Reading comics for the field of International Relations: Theory, method and the Bosnian War

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European Journal of International Relations 23(3)
the general category of popular culture or by relying on existing IR analysis of moving images or literary genres. Yet, although IR scholars have promoted the study of popular culture and made intertextual connections across a range of (seemingly) strange bodies of work for more than 25 years, the medium of comics has largely escaped attention (Der
Derian and Shapiro, 1989). As of 2016, only two articles related to comics have been published in major IR journals and they have been on the pedagogical potential of using graphic novels as a teaching resource (Juneau and Sucharov, 2010) and on the specific genre of current affairs comics (Thorsten, 2012). Although often critically acclaimed, such books makeup only a fraction of what is produced through the medium of comics. The starting point for this article is thus that a thorough account of this medium in general and its significance for research in IR is warranted, and that there are at least four reasons why comics should be incorporated into IR research they are an important form of popular culture they may work as an outlet for critical, marginal discourses comics and their creators are sociologically significant for the mediation and experience of foreign policy and comics can generate and further research questions of importance to IRA first reason why comics should be brought into IR is that in terms of production, circulation and consumption, many comics carry the mass audience and fiction, entertainment, amusement connotations of popular culture (Rowley, 2015: 361–363) — whether popular culture is defined as a set of practices (Weldes, 2003: 6) or a category of artefacts — that engage explicitly with international politics. American superhero comics like Superman and Captain America have historically been published in large numbers and have dealt with the Second World War, the Cold War and the war on terror
(Dittmer, 2005, 2013). As the most prominent figure of francophone comics, Hergé took the fearless reporter Tintin to the furthest corners of the globe, introducing children to places like the Balkans, Egypt, America, the Congo, Latin America and Tibet. The
Adventures of Tintin, first published in French, have been translated into 50 languages, have sold more than 200 million copies and continuously sell more than 2 million copies per year The reasons why research on popular culture is important and how such research should be conducted are by now well established in IR. Providing analysis of a wide range of popular culture — movies, novels, television series and videogames — IR scholars have argued convincingly that it is important to study widely consumed cultural artefacts as these are crucial for the constitution of the social (Kiersey and Neumann,
2013; Neumann, 2001: 608; Neumann and Nexon, 2006; Robinson, 2015; Rowley and
Weldes, 2012; Weber, 2006). Such artefacts may not come forth as explicit attempts to impact foreign policymaking or even as inputs to broader political debates, yet they rely upon and produce particular representations of international subjectivity and practices of significance for world politics, including, for example, diplomacy and military intervention.
The second reason for bringing comics into IR draws on the capacity of comics to offer critique of established political discourses or bring into analytical focus those who are not represented if international relations are defined exclusively as intergovernmental. As I have argued elsewhere, the study of marginal actors and discourses becomes salient when analyzing where resistance and future rearticulations might occur and is particularly warranted when governmental discourse has successfully hegemonized the political and media discourses (Hansen, 2006: 63). Looking to the history of

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comics, activists have adopted comics as a medium through which to communicate their causes. Over the past 15 years, comics journalism has been spearheaded as a genre by American-Maltese comics artist Joe Sacco, who describes his works as concerned with those who seldom get a hearing as The powerful are generally excellently served by the mainstream media or propaganda organs (Sacco, 2012: xiv. Marginalized discourses may also arise from human beings whose everyday experiences of world politics are narrated through the genre of graphic memoir (Enloe, 1989; Sylvester, 2013).
Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, on childhood during and after the Iranian revolution in
1979, is a casein point.
The third reason for researching comics from an IR perspective concerns the political- sociological status of the medium and those who produce and use them. Approaching comics from this angle, there are two ways in which they connect with international relations. The first is through the observation that some comics artists have come to inhabit a position in the public sphere where they are constituted not only as producing aesthetically praised work, but also as capable of being public intellectuals or expert voices on foreign policy. The most prominent example in this respect is Art Spiegelman, whose
Maus — a two-volume work that weaves the story of his parents personal experience of the Nazi Holocaust with his own difficulties of dealing with his ailing father — received a Pulitzer Prize, has been translated into more than 30 languages, has sold more than 3.1 million copies worldwide and has become the subject of lengthy academic analysis.
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Spiegelman was on Time magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people in
2005 and has been a central figure in debates following the Danish Cartoon Crisis in
2005 (Spiegelman, 2006) and the attacks on Charlie Hebdo in 2015. Another prominent comics intellectual, Marjane Satrapi, testified on Iranian election fraud to the European Parliament following the Iranian elections in 2009.
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Theoretically, this raises the question of who become public voices of foreign policy authority, and how certain forms of knowledge become sociologically signified as having a status that may, in turn, allow someone to speak across a particular domain (Hansen, 2006; Lebow, 2007). The second political-sociological interface between comics and IR relates to the argument made particularly by IR feminist scholars that we should be concerned with the way that non- elites experience and practise international relations (Sylvester, 2013). At the level of everyday practice, comics have along tradition of spurring community building among fans and followers. Korean War veterans, for example, commented on the accurateness of battle scenes on the Combat Correspondence pages of magazines from the s, thus finding a space to convey their experiences of war (Hilbish, 1999: 221). As the possibilities for interconnectivity have expanded dramatically with the advent of the Internet, there is now a wealth of sites through which opinions and experiences are shared
(Sakamoto and Allen, 2007). Studying practices around comics might also reveal appropriations that negotiate the meaning of genre or particular comics. For instance, Nancy Rose Hunt (2002: 93, 96) traces how Tintin in the Congo — arguably a case of colonial paternalism and racist caricature — is turned into a postcolonial joke in contemporary Zaire (on colonialism in The Adventures of Tintin, see also Frey, The fourth reason for bringing comics into IR is that the medium may allow us to further our understanding of questions of general significance beyond the study of comics. Comics, in short, are not just objects needing study in IR, they might be put in the

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