Anxiety, humour and (geo)politics: warfare by other memes

Humour is usually overlooked in analyses of international politics, this despite its growing prevalence and circulation in an increasingly mediatised world, with this neglect also evident in the growing literature on ontological security and anxiety in IR. Humour, though, needs to be taken seriously...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inInternational relations (London) Vol. 37; no. 1; pp. 172 - 179
Main Authors Browning, Christopher S, Brassett, James
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London, England SAGE Publications 01.03.2023
Sage Publications Ltd
Subjects
Anxiety
Geopolitics
Humor
anxiety
anxiety geopolitics
Covid
ontological security
humour
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Summary:Humour is usually overlooked in analyses of international politics, this despite its growing prevalence and circulation in an increasingly mediatised world, with this neglect also evident in the growing literature on ontological security and anxiety in IR. Humour, though, needs to be taken seriously, crossing as it does the high-low politics divide and performing a variety of functions. In the context of the Covid pandemic we argue that the link between humour and anxiety has been evident in three notable respects: (i) functioning as a (sometimes problematic) form of stress relief at the level of everyday practices of anxiety management, (ii) working to reaffirm biographical narratives of (national) community and status and (iii) most significantly for IR, as a form of anxiety geopolitics.
ISSN:0047-1178
1741-2862
DOI:10.1177/00471178231151561