In this paper, we take the emergence of the Her Majesty’s Armed Forces toy range in 2009 as a starting point for thinking through the domestication of geopolitics through practices of play. Empirically, the paper draws upon substantive, innovative and original research undertaken with children in their homes, via a series of play ethnographies; conceptually, the paper draws upon the notion of ‘domestication’ and argues that ideas from these literatures might be usefully adopted as a means of reconfiguring popular geopolitics. In so doing, we argue not only that toys, games and play warrant much greater attention as forms of popular geopolitics, but also that the idea of domestication has much to offer wider conceptions and framings around popular geopolitics itself. The paper thus advances claims for a significant reformulation of popular geopolitics as an encounter between texts, objects, bodies and practices. More specifically, the rich ambiguity of the observed practices emerging from our play-centred ethnographic approach speaks clearly to the need to avoid prioritising the public over the private, cultural producers over audience, and the discursive over the affective in our theorisations of domestication. While we should be attentive to the highly orchestrated practices of anticipating domesticity and the multiple sites of geographical production assembled though these practices, we should not ignore the excess inherent within the incomplete, experimental process of domestication.

This paper explores the popular geopolitics of Hollywood cinema in the years since the terror attacks on New York & Washington on September 11th 2001. During this time there has been a surprisingly varied and wide-ranging output of mainstream US movies that take either 9/11, or the consequential ‘war on terror’, as their primary context. In the paper we look at one such film in particular, the 2007 film ‘The Kingdom’, directed by Peter Berg. Set in Saudi Arabia, the film centres around an FBI-led investigation into a terrorist attack on an American civilian compound. In discussing the narrative and discursive elements of the film, and their relationship to the geopolitics of the ‘war on terror’, we also seek to build upon recent conceptual developments in the field of popular geopolitics. In particular, we argue that a greater recognition and understanding of the visuality of the geopolitics of film is required. We do this in two main ways. First, we suggest that attention needs to be paid to the ways in which images in films are put together. Here we use the notion of montage to show how film produces imaginative maps of connectivity, that in this context bear relation to the production of a series of ‘extra-territorialities’ in the war on terror. Second, we contend that greater attention to the notion of genre (in this case the action-thriller) can provide productive forms of analysis. More specifically we argue that the action-thriller genre has certain political tendencies, especially towards what has been termed Jacksonianism.

In this paper, we take the emergence of the Her Majesty’s Armed Forces toy range in 2009 as a starting point for thinking through the domestication of geopolitics through practices of play. Empirically, the paper draws upon substantive, innovative and original research undertaken with children in their homes, via a series of play ethnographies; conceptually, the paper draws upon the notion of ‘domestication’ and argues that ideas from these literatures might be usefully adopted as a means of reconfiguring popular geopolitics. In so doing, we argue not only that toys, games and play warrant much greater attention as forms of popular geopolitics, but also that the idea of domestication has much to offer wider conceptions and framings around popular geopolitics itself. The paper thus advances claims for a significant reformulation of popular geopolitics as an encounter between texts, objects, bodies and practices. More specifically, the rich ambiguity of the observed practices emerging from our play-centred ethnographic approach speaks clearly to the need to avoid prioritising the public over the private, cultural producers over audience, and the discursive over the affective in our theorisations of domestication. While we should be attentive to the highly orchestrated practices of anticipating domesticity and the multiple sites of geographical production assembled though these practices, we should not ignore the excess inherent within the incomplete, experimental process of domestication.

This paper explores the popular geopolitics of Hollywood cinema in the years since the terror attacks on New York & Washington on September 11th 2001. During this time there has been a surprisingly varied and wide-ranging output of mainstream US movies that take either 9/11, or the consequential ‘war on terror’, as their primary context. In the paper we look at one such film in particular, the 2007 film ‘The Kingdom’, directed by Peter Berg. Set in Saudi Arabia, the film centres around an FBI-led investigation into a terrorist attack on an American civilian compound. In discussing the narrative and discursive elements of the film, and their relationship to the geopolitics of the ‘war on terror’, we also seek to build upon recent conceptual developments in the field of popular geopolitics. In particular, we argue that a greater recognition and understanding of the visuality of the geopolitics of film is required. We do this in two main ways. First, we suggest that attention needs to be paid to the ways in which images in films are put together. Here we use the notion of montage to show how film produces imaginative maps of connectivity, that in this context bear relation to the production of a series of ‘extra-territorialities’ in the war on terror. Second, we contend that greater attention to the notion of genre (in this case the action-thriller) can provide productive forms of analysis. More specifically we argue that the action-thriller genre has certain political tendencies, especially towards what has been termed Jacksonianism.