I recall a conference where the discussant of a paper by Dan Drezner began his comments by saying that he was about to take us into “Dreznerland.” This was said part as jibe but mostly as admiring recognition of the unique perspective that Dan Drezner brings to much of his work. And that commentator had not even read Theories of International Politics and Zombies.

Who else in the profession would come up with the idea for such a book? And get it published by a university press? And make it a book that cuts into the grand disciplinary theory and “-isms” debates in ways that are both culturally clever and intellectually insightful.

If you keep your nose from going up in the initial “Zombie Literature” chapter, you get to the context of contending theories of international relations: “Looking at the state of international relations theory, one quickly realizes the absence of consensus about the best way to model world politics. There are multiple existing paradigms that attempt to explain international politics” (pp. 16–17). It is not even that the IR theory debate remains unresolved; it may never be resolved, indeed may not be possible to do so. It is that many self-styled high-level approaches do not even provide much insight into the relative strengths of particular paradigms. I am not convinced that a zombie attack is “an exemplar for salient concerns about the global body politic” (p. 18; emphasis added), but I do think this scenario is a sufficiently rich quasi-case study to provide “a way to stress test our existing theories” (p. 17; emphasis added).

Seven major theories—realism, liberal internationalism, neoconservatism, constructivism, domestic politics, bureaucratic politics, and psychological theories—each get their own chapter assessing their explanatory power for the ways in which the world would respond to a zombie attack. Realism, with its tenets of anarchy and self-help, posits no more international cooperation against a zombie attack than any other threat. “The strong will do what they can,” Thucydides is paraphrased, “and the weak must suffer devouring by reanimated, ravenous corpses” (p. 38). Liberal internationalism is characteristically more optimistic “that the incentive for multilateral cooperation among humans would be powerful” (p. 53), providing some global governance as through a coordinating World Zombie Organization (WZO), though with limitations just as inherent to the paradigm from open borders, state sovereignty constraints, and perhaps even advocacy from global civil society and nongovernmental organizations “devoted to the defense of the living dead” (p. 57).

Neoconservatives would push for “an aggressive and militarized response to ensure the continued hegemony of the human race,” with the added skewering that they might “invade Iraq out of force of habit” (pp. 63, 62). For at least some strands of constructivism, “the existential peril posed by zombies could be the exogenous shock needed to break down nationalist divides and advance the creation of a world state” (p. 72). I will leave for the reader's own interpretation the social identity connection between the lifestyles of college students and zombies and the possibility of merged norms.

The domestic politics literature pulls in different directions, toward assertive response initially through the mobilization that high threat levels tend to precipitate, but with us-first nationalism limiting interstate cooperation, as well as potential domestic constraints kicking in over time as the conflict gets drawn out and casualties mount. For bureaucratic politics, Drezner brings in one of the zombie lit novels, The Rising (Brian Keene, 2003), in which the president turned into a zombie and devoured the secretary of state, prompting a Secret Service agent to draw his weapon to shoot the zombie president, only to be shot by another agent still following standard operating procedure of defending the president. And, yes, “where you stand depends on who you eat” (p. 90).

In the psychology theory chapter we run through confirmation bias, fundamental attribution error, rational choice, prospect theory, groupthink, and other first-image theories. Each has its own propositions and predictions, posing questions that bear not only on policy but also on the potential responses of social units such as communities and families.

The book thus is true to its title. It really is about IR theory. It does not delve as deeply into the interstices of the various paradigms as mainstream work does. But it brings out key tenets and provides comparative paradigm assessments quite effectively and quite accessibly—especially for undergraduates, and arguably for graduate students. If I were teaching an IR theory course, I would use it.

The book also has two other values. One is that it's flat-out fun to read. Drezner's humor is wry. Some connections and extrapolations get pretty far out, but even these are entertaining. The illustrations are New Yorker–like; for example, on page 44, a zombie official making its case at the United Nations, and on page 58, 1960s-like demonstrators decrying anti-zombie-ism. The illustrator, Anne Karetnikov, is to be commended for contributing greatly to the presentational power of the text. While we academics have an institutional interest in too many pictures not being worth a thousand words, we do benefit from picture-words complementarity.

The other value is its policy relevance—not in the sense of a focused policy paper, bullet-pointed memo, op-ed commentary, or the like, but in showing the limits of all the paradigms surveyed for contemporary security problems. The zombie threat can be categorized as nonstate and asymmetric, which makes it relevant for understanding terrorists, hackers, pandemics, climate change, and so many other threats that are neither state-centric nor conducive to strategizing with traditional instruments of power. So even if one is not yet ready to queue up zombie movies on one's Netflix list, the question of IR theory's “eroding analytic leverage over the security problems of the twenty-first century” (p. 112) is one to be acknowledged and addressed. Drezner's book makes this case creatively and cogently.