Abstract

This chapter explores the roles that popular culture plays in shaping and understanding security-related processes. It explains the different ways in which popular culture is conceived by different IR scholars and consequently how it impacts politics, and security issues more specifically. The chapter then focuses on the role of pop culture in managing conflicts (how it shapes basic beliefs about conflicts and how it helps sustain enemy images), how pop culture is used in inter-state geo-political competition, as a source of soft power, and finally, what roles pop culture can play in supporting transitions to peace, and in normalizing various types of understandings of peace.