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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....