Research on popular culture and world politics has become a mainstay of scholarly efforts to unpack the mechanisms shaping our political realities.

Research on popular culture and world politics has become a mainstay of scholarly efforts to unpack the mechanisms shaping our political realities. In recent years, much of this work has focused on attempting to provide insights into the discursive constitution of popular culture and world politics, focusing on how the production, dissemination, circulation, consumption, and contestation of popular culture impacts the complex interplay of power, identities, ideologies, and actions. Approaches have tended to fall into one of three broad categories. First is a pedagogical approach - what Neumann and Nexon (2006) refer to as “popular culture as mirror” in which pop culture artefacts from science-fiction, fantasy and horror genres are used either in an allegorical sense or as metaphors meant to function as pedagogical tools to help understand how historical and political reality functions. The second is an interpretive approach that views popular culture artefacts as political texts in themselves, seeing popular culture as a lens for understanding how societies think about themselves and exploring how culture informs political reality. The final approach - the explanatory approach, treats popular culture as an explanatory factor in politics, examining its impacts on real-world political action, events, or categories of meaning.

These approaches suggest that fluency in specific popular-cultural artefacts can also have causal or constitutive effects on the political values of those who consume them. Indeed, as Weldes (2003) argues, popular culture texts are not just a window onto an already pre-existing world, but rather are part of the processes of world politics themselves: they are implicated in producing and reproducing the phenomena that we assume they merely reflect.  Consequently, they can exert a constitutive “informing” effect on the political realities of audiences, priming societies to think in specific ways about particular issues and concepts. Carpenter (2016) suggests that this can take the form of either a “naturalizing” effect on attitudes and behaviour, in which popular culture plays an important role in making a politically-constructed reality seem inevitable and normal; or an “enabling” effect by providing culturally-resonant repertoires of action on which savvy political actors can then draw to persuade audiences

Nowhere is this relationship more evident than at the intersection of popular culture and political violence (broadly defined here to encompass war, civil war, conflict, military intervention, state repression, and terrorism), with scholars becoming increasingly cognisant of the immense potency and propaganda value popular culture possesses in recasting both historical and contemporary events, constructing narratives, legitimising violence, or shifting audience understandings and worldviews in relation to political violence.

This relatively late ‘turn’ towards popular culture and its political effect vis-à-vis political violence is surprising, considering the potency of pop culture dissemination as conflict propaganda has long been recognized. The close connection between Hollywood and the US government, for example - one which stems back to the First World War and became particularly salient during the Second World War, is well established. Similarly, the appropriation of popular culture by the United States as a tool of soft power and ‘cultural diplomacy’ during the Cold War, through such means as Hollywood blockbusters, international sports, and music - most notably ‘Jazz diplomacy’, is also well understood. In recent years, this often opaque, symbiotic relationship between political/military elites and the cultural industries has been dubbed the ‘Military-Entertainment complex’.

In the US, for example, it has been a vital part of the country’s deeply patriotic legacy - a phenomenon that has taken on new meaning since the end of the Cold War and, and much more emphatically, since the events of 9/11. Within this context, popular culture has often served to legitimize and justify US military intervention, reinforce jingoistic narratives of US exceptionalism, and manufacture consent among publics for US foreign policy goals.

This interdisciplinary symposium seeks to understand this problematic nexus between popular culture (including, but not limited to, films, TV, comics, videogames, music, sports, and in the last decade, social media) and war, conflict, and political violence. We hope to explore the myriad intersections of popular culture and political violence from a wide array of disciplinary perspectives, and across a broad range of historic and geographic contexts. These are essential for more fully understanding the role of popular culture in shaping political discourse, perceptions, and experiences with respect to political violence; and uncovering the mechanisms of cultural mobilisation and the legitimation of state violence more broadly. Moreover, we hope to shed new light on how entertainment media and other forms of popular culture influence public understandings of military action and foreign policy, while revealing the actors, networks and strategies that connect the entertainment industry with military and political agendas. 

Submission guidelines

We invite contributions that explore any aspect of the relationship between popular culture and political violence, including but not limited to:

• Analysing representations of political violence within popular culture.

• Deconstructing popular cultural artefacts and offering critical readings of their political, historical or cultural significance.

• Examining how popular culture portrays, narrativizes, reimagines, or helps to construct meanings around politically violent events.

• Understanding how popular culture artefacts shape audience understandings, political attitudes, or worldviews vis-à-vis political violence.

• Understanding popular culture’s role in the construction of the self/enemy and processes of othering and vilification.

• Unpacking the role of popular culture in the construction of nationalist and other identity discourses.

• Analysing the processes and consequences of aestheticizing violence, and the dissemination of violent imagery and other content.

• Exploring popular culture’s capacity to serve as political/cultural battleground: either by reproducing and reifying pre-existing social orders; or by providing subversive narratives and thereby acting as a site of resistance against state power.

• Understanding how political and military elites wield popular culture to normalize or legitimize political positions and narratives.

• Exploring the representation and negotiation of gender, race, sexuality, disability and class in popular culture and its intersection with the Military-Entertainment Complex.

Please submit a 250 word abstract complete with author and contact information to akil.awan@rhul.ac.uk by 23 June 2025.

Selected papers from the symposium will be invited to contribute to a special issue, provisionally agreed with the Q1 Sage journal, Media, War & Conflict.

This event is organised by Dr Akil N Awan (Royal Holloway) and Dr Ryan O’Connor (Birmingham City University), and generously supported by the Conflict, Violence & Terrorism Research Centre (CVTRC) at Royal Holloway, University of London.