Oh…Yes. Ilya Somin:

Political scientist Dan Drezner has an interesting essay in Foreign Policy magazine that explores how different international relations theories would cope with an invasion of zombies. It’s based on his forthcoming book Theories of International Politics and Zombies, scheduled to be published by the Princeton University Press. Drezner analyzes the possible responses to a zombie invasion predicted by realist, liberal, and neoconservative theories of international relations. Great stuff!
Unfortunately, he doesn’t consider the possible predictions to be derived from libertarian theories of politics. So I will take a (merely metaphorical) stab at it myself:
I would expect many governments to try to use zombies for their own nefarious ends. Zombies might be an excellent tool of repression for authoritarian states. Government efforts to combat the zombie menace might well be hampered by public choice problems. Various interest groups would surely exploit the zombie crisis as an opportunity to lobby for special benefits for themselves under the pretext of combatting the zombies. For example, farm subsidies for dead farmers will surely go up, as lobbyists argue that the dead farmers might turn into zombies themselves unless they are paid off. In democracies, anti-zombie policy might also be compromised by widespread voter ignorance of zombies and irrationality about them. I venture to predict that voters are likely to be even more ignorant and irrational about zombies than they are on most other policy issues.

There’s a lot to say here, but I think Somin is letting his commitment to libertarian theory overtake his judgment. It is fundamental to all zombie scenarios that efforts to “weaponize” zombies fail almost immediately. To be sure, governments would try to use zombies for their own nefarious ends, but these efforts would only hasten the advance of the zombie menace.

And this is why I’m a little dubious about Drezner’s project, even if I’m very excited about it. For instance, he writes:

How would the introduction of flesh-eating ghouls affect world politics? The realist answer is simple if surprising: International relations would be largely unaffected. Although some would see in a zombie invasion a new existential threat to the human condition, realists would be unimpressed by the claim that the zombies’ arrival would lead to any radical change in human behavior. To them, a plague of the undead would merely echo older plagues, from the Black Death of the 14th century to the 1918 influenza pandemic. To paraphrase Thucydides, the realpolitik of zombies is that the strong will do what they can and the weak must suffer devouring by reanimated, ravenous corpses.
Realists also predict balance-of-power politics, so wouldn’t the specter of the undead create a balancing coalition of humans against ghouls? This possibility cannot be ruled out. If zombies emerged from central Eurasia, for example, their capacity to spread quickly could trigger an alliance designed to prevent zombie hordes from taking over the continent. However, buck-passing would be an equally likely outcome. In a buck-passing situation, states would refrain from taking an active stance against the zombies in the hopes that other countries would do the dirty work of uniting to slay the demon hordes.

It’s almost as if Drezner, a prominent international relations scholar, is more interested in discussing international relations theory than he is about zombies!

I will have more to say about this. But let me just throw it out there: a true zombie invasion will trump traditional international theory (never mind farm subsidies!). The computer modeling of zombie proliferation alone would convince realists, neocons, even the vast majority pacifists to either liquidate the zombies at all costs or to bunker down for their own protection. Zombies, quite simply, would be a game-changer.

More to come.