Over at Duck of Minerva, Rodger Payne responds to Stephen Walt's list of favorite international relations films with his own picks. Dan Drezner offers his own set of IR movies at Foreign Policy. I can understand the impulse. International relations theory, especially the statistically addled variant now dominant in many political science and international relations departments, is so abstract that it's begging for a humanizing device--like say, relating neorealist balance of power theory to Independence Day.
Of course, the danger is that certain cinematic visualizations can become so powerful that they end up providing a misleading view of policy dilemmas. Hollywood's role in the debate over torture and the "ticking time bomb" scenario is a case in point. Likewise, as I pointed out in my "Legacy Futures" commentary, our favorite science fiction visualizations of future conflict may colonize our imaginations and crowd out other alternative futures.
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