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The World Politics of Disco Elysium
The World Politics of Disco Elysium analyses 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.
The World Politics of Disco Elysium will be of great interest to students and scholars researching the politics of popular culture, post-Soviet politics, non-Western International Relations, as well as game studies and cultural studies.
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.
The World Politics of Disco Elysium will be of great interest to students and scholars researching the politics of popular culture, post-Soviet politics, non-Western International Relations, as well as game studies and cultural studies.
- GenresPhilosophyPolitics
278 pages, Hardcover
Published June 30, 2025
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November 5, 2025---
This is cute but not apt. It's good to remember that political theory is not the same as political reality,, that this whole book, this whole field is just a representation. But political fiction like DE is not mostly second-order (a representation of a representation), except when the characters talk about theory (which some do). I think they're still trying to establish the seriousness of talking about videogames on the company dime. I thought that died out in the noughties.
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The larding (Hogg 1902) of citations (Schooly 1990) is hard to get used to again (Leech 2025).
scholars have focused on the complex circulation of ideas between first- and second-order representations of world politics. Revachol, the second-order speculative fictional city at the heart of the game is a cultural object rife with tensions echoing the predicaments of our own world politics.
This is cute but not apt. It's good to remember that political theory is not the same as political reality,, that this whole book, this whole field is just a representation. But political fiction like DE is not mostly second-order (a representation of a representation), except when the characters talk about theory (which some do). I think they're still trying to establish the seriousness of talking about videogames on the company dime. I thought that died out in the noughties.
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The larding (Hogg 1902) of citations (Schooly 1990) is hard to get used to again (Leech 2025).
Displaying 1 of 1 review