Max Warrack

Background

About Max Warrack

Teaching Fellow at the University of Warwick in International Relations and East Asian Studies. My research explores the relationship between culture and politics, understanding political phenomena as expressions that can be traced back to changes in culture. I focus on media-entertainment as the most prominent cultural medium in contemporary civil societies, and therefore, the primary site where the ideas that shape politics are constituted. I have three lines of research: popular culture and world politics; international relations and security; and critical military studies/gender studies. My primary case study is Japanese security policy, where I argue its new post-Cold War security trajectory expresses a cultural shift away from the ‘culture of antimilitarism’ established after World War Two, and towards a new emerging ‘culture of militarism’. My PhD project fused the three lines of research together in a discourse analysis on gendered representations of the Japan Self-Defense Force (JSDF) in manga that re-establish the connection between masculinity and the military.