreak would look like and concluding that unless they were like killed in the first 24 hours, you know, the world would be overrun.

And this was one of those, you know, papers that like the BBC reported on and the Post reported like it just sort of garnered a lot of attention. I was blogging for foreign policy at the time and I sort of read these stories and then I managed to access the actual paper. So I read it and it's really sort of a mathematical paper. But as I was reading it, I kept thinking there's no politics in this. There's no borders in their model. There's no like notion that you could stop things at the border or you would kill zombies or what have you. So I wrote like a blog post for foreign policy saying, well, here's what the different theories would be. It was sort of like, I was just riffing. It was a kind of one-off, but it generated a lot of

responses. And then I was at an academic conference a couple months later, and someone came up to me and said, you know, I was teaching a summer class in IR for high school students. And I was trying to explain to them what social constructivism is as a theory in a straightforward sense, and they weren't getting it. And then I showed them your post, and they got it. And that was when I realized that your average 18-year-old knows a ton more about zombies than international relations theory.

This was a possible way to sort of explain it and have some fun in the process. And so I went to my editor at Princeton University Press, Chuck Myers, and thank God Chuck immediately got what I wanted to do with it. And then I started writing it. And actually for about a month, it was a real struggle.

I felt like zombie Milton Berle. I felt like I was like the most obvious jokes and like, it was just like lifeless. And Chuck gave me a great piece of advice and this was why the book worked. He said, you have to write this in the exact same tone you would write a serious piece of scholarship. That's where the humor will come out.

The fact that you're taking it so seriously. And the moment he said that, it was like something clicked into place. And I wrote most of the book in about six weeks. So it was really, the joke I always made is that I knew the IR already. I knew what I was gonna do on that. The research that I had to do was all the zombie movies.

Cause I didn't know that much about the zombie genre. And my kids were young at the time. And so there was this ritual for a couple months where like I would tuck in my kids and at 10 o'clock at night, I would pop in Night of the Living Dead or Day of the Dead or Warm Bodies or something like that, just so I could watch it.

Yeah, in the prologue or the introduction of your book, you mentioned not being a horror fan. Yeah. You were not super into horror, but that 28 days later kind of changed, turned you around on that. Yeah. What was it about zombies in particular

that you found appealing, as opposed to some of these other horror genres that you didn't like? Well, I mean, to be fair, part of it was that zombies were incredibly popular. 28 Days Later, and the first Resident Evil film kind of revived the genre from a movie perspective. Move to the head.

Shaun of the Dead actually was, I think, a big factor. Shaun of the Dead, when I rewatched that, that was when I knew I had a book, because there's a moment at the end, like towards the end, where Shaun says, you know, as Bertrand Russell once says, without mankind, you know, without cooperation, mankind is nothing. I was like, wait, that's the liberal theory. Okay, now I can, I've got an alternative theory. I think the thing that I find appealing about the zombie genre, as opposed to sort of other

horror genres, is that in theory, mankind should be able to avoid the living dead. Right? Like, in Romero's version of it, you know, all you have to do is act with just a minimal degree of cooperation, you can avoid it. And even with the 28 Days Later style, zombies, you know, just so long as you act quickly, in theory, you can mitigate against the spread. And yet, again, very often we fail at that. Where I think that the zombie genre tends to screw things up is assuming that human beings can't adapt. And, you know, the way I would put it is that any species that can

invent duct tape and shotguns is going to figure out a way to deal with the living dead The other thing that was the inspiration for the book was not the movie but Max Brooks is novel World War Z That is the one zombie novel that I recommend that even if you don't like zombies that is a great book It is a fantastic read It's the best zombie novel out there Yeah, I'm pretty sure is that the one that's kind of a hodgepodge of stories from... It's a Studs Turkel style sort of like, yeah. You can almost imagine it being like told more in a documentary style. The thing I always like to say

about the movie World War Z is the great thing about it is you can watch it and it won't ruin the book for you at all because it's completely different. There's really no relation there, which is too bad. Because the book is really interesting. And it is the sort of thing that would work very well as an animated series on Netflix or something. Or like an HBO anthology series. Yeah, I agree.

So do you want to run through the types of theory that you discuss in the book? We don't have to get deep into the weeds of what each of them argues, but I do think it would be helpful just to give people a sense of what the book, you know, is tackling here. Right. So, you know, there's a variety of different international relations paradigms. The oldest one that probably people would be the most familiar with is realism. You know, realism posits that, you know, it's a very Hobbesian world out there, that all actors need to be concerned with their own survival.

And it is unsurprisingly the paradigm that actually an awful lot of the zombie genre fits perfectly with. You know, as I think I put it in the book, you know, realists posit that it's a dog-eat-dog, or in the case of zombies, man eat man kind of world out there. And because of this, realists also tend to think, well, the world wouldn't change that much if you introduced the living dead, because it's already an unsafe world out there. You wouldn't necessarily want to. It's not like, you know, introducing a living dead changes anything all that much. And I think the argument is often made that, for realists that states would just have to adapt, the states with the strongest amount of power

would be able to resist. And then eventually even the zombies would evolve to be other actors in the international system, much like let's say the Alphas in 28 years later. Liberals are a more optimistic sort of paradigm, whereas realists believe that it's a Hobbesian world out there, liberals tend to believe it's a Hobbesian world out there. Liberals tend to believe it's a Lockean world out there, which means even in a world dominated

by anarchy, cooperation is a possibility. Liberals have a tricky time with the zombie apocalypse because the thing you have to acknowledge at the outset is that globalization, which liberals tend to be a big fan of, would obviously dramatically facilitate the cross-border spread of zombies. And so as a result, it would likely become a much bigger problem initially in a liberal world order than in a more realpolitik one. But that said, liberals would also argue

that the incentives to cooperate would also be extremely strong. So you could see the creation of like, you know, a world anti-zombie organization or other kinds of structures that would try to combat the zombies. The only problem might be that there would be global civil society that would identify with the zombies. You know, you'd start seeing groups like zombies without borders, you know, or zombie

aids suddenly, you know, created. And so that would be, you know, an interesting battle. I think I talk about social constructivism a little bit, where the problem there is the sort of dominance of norms and identities, and those kind of govern how world politics works. What I would argue is that if zombies became sufficiently numerous,

that what you would inevitably start to see is human beings adopt zombie tropes, and that there are reasons why you might actually like the zombies, you know, the zombie way of life, as it were. Zombies don't discriminate. They will eat anyone regardless of race, gender, sexual preference, religious orientation. They're also, like, progressives would love them. I mean, you know, they walk everywhere and they only eat organic. It's pretty, you know, it's a decent a decent lifestyle. I think I argued in the

book that the real concern would be if urban hipsters started adopting the zombie lifestyle. The other one that I do want to say, because this is actually the argument I made in the book, that it was a logical conclusion from reading this, watching the zombie films and so forth, is I said there was this sort of paradox in terms of domestic politics of zombie responses, where if you have an initial outbreak, that's the moment when you would expect to see publics rally around the flag the most, express the greatest faith in the government that would be able to solve the problem, which is generally what happens in the face of crises or attacks or pandemics.

The problem is that usually that is also when the governments will be the least equipped to handle this, because governments are run by bureaucracies and bureaucracies are dominated by what we call standard operating procedures. But the undead by definition are an unstandard situation. And so the paradox is that governments would eventually move down the learning curve. They would eventually figure out how to deal with the undead. But by the time they actually did figure it out, public distrust in what states said you should do would be at its highest or would be much higher. So it would be hard for governments to win back the trust

of individuals. And I have to say the thing that I found, I still find legitimately disconcerting is, that's a pretty good explanation for what happened during COVID. Like that dynamic where like the official said, okay, we're gonna do this, like, you know, restrict closed schools, mask, you know, we're working on a vaccine.

And the public initially is like, fine, we get that. And then after a while, the public initially is like fine, we get that and then after a while the public rebels and by the time vaccines are rolled around you've got a large number of people who don't believe that they exist, you know, that they work or that it matters. And it was disturbing to realize that I, it did kind of work in the zombie novel, you know, genre and it works for COVID, unfortunately. You mentioned disease and outbreak and pandemic as one possible way of looking at this and you know mentioning H1N1 which had been you know obviously a thing SARS, Ebola, right and I'm reading this and you sound relatively optimistic you're like look we've got a great global world

order the governments of the world are very transparent about all of this. And I'm just reading this thinking like, boy, I remember 2020. I remember 2020. It did not quite work this way. Now, I mean, the problem is it worked that way for a little bit. I mean, remember, people were going out in pots and pans at five o'clock thanking emergency workers. There was initial trust that the institutions would actually sort it out.

The problem is it didn't last. And then for a variety of reasons. And now there's this whole anti-vaccine movement that I think really got supercharged as a result of the, the, not just the pandemic, but also like, you know, the idea that you couldn't go to a restaurant unless you'd vaccinated and, and so on and so forth. And, and also I think a tendency by, by some to perhaps underestimate what the social costs were of doing things like closing schools and things like that. I don't want to valorize the anti-vaccine movement

because I certainly disagree with it vehemently. But I think you are seeing sort of people looking back, realizing, okay, we could have handled this better. You know, that maybe the thing to do was to say, look, we think we can get people back in schools. But I mean, you know, that obviously would have put a bigger burden on teachers, but that might've been worth doing still. But like, it's a tricky thing,

because in some ways, I still remain optimistic in the sense of, we had a working vaccine from COVID in less than a year after it went global. I mean, by historical standards, that's freaking amazing. And so, I hope at some point, when the re-revisionist history of COVID is talked about, that fact is stressed. It actually, it's kind of miraculous that not that we were housebound for so long, but that in fact, we eventually science the shit out of it, to quote the Mart Martian and figured out a way to get back to our lives. Daniel Dresner, thank you for being on the show today. I will link to the books and podcasts and newsletters, et cetera, in my newsletter.

So if you want to check that out, make sure you click there. But again, thanks for being on the show today. Thanks a lot, Sonny. I really had fun. And again, my name is Sonny Buncher. I'm Culture Editor at The Bullwork, and I'll be back next week with another episode of The Bullwork Goes to Hollywood. See you guys then.