The World Politics of Disco Elysium (2025), edited with Nicholas Kiersey

The World Politics of Disco Elysium analyzes the distinctive political claims and original arguments on a wide range of international political issues of the highly-acclaimed Marxist video game Disco Elysium (2019), which takes place in a speculative fictional world anchored in a post-Soviet Estonian perspective.

Disco Elysium (2019) has been repeatedly acclaimed as one of the best video games of all time. This detective role-playing game unfolds in a city ruined by a failed communist revolution and occupied by a foreign coalition. Furthering recent work in International Relations and popular culture, this book claims that the “cognitive estrangement” of speculative fiction can produce theoretical and political novelty, beyond merely reflecting existing political dynamics. By placing a metaphor for the Estonian capital Tallinn at the centre of a world, Disco Elysium produces an estranged Estonian perspective on world politics that challenges dominant Anglo-American views of International Relations, while also undermining the opposition between a coherent West and a colonized Rest. The contributors, from International Relations and Cultural Studies, discuss the game’s claims on topics such as capitalism, (neo)liberalism, foreign intervention, law enforcement, fascism, colonialism, gender, disability, violence, memory, revolutionary politics, the European Union, political realism and international security.

Link to the Routledge book page.

Decomposing the body politic: Sick and disabled resistance in Disco Elysium (2025)

Book chapter in The World Politics of Disco Elysium (2025), edited by Vic Castro and Nicholas Kiersey.

Taking up the theme of disability and liberation, Castro’s chapter notes that the Disco Elysium game self-consciously presents itself as something of a freak show, putting sick, disabled, and mentally ill characters on display for the player’s entertainment. However, they say, portrayals of disability in the game are also integral to the game’s critique of capitalism and liberal modernity. Key here is the notion of “staring,” which gives agency to “ex-human” accounts of life in order to subvert modern ideals about abledness and the sovereign state. For Castro, the genealogy of ableism and politics can be traced back to Hobbes, who attempted to solve the problem of establishing radical equality by subsuming bodily difference within the sovereign will of the modern liberal state. The game shows that subjects who superficially appear abled, or even hyperabled, are often anything but — surfacing a contingent, assemblage-based ontology of the body-mind that opens unexpected avenues for political agency.

Mechanical sex, science, security: Intersex medical violence, Thomas Hobbes and John Money’s invention of gender (2024)

Article in Security Dialogue, volume 55, issue 2, April 2024, pages 142–159.

According to a widespread contemporary medical discourse, intersex people’s well-being is threatened by their own bodily features, which must be ‘corrected’ through emergency surgical measures. Yet intersex people and activists have abundantly documented how these measures enact precisely the suffering that they were framed as countering. This article asks how the presence of such exceptionalist security logic in mundane hospital settings highlights particular intersections of security, bodies and materiality in Western modernity. It puts 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes in dialogue with 20th-century sexologist John Money, and shows how both struggled to construct social order in spite of the disorderly materiality of human bodies. Hobbes ‘invented’ a universal abstracted body, a machine in which matter is subsumed to the fiction of a social will. As science provided mechanistic understandings of sex, race and deviance, the messy materiality of concrete bodies eventually failed to substantiate a biological grounding for the sex binary. Money then ‘invented’ the concept of gender – a social category to which physiological sex is subservient, which feminists later borrowed – to justify violent interventions that physically cut that disorderly materiality out of intersex people’s bodies.

How intelligence tales are made real: Le Bureau des légendes as a cover story for the French DGSE (2023)

Co-authored with Joakim Brattvoll in Intelligence and National Security, volume 38, issue 7, 2023, pages 1112–1126.

The French spy series Le Bureau des légendes (2015–2020) has been acclaimed for its allegedly realistic depiction of French foreign intelligence. Drawing on the concept of ‘legend’, this article adapts actor-network theory to understand how Le Bureau was able to make a significant impact on public discussions of secret intelligence in France. The article shows how the series was constituted as a ‘virtually true’ cover story for the Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure (DGSE), which supported the series’ production, and how this story impacted the DGSE itself.

The limits of imagination: Securitisation and exceptionalism in the World of Warcraft video game (2022)

Article in European Journal of International Security, volume 7, issue 2, 2022, pages 207-225.

Securitisation theory has too often been associated with the liberal state of exception and its problematic baggage. The Copenhagen School’s early claims to deconstruct (not reproduce) the national security logic seem overlooked. Using the fantasy video game World of Warcraft as a large-scale thought experiment, this article asks how a distinct security mode is still possible when the normalisation of armed violence exceeds even what Carl Schmitt’s political theory can provide for. Following a careful reading of Ole Wæver’s formulation of the ‘existential threat’, securitisation asserts that without a certain referent object, the world becomes meaningless. As a tool for reshaping the limits of imagination, securitisation enacts political communities in World of Warcraft by turning upside down common wisdom about normalcy and security. While normal politics are violently conflictual, securitisation fills in the role of international norms and organisation, fostering supranational cooperation and erasing sovereign disputes. Securitisation thus far exceeds its contingent incarnation in the modern concept of security – a conclusion that has consequences for the normative debate on securitisation and for non-Western interpretations of the theory.