Citation

Buus S. Coop. Confl. 2009; 44(4): 400-419.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2009, Nordic Committee for the Study of International Politics, Publisher SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/0010836709344446

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

A number of security scholars and policy-makers now approach the fictional narratives of popular culture as both a source of and a tool for imagining current and future threats and risks following the ‘failure of imagination’ that was 9/11. Building on this line of thought, this article assumes that contemporary popular fiction may be important to explorations of national and global security not only because elements of the security community have begun to turn to popular fiction in security scenario thinking and planning, but because people themselves have long turned to the popular cultural works that surround them as a particularly accessible source of security scenarios, thinking and even security practices. With the help of critical literary and cultural theories around the supernatural and crime narratology, as well as existing critical security studies scholarship, this article examines two contemporary popular cultural narratives, ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ from the United States and the Martin Beck series from Sweden, and asks how each narrative can be said to depict the new global security environment and the notion of borderless threats. How does a popular cultural fantasy narrative about energetic teens and demons in America’s low-welfare ‘Ownership Society’ represent the internal—external security boundary as compared with a long-standing popular realist narrative about tired cops and crime in Sweden’s high-welfare ‘People’s Home’? Although such a comparison may at first seem far-fetched, in this article I argue that comparing apples and oranges in this instance proves valuable, since the differing fictional modes at work in ‘Buffy’ and ‘Beck’ not only have much to say about the kinds of internal—external security images and actors that are presented in each, but also the kind of ‘security imagination’ that each narrative makes possible.