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Geopolitics, Northern Europe,
and Nordic Noir
With its focus on the popular television genre of Nordic noir, this book
examines subtle and explicit manifestations of geopolitics in crime series
from Scandinavia and Finland, as well as the impact of such programmes
on how northern Europe is viewed around the world.
Drawing on a diverse set of literature, from screen studies to critical
International Relations, Geopolitics, Northern Europe, and Nordic Noir:
What Television Series Tell Us About World Politics addresses the fraught
geopolitical content of Nordic television series, as well as how Nordic noir
as a genre travels the globe. With empirical chapters focusing on the inter-
linked concepts of the body, the border, and the nation-state, this book
interrogates the various ways in which northern European states grap-
ple with challenges wrought by globalisation, neoliberalism, and climate
change. Reflecting the current global fascination with all things Nordic, this
text examines the light and dark sides of the region as seen through the tele-
vision screen, demonstrating that series such as Occupied, Trapped, and The
Bridge have much to teach us about world politics.
This book will be of interest to those interested in geopolitics, national
identity, and the politics of popular culture in Scandinavian studies, media/
screen studies, IR/political science, human/cultural geography, sociology,
anthropology, cultural studies, and communication.
Robert A. Saunders is a Professor in the Department of History, Politics, and

Geography at Farmingdale State College – State University of New York,
USA, where he teaches courses in world politics and European culture. His
research explores various intersections of popular culture, geopolitics, nation-
alism, and religious identity. Professor Saunders’ scholarship has appeared in
Millennium, Politics, Political Geography, Nations and Nationalism, Social &
Cultural Geography, and Geopolitics, among other journals. He is the author
of several books, including Popular Geopolitics and Nation Branding in the
Post-Soviet Realm (Routledge, 2017).
Popular Culture and World Politics
The Popular Culture World Politics (PCWP) book series is the forum for
leading interdisciplinary research that explores the profound and diverse
interconnections between popular culture and world politics. It aims to
bring further innovation, rigor, and recognition to this emerging sub-field
of international relations.
To these ends, the PCWP series is interested in various themes, from the
juxtaposition of cultural artefacts that are increasingly global in scope and
regional, local, and domestic forms of production, distribution, and con-
sumption; to the confrontations between cultural life and global political,
social, and economic forces; to the new or emergent forms of politics that
result from the rescaling or internationalisation of popular culture.
Similarly, the series provides a venue for work that explores the effects
of new technologies and new media on established practices of representa-
tion and the making of political meaning. It encourages engagement with
popular culture as a means for contesting powerful narratives of particular
events and political settlements as well as explorations of the ways that pop-
ular culture informs mainstream political discourse. The series promotes
investigation into how popular culture contributes to changing perceptions
of time, space, scale, identity, and participation while establishing the outer
limits of what is popularly understood as ‘political’ or ‘cultural’.
In addition to film, television, literature, and art, the series actively
encourages research into diverse artefacts including sound, music, food cul-
tures, gaming, design, architecture, programming, leisure, sport, fandom,
and celebrity. The series is fiercely pluralist in its approaches to the study of
popular culture and world politics and is interested in the past, present, and
future cultural dimensions of hegemony, resistance, and power.
Edited by Matt Davies, Newcastle University, Kyle Grayson, Newcastle
University, Simon Philpott, Newcastle University, Christina Rowley,
University of Bristol, & Jutta Weldes, University of Bristol
The Art of Global Power

Artwork and Popular Cultures as World-Making Practices
Edited by Emily Merson
Nationalism and Popular Culture

Edited by Tim Nieguth
Geopolitics, Northern Europe, and Nordic Noir

What Television Series Tell Us About World Politics
Robert A. Saunders
For more information about this series, please visit:

https://www.routledge.com/Popular-Culture-and-World-Politics/book-
series/PCWP
Geopolitics, Northern Europe,
and Nordic Noir
What Television Series Tell Us About
World Politics
Robert A. Saunders
First published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
© 2021 Robert A. Saunders
The right of Robert A. Saunders to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Saunders, Robert A., 1973- author.
Title: Geopolitics, Northern Europe, and Nordic noir: what television
series tell us about world politics / Robert A. Saunders.
Description: London; New York: Routledge, 2021. | Series: Popular
culture and world politics | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020037259 (print) | LCCN 2020037260 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781138368347 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429429316 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Detective and mystery television programs—
Scandinavia—History and criticism. | Crime on television. |
Geopolitics on television. | International relations on television.
Classification: LCC PN1992.8.D48 S28 2021 (print) |
LCC PN1992.8.D48 (ebook) | DDC 791.45/6556—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037259
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037260
ISBN: 978-1-138-36834-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-42931-6 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman

by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.
Ja, jag vill leva, jag vill dö i Norden. [Yes, I want
to live, I want to die in the North.]
— Final verse of the Swedish national anthem1
1 This lyric was added to the Swedish national anthem by Louise Ahlén in 1910.
Translation by Robert A. Saunders.
Contents
List of figures viii

List of tables ix
List of boxes x
Preface xi
1 Co-constituting the world: Popular culture and geopolitics 1
2 Why Norden? Why now? A geopolitical foregrounding 26
3 Northern places, dark spaces: Norden as a realm

of imagination 54
4 It’s the little things: Bodies, communities, encounters 78
5 In/Out/In-between: (B)orders, liminality, and us/them 104
6 Ideology versus idylls: Neoliberalism, nationalism,

and nature 133
7 Beyond Norden: The global geopolitics of a genre 163
Appendix: Television and TV film series 191

Index 195
Figures
2.1 British Prime Minister Winston Churchill reviewing British

troops during the World War II in Iceland 29
2.2 Memorial to the orphans of war, 1939–1945, Lappeenranta,
Finland 33
3.1 Denmark: The happiest country on Earth? 55
4.1 A matter of bodies against nature: Investigating
in the Far North 89
4.2 Frozen necrocorporeality: The body as a political signifier 90
4.3 The Danish ferry: A tether to a another world, bringing
foreign bodies 91
5.1 The Øresund Bridge connecting Copenhagen and Malmö 109
5.2 Saga Norén’s apartment building in Västra Hamnen, Malmö 112
5.3 The securitised border from the perspective of the Finnish side 120
5.4 The opening scene of the series showing the UPM Kaukas
paper mill from the edge of Saimaa 121
6.1 A view of central Oslo from the Akershus Fortress 140
6.2 The (fictional) thorium power station 141
6.3 Fornebu offices of Statoil qua Norway’s seat of power 143
6.4 The Russian-Norwegian border 144
6.5 Norwegians vs. Afghans: Horsemanship across the world 150
7.1 Danish comedian Jonatan Spang’s ‘Draman’ spoof
of The Bridge 164
Tables
1.1 Nordic noir series and/as (geo)political culture(s) 10

Boxes
2.1 World War II 31

2.2 The Cold War 36
3.1 Gender 66
4.1 Imperialism 85
4.2 The environment 94
5.1 Religion 115
5.2 Nationalism 124
6.1 Terrorism 138
6.2 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 146
6.3 Global War on Terror (GWOT) 148
Preface
The book you hold in your hands began on ‘The Bridge’. In December 2015,
I attended a Carlsberg-funded workshop at the University of Copenhagen
entitled ‘Typical Russian Autocracy Versus Shockingly Depraved Europe:
A Conference on Cultural Stereotypes and Popular Geopolitics in the Putin
Age’. During a break between sessions, my colleague and fellow ‘Florida
Man’, Jason Dittmer, pulled me aside and asked if had seen Swedish-Danish
television series The Bridge, i.e. Bron|Broen (2011–2018). I confessed igno-
rance of its very existence but did a bit of research that evening and before
the sun set on the next day (which at that time of the year was during the
mid-afternoon), I had already decided to use my remaining time overseas
to cross the Øresund strait and visit Malmö, Sweden. Luckily, a Danish col-
league urged me to grab my passport before heading over to Skåne (Scania),
while also dutifully reminding me of the fact that where I was going used
to belong to Denmark. Again, my ignorance prompted further discussion.
I had wrongly assumed Schengen protocols were in effect, thus allowing for
the unfettered movement of people between Denmark and Sweden; but this
was not the case (nor is it at the time of writing). My interlocutor seemed to
resent the new border controls to no end, given both Denmark’s historic loss
of a big chunk of the southern part of the Scandinavian Peninsula and the
current interruption in the social and economic flows that had been taken
for granted since the international span opened on 1 July 2000.
He informed me that due to the so-called ‘Syrian refugee crisis’, Sweden
had imposed identity checks on certain routes from Denmark, including
train and road travel via the Øresund Bridge, that space so associated with
the world’s most popular Nordic noir television series. Indeed, a perfunc-
tory check of my passport occurred during the passage from Copenhagen
Central Station to Malmö C (being a middle-aged American mantled in a
North Face winter coat, sporting a top-knot and an overgrown salt-and-
pepper beard, and features that often provoke comments that I ‘look like a
Viking’, I breezed through with barely a glance at my papers). Thereafter,
I spent a wonderful day exploring Sweden’s ‘southern capital’, gazing at its
architecture and street art, partaking of its beer culture, and sampling its
cuisine. That fleeting day was capped off with an impromptu visit to Gothic
xii Preface
Sankt Petri Church where I sat in awe, listening to a choir practice their
Christmas performance in one of the best sound caves I have ever entered.
This southern Scandinavian city, made into an anonymous urbanscape by
four seasons of The Bridge and regularly vilified by FOX News, captured
my heart and my imagination. Filled with colour, life, and a friendly mul-
ticultural populace, Malmö defied all the stereotypes I had been exposed
to, including those gleaned from my Swedish friends from Stockholm who
chided me that the city is ‘not even part of Sweden’.
In the coming weeks, I began a new research agenda that pulled me west
but kept me moored in an academically safe space (my previous scholar-
ship has mostly focused on Russia, Central Asia and ‘eastern’ Europe, and
more specifically Western and/or Anglophone representations of these
post-socialist spaces). Of course, at the time, I did not know how impor-
tant that bridge-crossing would be, but after several years of sustained
scholarly inquiry and repeated visits to Denmark and Sweden, as well for-
ays to Iceland, Norway, and Finland, it started to become clear the ‘the
Bridge’/The Bridge had changed my life forever, both academically and per-
sonally. Crossing that chasm certainly had costs, but the benefits that came
with it produced this book. Since those heady days that fired my northern
imagination, my Netflix profile has siloed, shrinking in some ways while
expanding in others. My choices slowly taught the great algorithms that
Netflix relies onto make it one of the most successful media companies of
the new millennium that I wanted to live in a televisual world built around
women detectives in chunky knitwear, darkened landscapes that pivoted
from the urban to the boreal on a moment’s notice, and socio-political
realms defined by a cracked-but-not-yet-broken welfare state. The Bridge
led me down the Nordic noir rabbit hole, and like Alice I began to see the
universe in a whole new way.
This book is the culmination of several years of work on various top-
ics relating to geopolitics, northern Europe, and Nordic noir television
series. Chapter 1 includes several passages from my co-authored (with Joel
Vessels) essay ‘Televisual Diplomacy: I am the Ambassador and Danish
Nation Branding at Home and Abroad’ Politics, 2019, 39(4): 430–447 and
‘Dark Screens: Geopolitical Television Drama within and beyond the
Nordic Region’, Nordicom Review, 2020, 41(s1): 11–27 (co-authored with Pei
Sze Chow and Anne Marit Waade), as well as portions of ‘Small Screen
IR: A Tentative Typology of Geopolitical Television’, Geopolitics, 2019,
24(3): 691–727. The empirical sections of Chapter 4 are drawn from my
chapter ‘Arctic Bodies: Sights/Sites of Necro-Corporeality in Nordic Noir
Television Series’, which appeared in Visual Representations of the Arctic:
Imagining Shimmering Worlds in Culture, Literature and Politics, edited
by Arja Rosenholm, Markku Lehtimäki, and Vlad Strukov (Routledge,
forthcoming). The chapter which appears in this book has been edited
since submission for the edited volume, although it retains roughly the
same empirical content and analysis. Chapter 5 brings together previously
Preface xiii
published analyses of The Bridge and Bordertown which appeared as
‘Geopolitical Television at the (B)order: Liminality, Global Politics, and
World-Building in The Bridge’, Social & Cultural Geography, 2019, 20(7):
981–1003, ‘A Dark Imaginarium: The Bridge, Malmö, and the Creation of
a “Non-Existent” Place’, Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, 2017, 4(3): 361–
385, and ‘Walking in (a) Bordertown: Sorjonen and the Spatial Imaginary
of Lappeenranta’, TV/Series 2020, no. 18, available at: https://journals.
openedition.org/tvseries/4877. Similarly, portions of Chapter 6 appeared in
‘Landscape, Geopolitics, and National Identity in the Norwegian Thrillers
Occupied and Nobel’, Nordicom Review, 2020, 41(s1): 63–83. Certain parts
of my chapter ‘Criminal/Liminal/Seminal: Nordic Border-Crossings and
Crossers in Contemporary Geopolitical Drama’ from the collected volume
Transnational Crime Fiction: Mobility, Borders and Detection, eds. Maarit
Piipponen, Tiina Mäntymäki, and Marinella Rodi-Risberg (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2020, pp. 205–223) have also been synthesised into the text, as
are some passages of my short essay ‘Cracks in Nordic Noir TV Series’ from
the online Encyclopaedia of Nordic Noir at Nordics.Info (https://nordics.
info/show/artikel/cracks/ - March 2019). Chapter 7 reprises sections of the
above-referenced article in Social & Cultural Geography, as well portions of
my chapter ‘Neoliberal Violence: Marcella and Britain’s Monstrous Work
Culture’, which appeared in The Best Murders Are British: Essays on the
International Appeal of English Crime Dramas © 2020, edited by Jim Daems.
Permission provided by McFarland & Company, Inc., Box 611, Jefferson,
NC 28640, www.mcfarlandbooks.com.
Given the primarily Anglophone focus of Geopolitics, Northern Europe,
and Nordic Noir, television series referenced in this text generally employ
the English-language title where one exists. For ease of reference, these
series’ original title(s) are provided in Appendix 1: Television Series; also
included are the country of origin, original dates of airing, and network(s),
e.g. The Eagle: A Crime Odyssey/Ørnen: En krimi-odyssé, Denmark, DR,
2004–2006. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.
With regards to acknowledgments, I would like to offer my sincere grat-
itude to Anne Marit Waade and the other members of the team at What
Makes Danish TV Drama Series Travel? Transnational Production,
Cultural Export and the Global Reception of Danish Drama Series (http://
danishtvdrama.au.dk/). Additionally, I wish to recognise the generous sup-
port of Aarhus University Research Foundation (AUFF), which funded
a portion of my research conducted in Denmark, and the Institute for
Urban Research (IUR) at Malmö University, which supported my research
in Sweden. I am also grateful for support from Reimaging Norden in an
Evolving World (ReNEW), which funded the ‘Nordic Noir, Geopolitics,
and the North’ workshop at Aarhus University in October 2018. I would
also like to acknowledge Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs
Laura Joseph for granting me a leave of absence from my teaching duties at
Farmingdale State College to conduct research in Scandinavia.
xiv Preface
No book is ever the product of one mind, and I owe debt of thanks to
the following individuals who helped me think through various aspects
of the analysis: Tine Roesen, Søren Abildgaard, Pei Sze Chow, Susanne
Eichner, Kim Toft Hansen, Gunhild Agger, Lynge Stegger Gemzøe,
Richard Cole, Pia Majbritt Jensen, Søren Bastholm, Stephen Joyce, Szilvia
Gyimóthy, Ushma Chauhan Jacobsen, Jaakko Seppälä, Jakob Stougaard-
Nielsen, Klaus Dodds, Tobias Hochscherf, Anna Estera Mrozewicz, Nicola
Witcombe, Mary Hilson, Michael Bang, Simon Halink, Georgia Aitaki,
Karin Zelano, Irina Souch, Sue Turnbull, Giancarlo Lombardi, Guy
Baeten, Saara Ratilainen, Maarit Piipponen, Mirka Rahman, Annette Hill,
Kim Frederichsen, Jason Dittmer, Joel Lena Jakobsson, Vlad Strukov, the
wonderful Simon Philpott, and my pride and joy, Kieran Fino-Saunders.
My deepest thanks, however, go to my muse, best friend, and partner-for-
the-universe, Gabriella Calchi Novati.
1 Co-constituting the world
Popular culture and geopolitics
Geopolitical television in the ‘North’

By one reading of the discipline’s historiography, it can be argued that
geopolitics actually began on the Scandinavian Peninsula. The founder
of Geopolitik, Rudolf Kjellén (1864–1922), obsessed about Norway, argu-
ing that maintaining influence over the country’s mountainous geography
was fundamental to the security of his native Sweden (Toal and Agnew
2002). His signature text, Staten som lifsform or ‘The State as a Form of
Life’, described a roiling world populated with quasi-biological organisms
or ‘super-individual creatures [i.e. states] … which are just as real as individ-
uals but disproportionately bigger and more powerful in the course of their
development’ (Kjellén 1924, 35). Kjellén’s evocative geopolitical imagery
impacted a generation of thinkers, including Karl Haushofer whose influ-
ence on Nazi ideology is undeniable.1 More than a century on from Kjellén’s
foundational work, geopolitics is increasingly on our minds and our screens,
functioning as a ‘prime popular cultural and political topic in the new cen-
tury’ (Debrix 2008, 9). As the French political scientist Dominique Moïsi
(2016) reminds us, geopolitically inflected television reveals the ‘emotions
of the world’, particularly in times of turmoil and rapid change. Enhanced
by new viewing technologies, spread via transnational digital distribution,
and defined by ever-increasing levels of quality, television is emerging as the
cultural medium for exploring the world.
Since the dawn of the new millennium, television has become more geo-
political, with the proliferation of serious, high-quality dramatic series that
are defined by their engagement with international issues including terror-
ism, the refugee crisis, nuclear deterrence, and climate change. From Game
of Thrones to Homeland to House of Cards, big-budget Anglophone series
dominate global screens, building realms of imagination that map onto our
own, influencing how we see international politics, and informing where one
belongs in this geopolitical matrix via calculated delimitations of ‘fictive
Wes and Thems’ (Gregory 1994, 204). However, English-language series do
not possess a monopoly on screening popular geopolitics via serial televi-
sion. Netflix, Amazon Prime, and other transnational, on-demand content
providers are increasingly populating their catalogues with non-English
language programming. While Spanish, French, and Russian series are pre-
dictably popular owing to their geolinguistic scope, television series from
northern Europe, and especially Nordic noir crime dramas subtitled for
global audiences, have proven extremely attractive to consumers around
the globe.
As the screened scion of Scandinavian detective fiction, Nordic noir – as
a regional form of geopolitical TV – is imbued with ethical, social, and cul-
tural concerns that distinguish it from analogue fare in the United States,
Germany, the United Kingdom, or Italy. Rooted in a critical, leftist tradition
that ultimately indicts the state and/or multinational corporations (MNCs)
through key details that manifest during the investigation (see Stougaard-
Nielsen 2017), Scandi-noir as a literary genre endowed its televisual offspring
with a fecund reservoir of normative orientations and approaches to crime
which have made it especially geopolitical in the current era. As Cinema
Scandinavia’s editor-in-chief Emma Vestrheim argues, the entirety of the
genre exists in the shadow of the assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof
Palme, a real-world embodiment of ‘the righteous welfare state’. Occurring
on the streets of Stockholm as the PM walked home from the cinema with his
wife, the 1986 murder remains unsolved, laying bare the notion that ‘Sweden
is not a perfect country’ (Vestrheim 2015, 16). Palme’s killing sent shock-
waves across the country and beyond, or as the BBC documentary Nordic
Noir: The Story of Scandinavian Crime Fiction puts it, this was ‘like the 9/11’
of the North (Murphy 2010). As northern Europe grapples with the post–
Cold War challenges of globalisation, neoliberalism, right-wing nationalism,
transnational crime rings, international migration, and climate change, noir
– both in its screened and print versions – keeps apace. Recent series such
as Finland’s Bordertown, Norway’s Nobel, Denmark’s Dicte, Sweden’s Blue
Eyes, and Iceland’s Trapped all have something to say about these issues,
and more importantly, they ‘say’ them in a Nordic way (even when using
English as the medium of communication as in the case of Netflix’s Young
Wallander). Rather than aping models of geopolitical television established
by American, British, or German series, northern European programming
is leading by example. Stylistically, Nordic noir is being increasingly emu-
lated and/or adapted, and in the process, the value systems that are inherent
in the genre are extending beyond Norden (cf. Redvall 2016, Agger 2017, Hill
and Turnbull 2018).
Why is this important? As screen studies scholar Milly Buonnanno states,
flows of television across international borders ‘widen the range of our
imaginative geography, multiply our symbolic life-worlds, familiarize our-
selves with “the other” and “the distant” and construct “a sense of imagined
places”’ (Buonnano 2008, 109). Residing in such imaginary worlds is not neu-
tral with regard to how people view world politics; rather, exploration and
co-creation of such imaginaries produce what cyberpunk novelist William
Gibson (1984) terms consensual hallucinations that, like anthropologist
Co-constituting the world 3
Benedict Anderson’s (1991) imagined communities, have acute ramifications
on geopolitical thinking.2 Put another way: ‘The countries of the mind are
real countries, legitimate to build, legitimate to inhabit’ (Wagenknecht 1946,
437, see also Saler 2012). This brings to mind geographer Mary Gilmartin’s
trenchant maxim: ‘Earth writing [i.e. geography] takes the world as we
experience or understand it, and translates it into images’ (Gilmartin 2004,
282); however, as the growing scholarship of popular geopolitics demon-
strates, this relationship is increasingly inverted, whereby the images we see
are translated into how we experience and understand the world around
us. While the anticipatory capacity of popular culture remains a topic of
some debate, it is abundantly clear that media, with its ability to generate
‘affect-saturated memory’ (Ó Tuathail 2003, 858), prepares citizenries for
potential outcomes, including geopolitical ones. More than just represent-
ing and predicting political outcomes, television series have been recognised
as making meaningful contributions to how space and place are seen, expe-
rienced, and understood. Importantly, as television series – especially the
sorts of geopolitically inflected dramas investigated herein – cross borders,
they complicate, comment on, and increasingly challenge established geopo-
litical visions, orders, and codes (Dijkink 1996). Via exposure to these new
narratives, which provide the viewer with choice in what sorts of ‘fictional
space-times’ they want to affectively engage with (Tischleder 2017, 121), we
are seeing important ramifications for world politics.
As such, the increasingly popular ‘northern’ style of dramatic television –
whether in the form of rather straightforward crime dramas like The Killing
or more geopolitically inclined series such as Occupied – is making an impact
around the globe as a de facto extension of the so-called Nordic model of
good governance, social and gender equality, and the provision of welfare
to its population (see Marklund 2017). Counter-intuitively, it is through a
medium that is drenched in blood and strewn with corpses that such influ-
ence is being wielded, playing on what historian Michael Saler calls ironic
imagination, a form of ‘double consciousness’ that allows for embracing
multiple worlds and multiple truths without ‘losing sight of the real world’
(Saler 2012, 14). Going beyond the genre of noir crime fiction, transnational
television studies scholars increasingly recognise Nordic programming as a
paragon of high quality television, and one with an enormous global reach
that has produced significant impacts that stretch far beyond its viewership
of primarily cosmopolitan, niche audiences (Jensen and Jacobsen 2020).
Abetted by advances in the production and distribution, particularly via
transnational streaming platforms, programmes like Borgen and Skam are
taking the world by storm, while also serving as exemplars of what contem-
porary television can and should be.
Recognising this state of affairs, the New York Times recently noted that
‘Netflix’s colonization of international television continues’ (Hale 2018),
highlighting the company’s recent decision to fund its first production in
Scandinavia, the apocalyptic near-future series The Rain (2018–2020). In
using such language, it is clear that the medium of television represents a new
field of power in International Relations, as the images depicted, stories told,
and landscapes screened help shape reality, and thus play a part in determin-
ing world politics in the twenty-first century. Moreover, the North – in its many
forms, especially those associated with the Arctic – is increasingly prevalent
in the global geopolitical imagination, especially via the tendency to engage
in ‘spatial spectacle’ or ‘geographic dramaturgy’ (Toft Hansen and Waade
2017, 89, 182), a trend that is being emulated in other national and regional
television productions. The most pressing issue of our time, climate change –
alongside its concomitant outcomes including extreme weather events (i.e.
hurricanes, heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, intense storms, etc.), extinction
of species, rising sea levels, reduction in crop yields, and the displacement
of peoples and disruption of their lifeways – is finding purchase in Nordic-
produced popular culture, not least of which with the ecocritical series Thin
Ice and Ragnarok. It is important to note that different regions possess differ-
ent concerns when it comes to scripting, scaping, and scrutinising world pol-
itics on the small screen. Just as geopolitical television programming from
South Asia like Ghoul tells us about the ‘emotions’ (see Moïsi 2016) of the
Pakistani-Indian rivalry and the Australian series Secret City screens fears
about China’s growing influence over Canberra, so too do Nordic noir series
provide a mirror of contemporary concerns across northern Europe. And
with Norden’s increasing status as model to the world, the influence of its
geopolitical television is of acute importance to scholars of IR.
Popular culture as the ‘real world’

Popular culture is increasingly influencing world politics, whether we speak
of the ‘celebritisation’ of/celebrities as heads of state, the impact of geo-
political imagination on popular attitudes towards the ‘Other’, or the role
of pop-culture artefacts in provoking international crises. Certainly, this
is nothing really new, from the myriad ways in which literature shaped
Western views of the Arab world to the pedagogical role of spy-thrillers in
the Cold War to the socialising power of videogames vis-à-vis the so-called
‘global war on terror’ (GWOT). In the contemporary deterritorialised
media ecosystem, the imbrication of these two systems, i.e. popular culture
and world politics, is now no longer simply a domestic or even a regional
affair; instead, it is a truly global linkage that merits serious and methodical
academic scrutiny. A wide variety of scholars from multiple disciplines have
begun to interrogate the interplay between popular culture and world poli-
tics (Grayson, Davies, and Philpott 2009), from the influence of pop-culture
narratives on political discourse (Tenenboim-Weinblatt 2009), to how super-
heroes inform national identity (Dittmer 2013), to media products’ influ-
ence on the relationship between gender and violence in contemporary IR
(Shepherd 2013). However, popular culture’s most important function is as
a generator of built-worlds, where imagined spaces inform, influence, and
instantiate the identities of prosumers of various mass media from comic
books to videogames to film.
With the increasing interconnectivity of publics around the world through
new media platforms, popular culture has become an indispensable techne
(τέχνη) for ‘understanding’ or ‘making sense’ of the outside world (Rowley
2010), a realm that was, in an earlier age, a distant and often confound-
ing space. As a mechanism for expressing and (re)affirming social values,
enlightening and empowering individuals, and coping with existing condi-
tions, screen studies scholar Stacy Takacs (2015) highlights popular culture
as a tool for defining reality and a projector of possible futures, as well as
force for premediation of (geo)political outcomes (see also De Goede 2008,
Grusin 2010). Recent work in the field of social and cultural geography has
demonstrated the political power of imagining new worlds via popular cul-
ture, from sport (Conner 2014) to videogames (Shaw and Sharp 2013) to nov-
els (Beckingham and Howell 2015). Over four decades ago, it was suggested
that media had become ‘the cultural air we breathe’ (Hoggart 1976, iv); in
the current globalised milieu, it is nigh impossible to argue otherwise. Our
every waking moment is suffused with the cacophony of an increasingly
networked realm, thus explaining my previous claim that we live in a world
defined by Fremdbebilderung, i.e. the state of being ‘totally engulfed by for-
eign images’ (Saunders 2017, 1). So broad and penetrative has this situation
become that many have argued that the mediascape (Appadurai 1996) has
itself become the key arbiter of social and cultural understanding (Deibert
1997). Combined with the sweeping changes in political structures around
the globe after the Cold War, the growing influence of deterritorialised
information and communications technologies has produced a convergence
which has been described as a ‘new media-dominated governing system’
(Gilboa 1998, 211). A number of screen scholars have gone further, arguing
that we are now entering an era defined by ‘hypermediatisation’ (Eichner
and Waade 2015), in which the real is often superseded or at least prefigured
by popular-cultural representation, effectively blurring the lines between the
political and the popular.
Given Takacs’ (2015) argument that popular culture is the ‘battlefield’
upon which some of the world’s most pressing foreign policy issues play out,
and IR scholars Christina Rowley and Jutta Weldes’ (2012) affirmation that
‘popular culture is the “real world”, providing us with meanings, includ-
ing about world politics’, it is absolutely vital to deepen our understanding
of popular cultural production and consumption as a field of power. As a
result of globalisation, including but not limited to the increasing movement
of people, products, and ideas across borders, what was distant is now near,
at least in the mind’s eye. As a consequence, popular geopolitics is steadily
becoming a mainstream approach to understanding the wider cultural con-
text of IR and addressing important issues that involve traversing and nego-
tiating identities/subjectivities in the contemporary world. One particularly
cogent exposition of popular geopolitics is ‘the study of the spatialisations
and underpinning geographies that are used to substantiate understand-
ings about other places in popular culture’ (Thorogood 2016, 3). Adding to
this rather parsimonious definition, we can describe popular geopolitics as
a field of study obsessed with ‘understanding of the everyday representa-
tions and practices which permeate geopolitical thought’ (Dunnett 2009,
585). However, as cultural studies scholar Vlad Strukov has argued, popular
geopolitics has hitherto seemingly been ‘at ease with the current neolib-
eral order’ (Strukov 2018, 64), thus limiting the (inter)discipline’s capacity
for ‘resistance’ despite its proven capacity to identify, critique, and theorise
power relations. My approach in this text, while not claiming to be an icon-
oclastic example in the vein advocated by Strukov, does work towards a new
paradigm in popular geopolitics by rooting a critique of neoliberalism into
basic framework of my analysis. Moving beyond the contention that pop-
ular culture represents a ‘mirror’ of world politics (Nexon and Neumann
2006), my examination of televised crime dramas and geopolitical thrillers
from Nordic Europe builds on my earlier work on the premediation of poli-
tics via screened interventions, while also reflecting on popular culture as a
key site for negotiating reality and projecting possible futures in the shadow
of the looming climate crisis brought on by the excesses of late liberalism.
Scope and aims

The primary aim of Geopolitics, Northern Europe, and Nordic Noir is to
expand a growing literature of ‘secondary world’-based geopolitical engage-
ment (cf. Weldes 1999, Kiersey and Neumann 2013, Dyson 2015, Clapton
and Shepherd 2017, Holland 2018), which argues that popular culture makes
IR what it is. Such a contention is problematic but is nonetheless gaining
increasing academic steam; this is particularly true in the wake of the election
of the reality-TV star Donald J. Trump to the US presidency, an event that
obliterated the lingering boundaries between the popular and the political.
Consequently, this book aims at examining the current state of geopoliti-
cally inflected television, with a specific focus on Nordic noir and ‘near noir’
thrillers. In this ensuing chapters, I argue that IR-inclined series matter not
only what they say or show, but also in what they do, particularly with their
planting of somatic markers and prefiguring developments in world politics.
In my use of the term ‘geopolitical intervention’, I refer to those instances
where some element which is not normally seen as a traditional form of state
power (e.g. military invasion, economic blockade, etc.) functions as a tool in
determining an outcome in world affairs (see Ó Tuathail 2003, Carter and
McCormack 2006, Cosgrove 2008). With this text, which synthesises my
recent work on the field of geopolitical television, I answer television scholars
Kevin Glynn and Julie Cupples’ call to address the neglect of entertainment
television in popular geopolitics’ scholarship and focus on ‘affects, bodies,
and emotions’ (Glynn and Cupples 2015, 273–74). My approach here inter-
rogates issues of race and gender, the embodiment of geopolitics through
affect, character development, and images, and explores the geographies
and geopolitics of emotion. Reflecting Takacs’ (2015) framework for exam-
ining popular culture as a mechanism for defining reality, a provider of role
models, an information distribution platform, a mediator of social interac-
tions, and a canvas for sculpting possible futures, this undertaking looks
more at the way the geopolitical permeates the everyday and how quotidian
aspects of international relations inflect perceptions of lives, cultures, and
identities through their depiction on the small screen. With this in mind, my
contribution aims to push the study of televisual geopolitical interventions
beyond the restrictive categorisation of popular culture as propaganda and
towards a more nuanced framework focused on popular culture as a means
of geopolitically inflected world-building.
Focusing on the genre of Nordic noir, i.e. televised crime series and
geopolitical thrillers originating and/or set in northern Europe, this book
works with two interrelated concepts to address popular conceptualisations
of mobility, liminality, and transgression in the contemporary geopolitical
milieu defined by and against neoliberal pressures from within and beyond
the region of Norden. These conceptual frameworks are (1) the geopolitics
of television drama and (2) geopolitical drama as a televisual genre. The
first is associated with how such long-form series travel via Netflix, Hulu,
and other video-on-demand platforms, thereby influencing the styles of tel-
evision production far and wide and thus raising the trope of the Nordic
detective to global status. The second, and more important, deals with the
increasingly geopoliticised content of contemporary television drama, par-
ticularly Nordic-produced series, and how the world-building capacity of
such content merges with production strategies to create a feedback loop
of worldviews that has ramifications for everyday understandings of how
world politics actually works.
In the remaining pages of this chapter, I ground television in the field of
IR, arguing that the medium is rapidly marginalising other forms of pop-
ular culture when it comes to shaping geopolitical imagination. In the next
chapter, I provide a highly circumscribed and admittedly rather idiosyn-
cratic geopolitics of Nordic Europe. This is done with the explicit purpose
of providing the reader with the relevant historical background that fuels
the narratives of Nordic noir series, which, as I explore in Chapter 3, take
their critical cues from Scandinavian crime fiction. Beyond a discussion
of the evolution of Nordic noir as television genre, this chapter also inter-
rogates why northern Europe and all things Nordic are currently the rage
(beginning with the Danish notion of ‘hygge’). In the second part of the
book, I shift to an empirical analysis, focusing on series produced in Nordic
Europe, specifically Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, and Finland.3 In
Chapters 4–6, separate but interlinked sets of issues are explored in chapter-
length surveys; each uses specific geographic scales, which are introduced
via opening vignettes focusing on a single series, and then examined more
thoroughly using at least two television series which are intended to serve
as case studies (however, the hallmark series examined will be analysed
throughout these chapters to lesser or greater extents, including via the
concept-based textboxes that pepper the book). As I explore in the ensuing
chapters, there are a number of scales that largely define popular geopoliti-
cal outputs, from the most minute to the grandest level. Generally speaking,
these aforementioned scales are as follows:
• The ‘Corporeal’ – spaces that are historically defined by an organic

community (Gemeinschaft), and are now challenged by transnational
pressures; frames of reference include bodies, the ‘home’, families, social
interactions, etc. (vignette: Monster; case studies: Trapped, Midnight
Sun, and Fortitude).
• The ‘Borderland’ – liminal zones shaped by regimes of mobility/
restriction, inclusion/exclusion, and threats/opportunities; frames of ref-
erence include territorial frontiers, international boundaries, demarcated
social spaces, bridges, bodies of water, etc. (vignette: Dicte; case studies:
The Bridge and Bordertown).
• The ‘Nation-State’ – political imaginaries bound to territorial realms;
frames of reference include symbols of sovereignty, maps, landscapes,
national culture; the ‘people’, the environment/natural resources
(vignette: Stella Blómkvist; case studies: Occupied, Nobel, and Blue Eyes).
The concluding chapter then shifts to the issues of adaptation, transplanta-

tion, and impact on a transnational scale. I begin with a light-hearted look
at the ways in which Nordic noir has been parodied as way of ‘describing’
the peculiarities of Nordic society, both within the region (Jonatan Spang’s
Draman: En Pan-Skandinavisk Krimiodyssän) and beyond it (Fallet and
Lilyhammer). Following a brief overview of the evolving dynamics of Nordic
noir as a malleable, transnational genre, I explore the widespread mimicry
of the style in different contexts, from continental series such as The Border
(Poland), Pagan Peak (Austria-Germany), and The Frozen Dead (France);
Australian series like Secret City, Mystery Road, and Deep Water; the so-called
Celtic noir of Dublin Murders, Shetland, and Hinterland; and Netflix’s grow-
ing suite of geopolitical noir series such as The Rain, Young Wallander, and
1983, among others. However, the empirical core of the chapter examines
how the Nordic noir style evolves when removed from the region (focusing on
various localisations of The Bridge) and public service broadcaster-funding
(Marcella). From here, I conclude with some final observations and parting
questions about what it all means, pointing to a number of ‘real world’ events
that have been eerily premediated via Nordic noir.
Scrutinising different aspects of geopolitical television, this book makes
a three-part contribution to literatures of popular geopolitics, visual pol-
itics, and cultural geography. The first is a normative contribution that
explores geopolitical programming as a realm of contestation, and one
which shapes geopolitical codes towards the self (Selbstbild) and various
others (Fremdbilder). The second is a theoretical contribution that makes
the argument that television matters more than film when it comes to ‘com-
mon-sense’ understandings of and expositions on geopolitics. This stems
from the medium’s long-form storytelling combined with recent focus on
localism, landscapes, and the lived city and flawed, complex characters.
The final contribution is empirical stemming from the critical and careful
readings of the aforementioned television series, each of which serves as a
paradigm of contemporary Nordic noir and its engagement with geopolitics
of import to northern Europe.
Geopolitical culture(s) on the small screen

Informed by political geographer Gerard Toal’s concept of ‘geopolitical cul-
ture’ – loosely defined as a ‘series of geographical imaginations about self
and other in the world’ built around a ‘locational narrative’ about a specific
territory made meaningful by discursive ‘boundaries of identity and differ-
ence’ (Toal 2017, 39) – I endeavour to explicate the ways in which contempo-
rary Nordic noir screens geopolitics by assessing ways in which such series’
attendant ‘issues’ speak to (geo)political culture(s) within the complex, con-
tradictory, and compromised Nordic imaginary (see Table 1.1). Drawing
on a diverse set of literature (cultural geography, screen studies, and popu-
lar geopolitics), I examine the nexus between popular cultural production,
consumption/prosumption of media, geopolitical intervention/resistance,
political culture, and IR. Throughout the text, I employ a mixed-method
form of analysis focusing on screened images as well as the narrative, sound-
scapes, and other ‘story-telling’ elements. Following the lead of human geog-
rapher Derek McCormack, I treat my artefacts as ‘thinking spaces’ that
engage viewers’ ‘affective energies’ as they ‘travel across and within cultures’
(McCormack 2016, 207 and 210). So then, this work aims to elucidate the role
of television series in shaping ideas, particularly those related to geopolitical
constructions of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in world which is increasingly defined by the
rising influence of MNCs and non-governmental organisations, porous bor-
ders, international migration and accompanying integration issues, transna-
tional threats to human security, complex forms of shared governance, and
the calamitous results of anthropogenic climate change.
My data set for this tentative typology, which focuses on series which
have premiered since 2010,4 includes paradigmatic examples of a series of
sub-genres which meet the following parameters:
• Produced in northern Europe and primarily for northern European

audiences
• Set in Norden and features characters who are predominantly from the
region
• Addresses multiple elements of ‘northern European’ identity and cul-
ture (e.g. via mobility, embodiment, materiality, authority, etc.)
• Significantly engages with thematic elements that go beyond (but do not
necessarily eschew) ‘instrumental’ personal motivation (Soulliere 2003)
for the crime(s) committed
• Aired on at least one transnational digital distribution platform
(i.e. Netflix, Amazon Prime, Walter Presents, MHz Choice, SBS on
Demand, etc.) with subtitles in English and/or a language other than
its original
Table 1.1 Nordic noir series and/as (geo)political culture(s)
Engagement of
(geo)political
Sub-genre Thematic elements culture(s) Paradigmatic examples
The Villainous Criminal Parochialism; Deadwind (Finland, 2018)

Corporation investigation anti-liberalism Follow the Money
uncovers a (Denmark, 2016)
transnational Midnight Sun (Swe/Fra,
corporate cover-up 2016)
Borders Kill International Identitarianism; Bordertown (Finland,
borders create cosmopolitanism 2016)
liminal spaces that The River (Norway, 2017)
turn deadly Trapped (Iceland, 2015)
The Dead Murders reveal Xenophobia; Dicte (Denmark, 2013)
Other embedded ethnic traditionalism Blue Eyes (Sweden, 2014)
hatred and/or The Bridge (Swe/Den,
misogyny 2011)
Globalised Illicit transborder Vigilantism; The Lava Field (Iceland,
Gang Violence flows splinter moralism 2014)
communities and Warrior (Denmark, 2018)
take lives The Lawyer (Swe/Den,
2018)
Terrorism as Acts of political Islamophobia; Below the Surface
Crime Drama violence mask or securitisation-ism (Denmark, 2017)
unveil deeper Greyzone (Swe/Den,
problems at home 2018)
Bullets (Finland, 2018)
Crime as the Corpses map out Populism; Occupied (Norway, 2016)
State of the much larger (geo) anti-nationalism Nobel (Norway, 2016)
Nation political problems Stella Blómkvist (Iceland,
2017)
Eco-Criticism Evils of Sustainability; Fortitude (UK/Ice/Nor,
neoliberalism and environmentalism 2015)
industrialisation Jordskott (Sweden, 2015)
result in dead Thin Ice (Inter-Nordic,
bodies and harm 2020)
to the planet
With these parameters in mind, it is possible to think of sub-genres of con-
temporary Nordic noir television series based on their engagement with par-
ticular (geo)political culture(s). By stretching the concept of political culture
beyond its original remit – both via the addition of the parenthetical prefix
of ‘geo’ and by expanding the scope of such culture beyond the nation-state,
I aim to more accurately reflect the everyday realities that feed ‘the atti-
tudes, beliefs, and values which underpin the operation of a particular polit-
ical system’ (Grant 2009) associated with the transnational Nordic polity.
While a number of esteemed scholars have written on the production val-
ues, settings/landscapes, and international popularity of ‘new’ Nordic Noir
as a genre (cf. Forshaw 2012, Peacock 2012, Bergman 2014, Gamula and
Mikos 2014, Redvall 2016, Toft Hansen and Waade 2017, Hochscherf and
Philipsen 2017), this book takes a different approach. Geopolitics, Northern
Europe, and Nordic Noir: What Television Series Tell Us about World Politics
examines the subtle and explicit manifestations of world politics within these
series, as well as the impact of such programmes on how the states of north-
ern Europe are viewed abroad. At the core of this text is the issue of how the
northern European state (via individual countries and the idea of Norden
as a whole) is depicted in such series, both as a positive and negative force,
as the region responds to the challenges wrought by populism, globalisation
and neoliberalism. I also look at the internal politics of Norden’s engage-
ment with the outside world, particularly through the tool of ‘ScanGuilt’
(cf. Oxfeldt 2016, Rees 2016, Leyda 2018). This rather problematic fram-
ing positions the region as a successful instance of industrialisation that
avoided imperialism, white domination of non-white peoples, overdepend-
ence on global markets, etc., but one which – due to its small populations,
technological innovation (or fossil-fuel production in the case of Norway),
and other forms of post-modern adaptation to global challenges – does not
suffer under peak liberalism while other nations and peoples do.
As discussed in greater depth in the ensuing chapters, landscapes are also
key components of popular geopolitical cultural production, from static
art forms like painting and photographs to more dynamic depictions (e.g.
screened vistas and ‘explorable’ videogame worlds) to imaginaries brought
to life through the written word. Such ‘scaping’ of geopolitical space is a field
of power that is sadly under-studied in the field of IR, but one which has
received ample attention in other disciplines from geography to art history
to media studies (cf. Ingram 2011, Scott and Swenson 2015, Toft Hansen and
Waade 2017). Turning to visual culture and its attendant politics, it is pru-
dent to highlight the role of seeing as a component of knowing in the realm
of geopolitics. In my own approach to this subject, I am influenced by Irit
Rogoff’s Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture, in which she states:
First, there are images that come into being and are claimed by various,
and often contested histories. Second, there are the viewing appara-
tuses that we have at our disposal that are guided by cultural models
such as narrative or technology. Third, there are the subjectivities of
identification or desire or abjection from which we view and by which
we inform what we view.
(Rogoff 2000, 32)
In her historicising of the process of geographical imagination, Rogoff lays

bare the power of culture and power on knowing, a sentiment that is echoed
in Stuart C. Aitken and Leo Zonn’s introductory chapter in Place, Power,
Situation and Spectacle: A Geography of Film when they remind us that the
‘very heart of geography’ is the quest for a ‘sense of self’ in the world and the
primary tool we have is ‘looking at images’ (Aitken and Zonn 1994, 7). Denis
Cosgrove has been particularly attentive to the power of sight is shaping spa-
tial knowledge, or what has been called ‘geographical vision’ (Cosgrove 2008,
8). Expanding on this concept, Gertjan Dijkink highlights geopolitical imag-
ination inevitably leads to a relational understanding that involves one’s own
place and other places, conjuring up ‘feelings of (in)security or (dis)advan-
tage’ and thus influencing a given polity’s views about their situation in world
affairs (Dijkink 1996, 11). While the vast majority of research on geopolitical
imaginaries has focused on world politics at the nation-to-nation level, less
work has been done on how people relate to such images when they supersede
the state and national territory. And with the increasing emotional valence of
television series in a world defined by competing flows of images from nearly
everywhere, investigating the impact of geopolitical narratives in ‘serious TV’
has never been more important.
Television 3.0 and its geopolitical turn

The advent of HBO’s The Wire in 2002 represents, according to one possi-
ble historiography, a watershed in television. Former police reporter David
Simon’s crime drama, which was set in the US city of Baltimore, Maryland,
functioned as an unapologetic intervention that presented political com-
mentary as serious entertainment. Commercially and critically successful,
the long-running series was defined by its attention to detail, evocative use
of urbanscapes, and attention-demanding plot lines. With its complicated
and thoroughly developed characters, The Wire – like the fantastical ABC
series Lost (2004–2010) – challenged its viewers’ preconceptions about what
television could be, picking up the discarded mantle of David Lynch’s Twin
Peaks (1990–1991) in an era where technological advances in television
viewing allowed for ever-bolder experimentations in serial drama. Defined
by its long-form storytelling, The Wire demonstrated that viewers in the new
millennium were willing and able to stick with a complex arc that demanded
fluency in the day-to-day politics of places and spaces. Through the exten-
sive use of ‘local colour’ (see Eichner and Waade 2015), The Wire rendered a
meticulously constructed realm where crime and politics were inextricably
intertwined, which – for many foreign viewers, and particularly those in
Europe – came to represent the ‘reality’ of urban America in the new mil-
lennium. As The Telegraph (2009) put it in a review that claimed the series
was possibly the ‘greatest television programme ever made’:
The Wire is a TV programme like no other. Its central character isn’t

a cop or a criminal but a city: the faded industrial port of Baltimore,
Maryland. Over the course of 60 episodes and multiple storylines, The
Wire portrays Baltimore – and by extension urban America as a whole –
through the eyes of dozens of characters. Each series focuses on a dif-
ferent facet of the city, including the drug-ravaged housing projects,
down-at-heel docks, crumbling public schools and corrupt political
administration. Regardless of whether its characters are running drugs
or running for office, The Wire refuses to make black-and-white judge-
ments about them. Its prevailing moral universe is grey.
Similar universes or secondary worlds have proven to be both popular and

profitable in the two decades since the turn of the last century. Indeed, I
would argue that blending politics and crime à la The Wire has become
de rigueur for those showrunners and broadcasters who aim to make their
series serious.
Buoyed by the success of demanding, yet rewarding post-millennium pro-
gramming, abetted by transformative leaps in delivery technologies often
labelled as ‘Television 2.0’ (Spigel and Olsson 2004), and influenced by the
steady transnationalisation of content, dramatic television series have increas-
ingly delved into geopolitical themes, from human rights to counter-terror-
ism to foreign policy. As a consequence, IR scholar Daniel Drezner (2016)
argues that we have entered into a ‘golden age’ of IR programming. The for-
mer Chair of Geopolitics at the College of Europe Dominique Moïsi echoes
this sentiment, but goes further, claiming that the creative teams behind geo-
politically inflected drama series are the ‘best analysts of the contemporary
world – and perhaps our future’. Elaborating on this point, he states:
At this moment of globalization, television series have become – if not

the universal cultural reference – one that is unavoidable in order to
analyse the emotions of the world. Just as one cannot understand the
world without integrating the dimension of emotions into it, so too is
it impossible to really understand the emotions of today’s world while
ignoring television series.
(Moïsi 2016, loc. 18)
The emergence of ‘geopolitical television’ (see Glynn and Cupples 2015)

as an identifiable and increasingly profitable and marketable genre car-
ries significant implications for global affairs, particularly through the
power of serialised drama to engage not only with a transnational audience
but also with actors in world politics. As a visual medium, television has
long been recognised for its ability to influence domestic political culture
(cf. Caughie 2000, Franklin 2006, Corner and Richardson 2008); however,
in an increasingly interlinked and digitised realm of mass media production
and consumption, the platform is steadily making its presence felt in the
‘remaking of worlds’ and ‘reworking of the poetics and politics of vision’
on an international scale (Elwood and Hawkins 2017, 5). This is no trivial
matter for geopolitics; as IR scholars Simon Philpott and David Mutimer
have argued: ‘[T]elevision, introduces another layer of experience for the
subject that complicates the possibility of “truth”’ and the constant medi-
ation and repetition of certain images has the capacity to ‘destroy the rela-
tionship between sign and referent leading to a condition of hyper-reality
in which images take on a distinct existence and meaning’ (Philpott and
Mutimer 2005, 338). As Moïsi states: ‘Geopolitics does not content itself
with brutally invading the reality of our daily lives, it invades our imagina-
tions, in an irresistible and undoubtedly dangerous dialectical movement’
(Moïsi 2016, loc. 44). This assertion has only become more trenchant since
the assumption of the US presidency by a reality-TV star whose early ten-
ure has been defined by widespread accusations that his administration
engages in a combination of reality manipulation, performative demoni-
sation of opponents, and ‘game show-style’ antics that is producing a new
form of mass-mediated authoritarianism (cf. Andrejevic 2016, Morgan and
Shanahan 2017, Gallagher 2017).
While television studies is a mature discipline, the relevance of television
programming to geopolitics remains at the margins of the field. This despite
the massive popularity of shows that have dealt with key elements of world
politics such as Mission: Impossible (espionage), M*A*S*H (war), Tenko
(internment), and Star Trek (diplomacy). Indubitably, media and IR schol-
ars have paid close attention to development in film as it relates to geopoli-
tics, with Cold War strategic cinema (cf. Lipschutz 2001, Dodds 2005, Shaw
2006, Shaw and Sharp 2013) and terrorism-centric surveillance cinema
(cf. Prince 2009, Dodds 2011, Zimmer 2015) receiving particular interest.
However, television’s role in shaping geopolitical codes, attitudes towards
international relations, and perceptions of the foreign ‘Other’ has received
less attention, though a handful of excellent contemporary studies do exist
(see Weldes 1999, Buzan 2010, Alsultany 2012, Kiersey and Neumann 2013,
Dyson 2015, Clapton and Shepherd 2017). Influenced by Aaron Sorkin’s
The West Wing (1999–2006) and David Chase’s The Sopranos (1999–2007),
and echoing the ground-breaking qualities of earlier cinematic series like
the aforementioned Twin Peaks, television programming in the post–9/11
era experienced a profound shift in what was possible with regards to the
narrative arc. In their hyper-detailed storylines, diverse and complex char-
acters, and IR/geopolitical themes, these programmes demanded intense
loyalty from their audiences, problematised accepted archetypes, and
required a substantive knowledge of world affairs and geography (or, at
a minimum, the diligence to research relevant material via the internet).
The thematic content of such series also mirrored and narrated the US’s
collective trauma post-9/11 as the ‘popular image [of America] being sepa-
rated from the dangers and corruption of the rest of the world’ was steadily
deconstructed (Holland 2011, 88). Not insignificantly, these shifts occurred
at a time when new technology platforms and the World Wide Web were
both making their presence felt in television viewing habits and practices,
thus resulting in what some have labelled a ‘convergence culture’ of old and
new media (Jenkins 2006).
New ways of watching television emerged in the wake of increasing sales
of full-season DVDs of popular series, followed by digital video record-
ing devices and digital downloads, which permitted fans to record all epi-
sodes of a series or purchase missed shows to avoid gaps in the narrative.
Concomitantly, online forums promoted heightened fandom through dis-
cussion, prediction, and counter-readings. This new milieu, in turn, pro-
duced a feedback loop that influenced a new generation of showrunners,
thus resulting a novel model of what media scholar Henry Jenkins (2006)
labels ‘transmedial storytelling’. The advent of streaming video on demand
(SVoD) platforms like Netflix, HBO GO, Amazon Prime, Viaplay, SBS
on Demand, and Hulu multiplied this effect, while changing the spatio-
temporal logistics of television consumption by allowing for entire series
to be viewed all at once and from almost anywhere on the planet (assuming
one possessed the appropriate virtual private network credentials and an
internet connection). This sea change promoted the phenomenon of ‘binge
watching’, which screen scholars claim is more immersive than the cinematic
experience due to the ‘duration and level of focus’ (Corbin 2014, 320). Such
developments have negated the historical prejudice towards television series
as ephemeral, patchwork experiences.
Just as changing ways of seeing impact reality, novel ways of watching
are vital to this evolutionary shift in the new media landscape, which has
now reached a mature state of convergence and is entering the era of fan-
based coproduction, what can be labelled Television 3.0. As programming
has come untethered from the demands of ‘appointment TV’ and moved
to handheld devices that enable access to an ever-widening variety of pro-
grammes from dozens of countries, particularly those in the global north,
this has opened up myriad avenues for engaging with the world through the
small screen (see Jenner 2016). As media scholar Catherine Johnson points
out, we must think of TV as an amalgam made up of ‘different techno-
logical, cultural, industrial, organisational, and experiential components’
(Johnson 2019, 4). No longer a single medium, ‘television’ now means many
different ways of viewing content, though the idea of the ‘screen’ remains
prominent (Tay and Turner 2008). In the new millennium, private view-
ing spaces abound (i.e. content can now be streamed nearly anywhere,
allowing the spectator to engage with the media via a pc, tablet, or phone
finally removing the ‘couch’ from the equation). Equally important, trans-
national digital distribution platforms aggregate shows from around the
world, allowing consumers to select programmes delinked from country-
of-origin, citizenship, or – via subtitling – geolinguistic considerations (see
Lobato 2019).
In this new environment, geopolitical television engenders a different
popular culture-world politics engagement than the previous ‘norms’
associated with television. As a concept, I define geopolitical television
as fictional, dramatic video content in serial form that (1) engages inter-
national themes via imaginary scenarios; (2) builds ‘worlds’ based on
situated social, geographical, and political understandings; and (3) inter-
rogates questions of domestic versus foreign identities via narratives.
Reflecting the interconnectivity of the globe and the transnationalisation
of the medium on both the production and distribution levels, broadcast
networks in the US, UK, Scandinavia, France, and elsewhere have begun
greenlighting more programmes focused on politically-sensitive interna-
tional topics, including war, espionage, transnational crime, and border
control. As IR scholar Jack Holland argues, such programmes ‘widen
the space for debate and challenge dominant orthodoxies’ in everyday
IR thinking (Holland 2011, 87). And as production quality increases –
e specially via the use of affective landscapes (see Toft Hansen and Waade
2017) – fans are provided with an increasingly realistic simulacrum of
‘being there’ when they watch their favourite series. Moreover, with an
increasingly global audience, many showrunners have opted to fold key
aspects of globalisation – people smuggling, drugs trafficking, transna-
tional corporate malfeasance, pandemics, etc. – into the storylines of
procedural crime dramas. As a consequence, a substantial proportion of
televised series has become relevant to quotidian geopolitical understand-
ing(s) and geographical imagination(s), arguably more so than any time
since the advent of the medium. Through the deepening of geopolitical/
IR themes, greater use of overseas filming locations, ever bolder attempts
at historical revisionism, and the liberal use of allegory to interrogate
contentious issues in world politics, geopolitical television has become a
player in the popular culture-world politics continuum.
Deep TV: Worlds of imagination

But what makes television different from film, or for that matter comic
books, videogames, or popular fiction? As television historian David Morley
argues, television, with its use of images of alterity and that which is not the
Heimat, has the capacity to ‘sharpen ordinary citizens’ awareness of cul-
tural forms which are not primarily theirs’ (Morley 2004, 312). Considering
the power of aesthetics in the viewer’s cognitive mapping (Jameson 1995),
television – particularly in its current form which has been delinked from
the living room and national broadcast monopolies – is a medium that
produces worlds of understanding. This in turn influences the affective log-
ics of geopolitical intervention (see Carter and McCormack 2010). While
film certainly shares much with television, the ability of the contemporary
Netflix viewer to stream hours upon hours of content from around the globe
represents a clear distinction in terms of affordances from the cinema-
going experience which requires one to go to and spend some two hours
in a movie theatre.5 Moreover, certain types of television are impossible
without inspiration from actual events, trends, and phenomena. Speaking
of the most-referenced exemplar of geopolitical TV, screen scholar Elliot
Logan notes: ‘It seems hardly plausible that Homeland, for example, could
be understood fully apart from any consideration of the “War on Terror” as
an informing cultural context’ (Logan 2016, 145). Producers and showrun-
ners are increasingly cognizant of their works’ interrogation of ‘real-world’
IR phenomenon, particularly through the crafting of (virtual) geographies
of emotion from the battlefield to the refugee camp to the bedroom of the
undercover agent.6 As Drezner (2016) points out, ‘the proliferation of so
many platforms has meant that there are now great shows that tackle the
eternal dilemmas of world politics in metaphorical worlds, past metaphori-
cal worlds, and the world we live in right now’. Moreover, new technological
affordances and growing budgets for television series with the potential for
wide international distribution have allowed for a dramatic increase in the
quality of production, especially in the on-site filming of landscapes (often
in far-flung locales). Taken together these trends have elevated the topo-
graphic power of television as a medium.
While not going as far as to claim that ‘cinema is dead’ as has recently been
argued by acclaimed filmmaker Martin Scorsese (qtd. in Franklin 2016), I
would affirm that television has made measurable advances in providing a
substantive challenge to motion pictures, at least in the realm of geopolitics.
As political scientist Michael J. Shapiro points out, the televisual aesthetic
differs from the cinematic in that it relies on a week-to-week structure,7 based
on a ‘background of uneventfulness – the mundane moments of interaction
in life worlds – from which the special events that drive each episode stand
out’ (Shapiro 2015, 198). Moreover, this interplay transcends the impact of
film, which is comparatively hampered by its collective/communal viewing
in the ‘public’ space of cinema auditorium (see Hanich 2014). Indeed, there
has been a continuing process of ‘legitimisation’ of television as a medium
for delivering quality content and undertaking substantive engagement
with various audiences (Newman and Levine 2012). Freed from the shack-
les of the two-hour narrative limitation (and enhanced by the capacity for
binge-watching and augmented reality via Amazon’s X-ray and other aug-
mented viewing technologies), television has embraced long-form storytell-
ing in ways that are impossible on the big screen, and with this evolution the
role of (small) screening IR becomes increasingly relevant.8 This transfor-
mation is occurring through three different structures that are beyond the
pale of film: (1) scriptwriters being able to incorporate topical issues into the
plots within a relatively compressed timeframe (temporality); (2) showrun-
ners’ ability to respond to viewers who make their desires known via social
media (prosumption); and (3) series’ capacity to engage with actors across
the arena of international politics through their storylines (dialogism).
Returning to the content and themes of shows like The Wire, 24, and Lost,
the role of geopolitics should be made explicit. Shaken to their core by the
2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, American viewing
audiences welcomed ‘Hollywood’s’ efforts at interpolating the permanently
changed world order. These series, each in their own way, contributed to a
deepening of the ways in which the purported ‘outside world’ flickered on the
small screen. However, US programming was not the only television environ-
ment that experienced a change after 9/11. The UK, which had likewise seen
its fair share of Cold War series, moved quickly to bring the new problems of
the world to the small screen. Series like Spooks (2002–2011) were particularly
keen to deal with such issues as Great Britain became embroiled in overseas
adventures in ‘special partnership’ with Washington. In continental Europe
and Scandinavia, the change in scope was less tied to foreign affairs per se and
instead rooted in an increasing unease about open borders, shared govern-
ance, and the challenges of maintaining the social welfare state under the new
realities of neoliberal globalisation. With its high rates of internet connectivity,
state-supported culture industries, and long, dark winters, it is perhaps not
surprising that Nordic Europe quickly picked up the mantle of innovative tele-
vision series production in the new millennium, becoming a purveyor of glob-
ally attractive properties from The Killing to Borgen to The Bridge. The thread
that runs through all these transformations is the increasing importance of
political geography (in its widest possible meaning), and how visual depictions
of ‘home’ and ‘us’ came to be contrasted against the ‘foreign’ places, things,
and people (a theme discussed via the case studies in the ensuing chapters).9
Triggered in part by the enormous popularity of Nordic noir in the British
Isles, North America, and mainland Europe (see Creeber 2015), this globali-
sation of content has also promoted an internationalisation of talent, with
directors, actors, and scriptwriters breaking out of their ‘national shells’ and
working on (co-)productions in other (western) countries. As will be discussed
in Chapter 3 and 7, the Nordic noir style has proved exceptionally popular out-
side of Scandinavia, resulting in English-language adaptations and the adop-
tion of stylistic and narrative schemas by British and US series, not least of
which is an intense focus on geographic elements as part of the overall diegesis
(cf. Agger 2013, Waade and Jensen 2013, Roberts 2016).
*******
In the subsequent chapter, the focus turns to the protean geopolitics of

Nordic Europe. The rationale for including a survey of the region’s geopo-
litical history is to present a field of potential ways of understanding and
critically engaging with the themes, narratives, character developments,
and other aspects of the television series which are offered as case studies in
the later chapters. Drawing on the loaded concept of ‘background’ – which
is always ‘geo-historically specific and generative … [and] open to interven-
tion, manipulation, and innovation’ (Anderson and Harrison 2016, 10) –
I seek to provide a sort of spatio-ideological firmament for the ensuing
analysis of what is both absent and present in Nordic noir. Given that the
world is never something that is simply a meaningless, messy ‘out there’ nor
a ‘inert backdrop’ for our ‘hopes, desires and fears’ (Anderson and Harrison
2016, 7–8), it is important to bring together practices, things, and events in
such a context so we can make sense of them. In short, Chapter 2: ‘Why
Norden? Why now? A geopolitical foregrounding’ provides a primer for a
geopoliticised seeing, ideologically informed means of knowing, and cul-
tural ways of being-in and being-of when encountering the built-worlds of
Occupied, The Bridge, and other popular Nordic noir series.
Notes
1. Not insignificantly, this text was translated into German within a year of its
publication in Sweden.
2. In my use of ‘imaginary’, I ascribe to Lean, Staiff, and Waterton’s extension
of imagination from the personal ‘inner world of mind-sight’ to a ‘culturally-
and socially-constituted process of formation’ that is bound to cultural pro-
duction (Lean, Staiff, and Waterton 2014, 15).
3. With a caveat relating to the British series Fortitude analysed in Chapter 4;
I make an exception here given the series was filmed in Iceland and Svalbard,
and featured numerous actors from across Norden.
4. Obviously, some of the most popular Nordic noir series (i.e. Beck, Wallander,
and Forbrydelsen) are thus excluded. That being stated, their influence is duly
noted in the ensuing analysis.
5. Having completed the final draft of this manuscript in Switzerland while in
self-isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic, the importance of on-demand
video streaming versus movie-going became even more acute. Given that the
cinemas across Europe were shuttered in early 2020 and most citizens began
working from home, Netflix agreed to reduce its offerings from HD to SD to
avoid slowing business-critical internet traffic due to a massive spike in daily
viewing.
6. Regarding the importance of setting, dramatic television series have increas-
ingly focused on production values in recent decades, resulting in elaborate
depictions of place and space, sometimes rivalling even videogames in their
creation of realms of imagination.
7. As I discuss below, the advent of ‘dropped’ series, i.e. those in which an entire
season is released on a single day, has further changed the nature of viewing,
making immersion even more important.
8. An 8–15-hour-long television season is endowed with an embarrassment
of riches compared to motion picture, which can rarely run longer than
145 minutes. The attention to detail in landscape depiction is just one area
where Nordic noir and similar genres of contemporary television drama differ
substantively from film; see especially Eichner and Waade (2015).
9. In the use of ‘foreign’ in this text, I recognise the problems inherent in delim-
itating the boundaries of identity with regards to transnational television
and its varied audiences, which can be found across the globe. That being
stated, this description is not meant to refer to the relationships between the
viewer and the text, but instead how the text positions elements within the
narrative.
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“No,” answered Bride softly, “I do not call you any of those names—
not even in my thoughts. I know you have not been very wise; I think
you know that yourself, and will learn wisdom for the future. But I
know that you believed yourself right in what you said and did, and
were generous and disinterested in your teaching. About your faith I
know very little. I think you know very little yourself; but we can leave
that in God’s hands. It does not come by man, or through man, but
by the will of God. I think it is His will, Eustace, to draw you to
Himself one day; but that day must come in His good time. I think we
sometimes make a great mistake in striving to urge and drive those
whom we love. Waiting is hard, and sometimes it seems very, very
long. But things are so different with God—His patience as well as
His love are so much greater than ours. And we can always pray—
that helps the time of waiting best.”
Eustace was intensely thrilled by these low-spoken words, which he
only just caught through the plash of the waves beneath. That
magnetic influence which Bride always exercised upon him was
almost overpoweringly strong at that moment. He could almost have
fallen at her feet in adoration. After the good-natured strictures of Sir
Roland, the slight grim reproofs of the Duke, and his knowledge of
the cutting criticisms and violent abuse levelled at him by the world
of Pentreath, these words of Bride’s fell like balm upon his spirit. He
felt lifted into a different atmosphere, and the question could not but
present itself to him—
“If faith and those unseen things in which that pure girl believes,
which are to her the greatest realities of life, are nothing but a myth,
a figment of the imagination, what gives them such power over a
nature like mine? Why do I thrill at the thought of them? Why do I
see glimpses, as through a rifted cloud, of a glory, a beauty, a peace
beyond anything I have ever conceived? Why, even by the teachings
of my own philosophy, the fact of this stirring of spirit indicates a
reality of some sort. And is there, after all, nothing higher than
philosophy? Is there no object of objective worship? Is there, after
all, a God?”
Little did Bride suspect the quick stirrings of spirit her words had
evoked. She walked on, with her sweet face set in earnest lines,
thinking of Saul and his grandfather’s ceaseless prayers on his
behalf, praying herself for him in a half-unconscious fashion, as was
her habit when thoughts of the erring one presented themselves. Her
mind was more with him just at that moment than with the kinsman
behind her, with whom, however, thoughts of Saul were always more
or less mixed up; therefore the question, when it came, did not in any
wise startle her.
“Bride, do you mean that you ever pray for me?”
“Yes, Eustace. I always pray for those whom I love, and for those
who seem to need my prayers.”
He was silent for several minutes, and then his thoughts surging
back to a question that had been on the tip of his tongue before, he
asked, “Bride, you said I could not teach Saul to be a truly happy
man. Do you think that I am not a happy man myself?”
“Not a truly happy one,” she answered, with quiet certainty. “I believe
you are happy in one way—in the world’s way. But that is not what I
mean by true happiness. There is another happiness I hope you will
learn some day—I think you will; and then you will understand. I do
not think you can understand yet.”
He was not sure that he could not. He remembered the Duchess in
former years; he had Bride before his eyes now. Even old Abner, in
the midst of all his trouble, showed a substratum of unchanging
serenity which nothing seemed able to shake. He believed he
apprehended without understanding what manner of thing this
happiness was—a thing altogether different from and independent of
the fluctuations of enjoyment and pleasure which went by the name
of happiness in his world. Eustace was receiving impressions just
now with a force and a rapidity that was startling to him. Every day
something seemed added to his list of experiences, and not the least
was the peculiar wave of emotion that swept over him now.
Yet Bride noticed nothing different in his manner as they reached the
beach, and were able to walk on side by side. He was a little absent
and thoughtful perhaps, as was natural with the interview just
hanging over him; and it soon appeared that their journey was not in
vain, for the tall form of Saul was seen seated upon a rock not far
away, and Bride said softly to Eustace, “There he is. I think you had
better go to him alone. I will go and see some of the poor people and
join you later on.”
Eustace was grateful to her for this suggestion. Now that he was
almost face to face with his quondam pupil, he felt that he would
rather be alone. He did not know in what mood Saul would meet him,
and it was better perhaps that they should be without the fetter which
the presence of Bride must necessarily impose.
Without pausing to rehearse any speech, Eustace walked straight up
to the lonely figure on the rock, and holding out his hand in greeting
(a demonstration very rare in those days between men of such
different stations), said, with warm feeling, “Tresithny, you have
suffered in what you took to be the cause of the people. That must
make a fresh bond between us, whatever else we may have to say
upon the subject.”
Saul started at the sound of the familiar, unexpected voice (the plash
of the waves had drowned approaching footsteps); he started again
at sight of the outstretched hand; but after a moment of visible
hesitation, he took it in his grasp and wrung it till Eustace could have
winced. The sombre face was working strangely. The mask of stolid
indifference and contempt had fallen from it. There was a new light in
the hollow eyes as they met the searching gaze of Eustace’s, and
the first words came out with something of a gasp.
“Then you have come at last, sir, and you have not changed!”
“Why should I change?” asked Eustace, with a smile, wonderfully
relieved to find that this unapproachable man, who was puzzling all
the world besides, did not turn a deaf ear upon him. Shocked as he
was at the change he saw in the outward aspect of Saul, he saw that
it was the same Saul as of old, a man full of strength and fight—a
tool that might be dangerous to work with, or of inestimable value,
according as it could be guided and tempered. A sense of true
admiration and fellowship sprang up within him towards this stern-
faced son of toil, with his sorrowful story and suffering face.
“Why should I change?” he asked; and then Saul’s pent-up feeling
burst out.
Every one had changed—the whole world—the very cause itself. All
had left him in his hour of need—all had turned upon him and
betrayed and deserted him. Months of solitary brooding, the delirium
of fever, the overwrought nervous condition into which imprisonment
had driven him, had all combined to produce in Saul a distorted
image of life, of the world, and of every single being in it. Hitherto he
had locked these feelings in his own heart; but now, before Eustace,
the one man who had proffered him friendship in the midst of his
trouble, the friendship of comrade to comrade, man to man, it all
came pouring out in one great flood of impassioned eloquence and
imprecation, terrible sometimes to listen to. It was not easy at times
even to follow his rapid speech, which alternated between the
roughest vernacular and the purest English he had ever spoken,
rehearsed a hundred times in his prison-house, as he had prepared
the speeches which were to raise all Devon and Cornwall to arms, if
need be, against the monstrous class tyranny under which the
country lay groaning. Eustace let him have his fling, never stopping
him by argument or opposition, leading him on by a sympathetic
word now and again to outpour everything that was in his heart
without fear. He knew by instinct what the relief would be, how much
good it would do for the outlet to be found at length; and though
unable to repress a sense of shuddering loathing at some of the
words of his companion, he could well excuse them in the thought of
his great sufferings and state of mental distraction, and was very
hopeful by slow degrees of winning him back to a better and more
reasonable frame of mind.
It was much to have gained his confidence—much that Saul was
able to depend on the sympathy of his former master, and was not
afraid of baring his inmost soul before him. Eustace was seized
sometimes with a sense of something like dismay to find how
absolutely Saul believed he would echo even the most blasphemous
of his thoughts, how securely he reckoned upon finding in his leader
the same absolute denial of all revealed religion—religion which he
himself fiercely decried and ridiculed, as part and parcel of a corrupt
system soon to be exploded. Much that the young man thus hotly
declaimed against—much of his wild and random vituperation must
have been learned from others. Eustace could honestly affirm he
had never allowed such expressions to pass his lips; but here and
there a phrase of his own would mingle with the wilder words of
Saul, and half startle Eustace by the method of its application. Also
he could not help recognising, as this man poured out his soul before
him by the shore that day, that his own standpoint had very slightly
and insensibly changed from those days, more than a year back
now, when he had first sought to awaken in Saul a response to his
own ardent imaginings. What the change was he could scarcely
define, but he was aware that arguments and assertions which
would then have passed by as only slight exaggerations of a
legitimate truth, now came to him with something of a shock,
bringing a realisation of some unheeded change or development in
himself which had silently leavened during the past months, till it had
attained a proportion he never suspected.
Rousing himself with a start from the train of thought thus suggested,
he tried to bring his companion back to the world of real things, and
to leave these idle denunciations and invectives alone for the
present. When Saul had about tired himself with his own impetuosity,
and had kept silence for a few moments, Eustace spoke a few well-
chosen words of sympathy, and gradually bringing round the subject
of the forthcoming election, he explained to the ex-prisoner what had
been going on in the world during his incarceration, and what bright
hopes were now entertained in this country of better days in store for
it, when a strong Government, pledged to redress the gravest of
political abuses, should be in power.
Saul was not entirely ignorant of what had passed, but had very
distorted ideas as to the amount and character of the opposition
offered to the bill and the prospects of its speedy success. He
listened eagerly to what Eustace told him, and his remarks and
questions again struck his master as showing a quickness of insight
and a power of appreciation most remarkable in one of his class. He
was a more excitable, a more sombre, a more embittered man than
he had been a year before. His class hatred had sunk deeper into
his soul, and become a more integral part of his nature. Eustace
recognised how the humiliation, if not the destruction, of the
moneyed classes was to him almost more of an object than the
redress of the grievances of the poor. The two were linked together
in his mind, it was true; but it was easy to see which of them held the
foremost place. Eustace realised, as perhaps he had never done so
well before, the temper of the French revolutionaries of forty years
back. He could well picture Saul in their midst, and think with a
shudder of the deeds he would commit at the head of a furious mob,
wrought up to a pitch of ungovernable fury by the rude eloquence of
such a leader. Perhaps he realised, too, what might come to England
if her sons were stirred up to a like madness, instead of being
worked upon by gentler methods. He well knew that there had been
moments when his own country had been on the brink of revolution,
and that such moments might even come again. Surely it was
needful for the men who stood in the forefront of the van of reform to
walk warily. They had an immense power behind them; but it was, as
Abner had said, the power of an explosive whose properties and
whose energies were but imperfectly understood. Reform may be
the best hindrance to revolution, but it may also incite the very
danger it strives to avert. Eustace had been told this a hundred times
before, but he had never been so convinced of the truth of the
warning as he was whilst walking on the shore that day in the
company of Saul.
He suggested taking him away from St. Bride, and showing him the
other side of life in the great centres of the world; but Saul, though
visibly attracted by the thought of continuing near to Eustace, for
whom his love and admiration were most loyal, gave no decided
answer. He shrank from the confinement even of freedom in a great
city, shrank from even such slight bondage as service under such a
master as this would entail. Moreover, there was no need for a
speedy decision. Eustace would be some weeks at the castle; he
would probably remain there till the result of the election was known.
It would be time enough to settle then what should be done. For the
present, Saul would remain unfettered and untrammelled.
“For I must be in Pentreath if there is to be an election,” he said, the
light of battle leaping into his eyes. He remembered elections in past
times, and the attendant excitement and fighting and fun, as in those
days it seemed to him. He was no politician then, and had only the
vaguest notion as to what it was all about; but he was always
foremost in the crowd about the hustings, cheering, howling, flinging
missiles, according to the spirit of the moment and the wave of public
opinion, which would ebb and rise and change a dozen different
times in as many hours. He had always been instinctively the enemy
of the Tory and the supporter of the Whig candidate, because he had
always taken on every matter the contrary opinion of the Castle—
almost as a matter of religion. Otherwise he could not be said to
have had an opinion heretofore in such things. But the excitement,
the indiscriminate treating, the rowdyism of the whole place, and the
fights and scrimmages that were constantly arising, were like the
elixir of life to the ardent temperament of one who was forced by
circumstances into a life of monotonous toil. He always obtained a
few days’ holiday on such occasions, and spent them in a fashion
dear to his heart. Now he looked forward to a longer spell of
excitement, and to struggles of a very different kind. Then it had all
been fun, now it would be stern earnest with him. There was a fierce
light of battle in his eyes. The hope sprang up again in his heart of
striking a blow for the cause. Eustace saw the look, heard the half
hissed words of joy and anticipation, and smilingly laid a hand on the
young fisherman’s arm.
“Yes, I think you will do well to be there. You are one of those who
may do us good, and help on the cause of right and liberty; but not
by violence, Saul—always remember that. Violence is not our friend,
but our most deadly foe. It puts a sword in the hands of our enemies
to slay us withal. There must be no unseemly violence at the
Pentreath election—remember that. We must give our opponents no
reason to say that the cause of reform is advocated by cowardly and
unworthy means. Leave all that sort of thing to our foes. Let them get
up as many riots as they please. Our part is to be just and wise and
patient, secure in the righteousness and justice of our object. You
will find we shall come out in a far stronger position by remembering
this than if we organise disturbances and lead angry mobs to deeds
of reckless lawlessness.”
Saul made no response; Eustace was not even sure that he heard.
His eyes were flashing, his nostrils working; he clenched and
unclenched his hand in a fashion indicative of strong excitement.
Eustace judged it wiser to say no more for the present. There would
be plenty of time before the elections came off to gain an increasing
ascendency over this wild spirit. His first beginning had been by no
means bad.
Yet Eustace, as he walked homewards silently with Bride, could
hardly help smiling at the thought of the part he should be forced to
play with Saul. That there were stirring days coming upon the
country he could not doubt, and he meant to take his part in them
with a will; but he realised that, with Saul watching his every
movement, and pledged to follow him to the utmost limit to which his
own arguments could be pushed, he should be forced to weigh his
words, and direct his actions with a greater prudence end
moderation than he had originally purposed. Perhaps it might be well
for him to have this reminder well before his eyes, but he could not
but smile at the peculiar result which had been brought about by his
own endeavour to work some sort of small agitation amongst the
people at St. Bride’s, St. Erme, and Penarvon.
CHAPTER XVI
THE POLLING AT PENTREATH
EVEN Bride caught something of the prevailing excitement as the
days and weeks flew by, and nothing was spoken of, or thought of in
the world about her, but the coming election and the prospects of the
Reform party. The far West-Country might be a little long in growing
into the burning questions of the day, but once aroused, it could
show an amount of eagerness and enthusiasm not to be despised by
busier centres. Moreover, party and local feeling always runs very
high in out-of-the-world places, and many in and around Pentreath
who cared but little, and understood less, of the real point at issue,
were keenly excited over the coming contest on account of the
exceptional nature it presented.
Hitherto their member, Sir Roland Menteith, had been returned
almost without opposition. He was popular with all sections of the
community, and such opposition as he met with was of a kind
sufficient to be the excuse for unlimited treating and unlimited
rowdyism on polling day, without being enough to awaken the
smallest amount of anxiety or uncertainty as to the result of the
struggle. But now all this was to be changed, and as days and weeks
rolled on, it became very evident that there would be a decided and
sharp contest; and although the supporters of Sir Roland were fairly
sanguine as to the result, the election was not the foregone
conclusion it had been in days of yore.
In the first place, there was already division in the camp; for so soon
as it became known that Sir Roland, whilst still professing Tory
principles, intended to give his adhesion to the bill which was before
the country for the reform of the franchise, a strong party, including
large numbers of wealthy men, at once seceded from him, and in a
short time it was announced that young Viscount Lanherne was
coming forward in the Tory interest to dispute the seat with Sir
Roland; whilst in the extreme Whig or Radical interest a candidate
was forthcoming in the person of Mr. Morval, a wealthy and
influential middle-class man, whose power and importance in the
place had been steadily growing during the past years, and who
promised to bring a strong army of voters to the poll when the day
should come.
The defection of these old-fashioned and “rabid” Tories from the
ranks of Sir Roland was a serious blow, for hitherto he had always
counted securely upon every vote this section of the community had
to give. It was a distinct split in the ranks, and a very serious one.
The young Viscount, though personally popular in society, was only
a lad fresh from Oxford, and knew nothing of the bulk of his
constituents. He had practically no chance of success, yet greatly
endangered Sir Roland’s seat, and was in great danger of making it
a present to the Radical candidate. From a common-sense
standpoint it was a grave error of judgment, but when party feeling
runs high, common-sense too often goes to the wall. There was a
large section in the county who absolutely refused to give any vote to
a man not pledged to fight the Reform Bill tooth and nail. By this
section Sir Roland was looked upon as a turncoat and renegade; nor
could the old-fashioned soundness of his Conservative principles on
other questions condone the fact that he stood pledged to the
support of this measure, which was looked upon as the first step
towards the overthrow of the existing constitution.
Neither did the Whig and Radical section trust the policy of Sir
Roland. They had too long been accustomed to regard him as the
Tory candidate to look upon him with favouring eyes now. In plain
English, the appearance of another Tory candidate in the field,
pledged to the old-fashioned Tory policy, had taken the wind out of
his sails, and made his position an anomalous one. He found himself
in the quandary so many do who try to adopt a moderate and liberal
policy without giving up altogether the older traditions in which they
have been reared: he was suspected and distrusted by a large
section on both sides, and regarded as one who was neither “fish,
flesh, fowl, nor good red herring,” a position not a little galling and
irritating to a man who had hitherto carried all before him with easy
assurance.
The Penarvon interest was his, and that went a long way; and
Eustace, who worked most energetically on his committee, did all
that one man can do to ensure a victory. Eustace, however, was not
always the best of advocates, for though he had a wide popularity in
certain classes, he was very greatly suspected and distrusted in
others, and those who would most willingly have followed his lead
were not of the class that had votes to give.
Still Sir Roland was by no means out of heart as to the result. He
had a very large following of men of moderate opinions, and the
support of the Duke, who was greatly respected by the upper
classes in the neighbourhood, was the best guarantee he could
possess that he was not going to pursue a destructive and
outrageous policy. Men who had wavered at first and had heard with
enthusiasm the news that Viscount Lanherne was coming forward,
began to think better of the matter after reading some of Sir Roland’s
manifestoes and hearing some of his speeches. The young
Viscount, though eager for the excitement of the coming contest, and
all on fire for the cause on which he had embarked, was neither a
man of experience nor knowledge, and he betrayed his lack of many
of the needful requirements of a politician whenever he addressed a
meeting or harangued a crowd. People began to take up the name of
“painted popinjay,” which had been freely flung at him by the
Radicals. It seemed somehow to fit the young spark, who was
always dressed in the tiptop of fashion, and whose face was as
brightly tinted as that of a girl.
Sir Roland had won for himself the name of “trimmer,” and found it
difficult to know what to call himself, since the name Tory was now
absorbed by the Viscount’s party, whilst the other opponent had
taken upon himself the name and office of the Whig representative.
At last, following the example of the great trimmer, Lord Halifax, he,
with a mixture of tact and good-humour which did him credit and
proved a strategic success, himself adopted the name thrust upon
him, and in his speeches and printed addresses openly advocated
the policy of “trimming,” when it had become a certainty that neither
of the two advocated extremes could any longer govern the country.
Of course there was an immense power in the style of argument
adopted from the great peer of two centuries back, who had often
found himself in a parallel dilemma; and his arguments, dressed up
in a fresh garb, were freely used by Sir Roland, and that with no
small effect. Eustace read up the subject of compromise for him, and
furnished him with most telling precedents to quote to his audiences.
The Duke spoke to those friends who came to remonstrate with, or
consult him, in a fashion that was not without effect. Men began to
say to one another that if the Duke of Penarvon had reached the
conclusion that it was hopeless to try and stem the tide, and that the
wisest and best course now was to seek to place in authority men of
known experience, probity, and moderation to guide the bark of the
country through the troubled waters of reform, why then they had
better follow the same tactics. He would certainly have advocated a
fighting policy if there was any reasonable hope of maintaining the
struggle with success; but if he despaired of this, it showed, indeed,
that the time for compromise had come, and every one who knew
anything of human nature or the history of nations, must be aware
that to insist on fighting a hopeless battle was only to stir up an
infinity of bitterness and party feeling, and render the winning side
tenfold more violent and destructive.
And so the days fled swiftly by; Eustace, though secure of his own
seat, working as hard in the cause of Sir Roland as though it had
been his own, striving to live down the distrust and ill-feeling he
found prevailing against him in Pentreath and its neighbourhood, and
gaining an experience and insight into human nature which he had
never obtained before. He found himself sometimes in a rather
awkward corner, it is true; for his own views were far more in
accordance with those of the Radical candidate, Mr. Morval, than
with those of Sir Roland, and it was by no means always easy to
avoid being landed again and again on the horns of a dilemma. But
since Sir Roland and he were of one mind upon the great question
upon which the appeal to the country was made, Eustace felt that
side issues and other matters of policy could be left to take care of
themselves. It would have been impossible to remain a guest at
Penarvon and to have flung himself into the arms of the Radical or
even the Whig party (it was all one, called at the castle Radical, and
in the town Whig, for the name Radical was still unpopular amongst
those who were voters, though beginning to be caught up by the
people). Eustace had no strong temptation to do this, having from
the first taken a liking for Sir Roland, and feeling grateful towards his
kinsman the Duke, who had been liberal enough to promise him the
coveted seat, even whilst regretting the nature of the great measure
his kinsman was pledged to support. Eustace would have sacrificed
more to win his goodwill and approval, or to keep in touch and in
sympathy with Bride. She was awaking to a keener interest in the
coming struggle than he had ever looked to see in her. He could not
tell exactly what she thought about it all, or what view she took of the
question of Reform; but there was something in her method of
receiving his accounts of their doings that inspired him with a keen
wish to retain her sympathies; and those he had found he could
never have unless his own doings were perfectly upright and
honourable. Many and many a time he was restrained from
employing some common trick or some unworthy inducement by the
remembrance of the look in Bride’s eyes when Sir Roland had
laughingly boasted of a like bit of sharp practice. In point of fact, he
was growing to rule his life by a new standard since knowing more of
Bride and her ideals. He hardly recognised this himself as yet; but,
had he paused to look back, he would have known that there were
innumerable little ways in which he had changed. Things which in old
days would have appeared absolutely legitimate, if not actually
advisable, were now avoided by him with a scrupulousness which
often exposed him to a laugh. He began to ask himself instinctively
how Bride would regard any course of action about which he was
uncertain, and again and again that question had arrested him from
taking a slightly doubtful course, and kept him upon the road of strict
probity and honesty.
Nor could Bade be altogether unconscious of this herself, and it
began to form a silent bond between them, which was, perhaps,
almost dangerously sweet. Eustace was the most conscious of this,
and it often made his heart thrill with pleasure; neither was it without
its effect upon her—one of these being an increased interest in
everything concerning this contest, and the keenest sympathy with
Eustace’s strenuous endeavours that it should be conducted on lines
of the strictest equity, and that nothing should be said or done to
disgrace the cause or give a handle for calumny or reproach. Bride
was scarcely more sorrowful than he when it was found that the
agent was conniving at time-honoured abuses, and setting on foot
the ordinary methods for vote-catching. Things that were looked
upon as a matter of course by Sir Roland, and received with a laugh
and a shrug, Eustace heard with a sense of repulsion which he
certainly would not have experienced a year before; and he worked
might and main to impose purer and more equitable methods upon
his subordinates, till it really began to be said in Pentreath that Sir
Roland deserved the seat if it was only for his probity and upright
dealing.
Eustace had hoped to have Saul working with and for him in these
stirring days; but, to his disappointment, and rather to his surprise,
he utterly failed in bringing his disciple into the arena of his own
efforts. Saul was working in his own fashion with a fierce resolution
and single-heartedness; but no argument or persuasion on
Eustace’s part would induce him to cast in his lot with the candidate
of the Castle party. It was in vain to say that he was on the side of
the great reform, that he was fighting the battle of the bill; Saul would
reply that Mr. Morval was also doing that, and that he was a man
pledged to the cause of the people through thick and thin, whilst
everybody knew that Sir Roland was only advocating the bill
because he knew it was hopeless to oppose it, and that at heart he
was a Tory and an aristocrat. It was quite enough for Saul that the
Castle was supporting him. No gentle words from Lady Bride, no
good offices from the Duke, had had the smallest effect in
overcoming the bitter hostility of this man towards the house of
Penarvon. Eustace sometimes doubted whether he should ever
retain Saul’s confidence if he were to succeed to the dukedom one
day, as was probable. As it was, Saul seemed able to dissever the
man from his name and race; but how long this might be the case
was an open question.
At any rate, Saul would not work with Eustace, and he worked on
lines absolutely independent, if not openly hostile. There was a
section in the town which was quite disposed to make an idol of the
young fellow, who had undergone a term of imprisonment and
suffered so much in the cause of justice and liberty.
This section was not one which commanded many votes; but the
voice of numbers always makes itself felt, and Saul was possessed
of a rude eloquence which commanded attention; and publicans
began to find that, if Saul was going to address a meeting in the
evening, it was sure to be largely attended by a class of customers
who brought grist to the mill. The operatives from the mills—now
finding that the hated machinery was a friend rather than a foe to
them, and almost all of them working again there—rallied round Saul
to a man. They liked to have as their spokesman and champion a
man of his grand physique and of a power of expression so much in
advance of their own. They always came to hear him speak, and he
was gradually becoming something of a power in the place. It is true
that his addresses were of so inflammatory a character that they
were often followed by a demonstration or a small riot which was
alarming to the more orderly inhabitants; but, at election times,
people made up their mind to disturbances, and tried to regard them
philosophically as the natural concomitants of the crisis.
The scenes presented by the hustings as the election day drew on
were increasingly lively and animated. Eustace came home one day
with his coat half torn off his back, having adventured himself rather
unwisely down a side alley where some considerable body of rabid
socialists had gathered to listen to one of their own number
denouncing anything and everything in the past systems of
government with a beautiful impartiality. He often returned soiled and
draggled, sometimes with a cut on the face or hands. Sir Roland did
not escape some of these amenities either, and declared with good-
humoured amusement that it promised to be the most lively election
he could remember.
The excitement became so acute as the day drew on, that even
Bride caught the infection of it, and was more aroused from her
dreamy life of silent meditation and prayer than she had ever been
before. Not that she ceased to pray constantly and earnestly for the
victory of the righteous cause—whichever that should be; but she
spent less time in silent musing and meditation, and more in the
study of those papers and journals which told her of the questions of
the day, and the aim and ultimate object of this hot party strife.
When the polling day really came, and her father settled to drive in in
the coach, taking Eustace with him—Sir Roland had his rooms at the
hotel in Pentreath, and had ceased to make headquarters at the
castle—Bride suddenly asked to accompany the party, a request so
foreign to her ordinary habits that both the men looked at her in
surprise.
“It will be very noisy and rowdy in the town,” said Eustace, “and we
may get into some street-fights, and have a warm reception
ourselves. Would you not be better and safer at home?”
“I should like to see the town at election time,” answered Bride, “and
I should like to be with my father.”
The Duke was surprised, and said a few words to dissuade her, but
finding her really bent upon it, gave way. He did not anticipate
anything very different to-day from what he had experienced at other
elections, and his daughter would go straight to the hotel where Sir
Roland’s committee-room was situated, and would remain there till
he drove out again. He himself would go early to the poll and register
his vote, and then come back and await the news which from time to
time would be brought in. He did not intend to remain late, to remain
till the result was announced; but he would spend a few hours in the
place, and gain a general idea how the fortunes of the day were
going.
The town presented an extraordinary appearance to Bride, as the
great coach rumbled through its streets, ordinarily so quiet and silent
and sleepy. The whole place was alive. It seemed as though every
inhabitant of the town and neighbourhood was abroad in the streets,
and shouts and yells, hootings and cheers, greeted the appearance
of the ducal equipage as it turned every corner. On the whole,
however, the crowd seemed jovial and good-tempered, and although
Bride shrank back sometimes in vague distress and alarm at the
sound of certain hoarse cries which assailed her ears, she was
aroused and interested by all she saw. The carriage passed through
the streets without molestation, though with many needful halts on
account of the congested state of the traffic, till it stopped at the
hotel, and the Duke handed out his daughter amid the cheering of a
large crowd, which had gathered there in the expectation of hearing
some speeches from Sir Roland. Bride was glad to hide herself in
the building; but was soon provided with a chair near the window,
from which she could look out into the market-place below. Sheltered
by a curtain, she could see without being seen. The room opened by
one of its long windows upon the great square balcony formed by the
roof of the projecting porch; and from time to time Sir Roland, or one
of his coadjutors, stepped out upon this balcony and made a short
speech, always received with vociferous applause. When it was
known that the Duke had arrived, there were many shouts for him;
and at last he gratified the people by going forward, and making a
brief but able little speech, in which encouragement and warning
were blended in a way that produced an obvious effect, and set the
people thinking.
Eustace made a speech to which Bride listened with undivided
attention; and never for a moment did he forget that she was
listening, and seldom perhaps had he spoken better, or so eloquently
advocated his entire belief in the use of the best and noblest
weapons only, in the noble cause to which they were pledged. When
he came in again, after being warmly applauded from without, she
gave him a glance which set his heart bounding and his pulses
throbbing; but he had no time for speech then, as the Duke wished
to go to the poll at once, and he accompanied him to try and ward off
anything like personal attack or insult; for he was by no means sure
what Saul and his band of malcontents were up to; and his own
presence at the side of his kinsman would be the greatest protection
from any disagreeable interlude.
Bride remained in the hotel, sometimes watching the animated
scene without, sometimes exchanging courtesies with the gentlemen
of the county who came in and out, some accompanied by their
wives, who, like Bride, had come to see what was going on, and who
were pleased to see the girl again after her long period of seclusion
following on her mother’s last illness and death.
Luncheon was spread in a room below, and partaken of as the
appetite or convenience of the guests suggested. The Duke returned
from the poll with tidings so far favourable to their candidate. But it
was too early to feel any security; and the supporters of the Viscount
were rallying bravely round him, and talking grandly of carrying the
seat in the Tory interest in face of all Radical and time-serving
opposition.
At two o’clock, however, things were still looking well for Sir Roland,
and better still at three. The Viscount’s poll remained almost
stationary now, and the Radical candidate was left far behind. True,
his supporters were mainly those likely to register their votes later in
the day, but on the whole there was a feeling in the minds of Sir
Roland and his committee that the day was going very well for them,
and the cheering and enthusiasm outside, whenever news from the
poll was received, was loud and increasing.
But the Duke, though keenly interested in the contest, was not
desirous of remaining much longer. He wished to get home before
the mills ceased work, and the operatives came pouring out. At any
rate, he wished to be clear of the town by that time; and when he
was told that to-day many of the mills were to close at four o’clock,
he quickly ordered his carriage to be got ready, for there was not too
much time to spare.
It took time, with the yard so full of vehicles and the stables so
overcrowded, to get the great coach out and equipped; and Eustace
suddenly resolved that he would at least make one of the party in it
on its way through the streets. The hands of the clock were drawing
rapidly on to the hour of four, and still the coach could not be got free
of the yard. Then a messenger from the poll came tearing up with
news of farther advances for Sir Roland, and some more
congratulations and cheering had to be gone through, whilst the
crowd, surging up closer and closer round the hotel, made egress for
the moment practically impossible. Before the horses were in and
the start accomplished, the clocks had boomed out the hour of four
some ten minutes since; and as Eustace looked out through the
window at the crowded state of the streets, and the threatening
aspect of the operatives swarming round them, he wished they had
cleared the precincts of the town some half-hour ago, but was very
glad he was in the carriage.
They had turned out of the main thoroughfare, where progress was
almost impossible, on account of its proximity to the polling booth,
and were making their way down a narrow alley, when a sudden
sound of hooting and yelling broke upon their ears, and Eustace,
trained to such things, detected a note of menace in it which he
feared was directed against the well-known carriage of the Duke.
This suspicion was heightened by the conduct of the coachman on
the box, who suddenly lashed his horses into a mad gallop, as
though the man felt that this was the only chance of getting through
some barrier suddenly raised before them.
This manœuvre was received with a howl and a yell. The next
moment, the carriage lurched violently, the horses plunged and
kicked in wild terror. Cries, groans, and curses arose in deafening
tumult around the carriage, and Bride half started up, exclaiming—
“They are trampling down the people. Eustace, stop the horses! Tell
the coachman to pull up! They must not hurt the people! See that
they do not! See if any one is hurt!”
There was no fear in her face, only a great compassion and anxiety.
But before Eustace could make any move or answer, the horses had
been brought to a standstill by the hands of the mob, and the wild
and enraged people were yelling and surging round the carriage in a
fashion which could not but remind all its occupants of scenes they
had heard described as having taken place in France during the
days of the uprising of the populace there.
Bride sank back in her seat, pale, but with a look of quiet resolution,
which bespoke the high courage of her race. The Duke put out his
hand and took his daughter’s in its clasp, but remained otherwise
perfectly quiet and unmoved. His fine old face regarded the tumult
without a change or a quiver; his eyes looked quietly, though rather
sternly, out from beneath the pent-house of his bushy brows, and his
lips looked a little thin and grim. The men on the box were making a
gallant fight, laying about them right and left with the great whip and
with the reins, whose buckled end made no bad weapon when

Geopolitics Northern Europe and Nordic Noir What Television Series Tell Us About World Politics 1st Edition Robert A. Saunders

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List of figures viii

1 Co-constituting the world: Popular culture and geopolitics 1

2 Why Norden? Why now? A geopolitical foregrounding 26

3 Northern places, dark spaces: Norden as a realm

4 It’s the little things: Bodies, communities, encounters 78

5 In/Out/In-between: (B)orders, liminality, and us/them 104

6 Ideology versus idylls: Neoliberalism, nationalism,

7 Beyond Norden: The global geopolitics of a genre 163

Appendix: Television and TV film series 191

2.1 British Prime Minister Winston Churchill reviewing British

1.1 Nordic noir series and/as (geo)political culture(s) 10

2.1 World War II 31

Geopolitical television in the ‘North’

Popular culture as the ‘real world’

Scope and aims

• The ‘Corporeal’ – spaces that are historically defined by an organic

The concluding chapter then shifts to the issues of adaptation, transplanta-

Geopolitical culture(s) on the small screen

• Produced in northern Europe and primarily for northern European

Table 1.1 Nordic noir series and/as (geo)political culture(s)

The Villainous Criminal Parochialism; Deadwind (Finland, 2018)

In her historicising of the process of geographical imagination, Rogoff lays

Television 3.0 and its geopolitical turn

The Wire is a TV programme like no other. Its central character isn’t

Similar universes or secondary worlds have proven to be both popular and

At this moment of globalization, television series have become – if not

The emergence of ‘geopolitical television’ (see Glynn and Cupples 2015)

Deep TV: Worlds of imagination

In the subsequent chapter, the focus turns to the protean geopolitics of

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List of figures viii

1 Co-constituting the world: Popular culture and geopolitics 1

2 Why Norden? Why now? A geopolitical foregrounding 26

4 It’s the little things: Bodies, communities, encounters 78

5 In/Out/In-between: (B)orders, liminality, and us/them 104

7 Beyond Norden: The global geopolitics of a genre 163

Appendix: Television and TV film series 191

1.1 Nordic noir series and/as (geo)political culture(s) 10

2.1 World War II 31