(Some of) The Politics of the Hunger Games

21 March 2012, 2158 EDT

As regular readers know, I assigned The Hunger Games in the last iteration of my SciFi class. Ever since then, I’ve been thinking about doing a short book with, one hopes, a less boring title than “The Politics of the Hunger Games.” Indeed, I just finished talking to an editor about it. Unlike the Harry Potter and International Relations volume that I co-edited, or the Battlestar Galactica volume that I co-wrote the conclusion for, this would be a short monograph intended for a non-academic audience.

So far I’ve sketched out chapters with titles like “Capitol Rules: Panem as Empire,” “Capitol Punishment: Panem as Totalitarian State,” “Playing by the Rules: Manipulation through Narrative,” “Capitol Falls: Revolutionary Politics,” “Katniss is not Bella: Class and Gender,” and “Bread and Circuses: Resources and Economics.” Obviously, some of these themes are pretty obvious (and covered in The Hunger Games and Philosophy), but for this kind of book, its less about originality than quality.

Thinking that I should probably find out what the interwebs are saying about the subject, I recently did a trusty google search. Turns out that the top hits include debates (e.g.) about whether the books are “conservative” or “liberal (uh, ok); an interesting, but rather strained attempt to link The Hunger Games to the politics of food; a somewhat disappointing New Yorker piece with “counterinsurgency” in the title; and a very wrongheaded analysis of Panem as an example of “asymmetric federalism.” So I guess there’s room here.

(Previously at the Duck, Charli talks Hunger Games.)

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.