University of Groningen

Bachelor Thesis IR/IO

Core Module: Visual Global Politics

Thesis Supervisor: David Shim

Dank Memes and Visual Discourse

Jakob Schiele

S2724421

Paterswoldseweg 53A

9727BA Groningen

22.05.2017

Word Count: 8009

1
unknown, When youre trying to explain the complexities of the meme economy to some normie, Meme Image,
May 19, 2017, http://imgur.com/xpYOgTb.
Table of contents

Introduction 3

Section 1: Seeing the Bigger Picture 6

Section 2: Defining Memes and Exploring their Discursive Potential 10

Section 3: Pepsi Can Solve World Problems - Analysis of a Contemporary Meme 20

Conclusion: See the Memes, Seize the Memes 26

Bibliography 28

Annex 31

2
 Introduction

The US-American presidential election of 2016 was highly interesting for political scientists
in many ways, but one important aspect was how social media and especially internet memes
seem to have played a substantial role in promoting the victorious right-wing candidate
Donald Trump.2 Some internet users even went so far to claim that the US-American people
"actually elected a meme as president", a statement that, as absurd as it seems at first glance,
makes more sense when considering how Trump appeared to incorporate some aspects that
correspond with internet culture, such as being "politically incorrect", relying more on
emotions than on facts and valuing entertainment more than profound message.3 Moreover, a
part of his campaign machinery that particularly appealed to younger voters was an online
community named "the_donald".4 Created by his supporters on one of the biggest internet
platforms, Reddit, it continued to create visual content praising Trump and denouncing his
opponents.5

Interestingly enough, in the ongoing German election campaign, followers of centre-left

chancellor candidate Martin Schulz appropriated language, style and methods of "the_donald"
in their own version of the community. Ironically named "the_schulz" and originally a
parody, the Subreddit quickly rose to prominence in public perception, accompanied by a
surge of popularity of the chancellor candidate, baffling politicians and journalists on both
sides alike.6 All this seems to hint to an increasingly important role of social media and
internet memes in election campaigns, something that Sandra Yao has already noted
concerning the reelection of Obama in 2012.7 However, her findings imply that there seems to

2
Christine Lagorio-Chafkin, “Reddit and the God Emperor of the Internet,” The New York Times, November 19,
2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/reddit-and-the-god-emperor-of-the-
internet.html?_r=0.
3
Abby Ohlheiser, “‘We Actually Elected a Meme as President’: How 4chan Celebrated Trump’s Victory,”
Chicago Tribune, November 12, 2016, http://www.chicagotribune.com/bluesky/technology/ct-meme-
president-4chan-trump-wp-bsi-20161112-story.html.
4
Reddit, “r/The_Donald,” June 27, 2015, https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/.
5
Jasper Jackson, “Moderators of pro-Trump Reddit Group Linked to Fake News Crackdown on Posts,” The
Guardian, November 22, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/22/moderators-trump-
reddit-group-fake-news-crackdown.
6
Reddit, “R/the_schulz,” November 24, 2016, https://www.reddit.com/r/the_schulz/; Fabian Reinhold,
“Schulz? MEGA!,” Spiegel Online, January 1, 2017, http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/martin-schulz-
reddit-kult-um-den-spd-kandidaten-a-1132438.html; Elena Cresci, “Mega: How German Chancellor Hopeful
Martin Schulz Became a Meme,” The Guardian, February 9, 2017,
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/feb/09/martin-schulz-meme-subreddit-bundestag-german-
elections.
7
Sandra Yao, “‘Pocket-Sized’ Politics - Binders, Big Bird and Other Memes of the 2012 US Presidential
Campaign,” in Understanding Popular Culture and World Politics in the Digital Age, Popular Culture in World
Politics (New York: Routledge, 2016), 153–74.
3
be more to internet memes than their use as some sort of marketing tool in election
campaigns: They can be an arena for political discourse.

Some might dismiss this, pointing out that memes are merely humoristic entertainment. But
immediately linking humor to political irrelevance would be a grave mistake, which is evident
when comparing memes to what appears to be another development in Western political
culture: A rising influence of Late Night Shows as an important factor in shaping political
discourse.8 Examples of this phenomenon are John Oliver in the US, Jan Böhmermann in
Germany and Arjen Lubach in the Netherlands. These shows seem to increasingly blur the
lines between entertainment and politics, packing political messages and criticism of
governments in a humorous format. Political internet memes work similarly, mashing
entertaining (or in internet speak, so-called "dank") content with overt and covert political
messages. Thus they might form a new type of visual political discourse, with the internet
replacing television as what Roland Bleiker called "the most crucial source of collective
consciousness today".9

Images have always played an important role in the construction of political discourse,
especially when it comes to foreign policy issues and international politics, as Lene Hansen
has shown in her work on iconic images.10 However, the rise of internet memes from a fringe
phenomenon to a central part of social media culture has been an undeniably important
development in recent years that should be paid more attention to. Memes, often taking the
specific form of an image accompanied by a short caption, constitute a new form of digital
cultural object that is easily and rapidly spread globally through digital social networks.

In my BA Thesis I want to shed light on this phenomenon that has so far been widely ignored
by International Relations scholars (with few exceptions) and try to answer the following
research question: Do internet memes constitute a new form of global visual discourse? The
first section of the paper will justify the choice of my research topic by building a theoretical
framework upon other IR work dealing with the analysis of visual art and popular culture.

Having done this, the second section aims to specify the research question by dissecting it into
smaller parts. First of all I will define the sometimes vague concept of internet memes, using
8
Geoffrey Baym, “The Daily Show: Discursive Integration and the Reinvention of Political Journalism,” Political
Communication 22, no. 3 (2005): 259–76; Lauren Feldman, “Late-Night Comedy as a Gateway to Traditional
News: An Analysis of Time Trends in News Attention Among Late-Night Comedy Viewers During the 2004
Presidential Primaries,” Political Communication 24, no. 4 (2008): 401–22.
9
Roland Bleiker, Aesthetics and World Politics (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 34.
10
Lene Hansen, “How Images Make World Politics: International Icons and the Case of Abu Ghraib,” Review of
International Studies 41, no. 2 (April 2015): 263–88.
4
recent communication studies literature dealing with this complex issue, in particular Limor
Shifman's book "Memes in digital culture". 11 Furthermore, I will show the conceptual kinship
of internet memes to the account of iconic imagery as put forward by Hansen. Hereafter, I
will point out how memes function as global visual discourse, building upon Sandra Yao's
and Saara Särmä's work on memes.12 Subsequently, I want to demonstrate what makes memes
a new form of discourse, by pointing out the crucial differences to older forms of media and
popular culture and showing the critical potential evident in memes.

Lastly, the third section will comprise a comprehensive analysis of a recent meme, namely the
images sparked by the "Kendall Jenner Pepsi Ad", to illustrate the points made before. For
this analysis I will use a modified version of the methodology developed by Hansen for the
examination of iconic images and their appropriations.

I will conclude the paper by proposing to IR scholars two ways to engage with the new
medium of internet memes.

11
Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2014).
12
Sandra Yao, “‘Pocket-Sized’ Politics - Binders, Big Bird and Other Memes of the 2012 US Presidential
Campaign”; Saara Särmä, “Collaging Internet Parody Images - An Art-Inspired Methodology for Studying
Laughter in World Politics,” in Understanding Popular Culture and World Politics in the Digital Age, Popular
Culture in World Politics (New York: Routledge, 2016), 175–88.
5
 Seeing the Bigger Picture

A paper dealing directly with war or interstate relations, for example, is easily accepted as
being part of the academic field of IR. In contrast, research written about internet memes will
probably evoke the same confused reaction from many IR scholars: What does this have to do
with International Relations? It might further be confronted with the accusation of not being
concerned with a "serious" topic, if not even being framed as a waste of precious mental
resources that should rather be directed towards the assessment of some world conflict,
preferably using a mainstream realist or liberal framework. Or how Särmä put it: "In a field
concerned with life and death issues, focus on the trivial may feel even dangerous - a
distraction from 'the real issues'."13

Consequently, to counter these doubts and to prepare the ground for my conceptual and
analytical assessment of internet memes, I will justify my research subject theoretically in the
following section. To achieve this, I will answer three questions, with each question further
specifying the choice of my research: Why study the visual? Why study pop culture? Why
study internet memes? Responding to these questions also posits my thesis in the important IR
debate concerning the delimitations of the academic field in general, and the question whether
to investigate popular culture in particular.14

Any IR work dealing with some form of art can be situated as being part of what Roland
Bleiker has identified as the "aesthetic turn" in IR, denoting an increasing amount of IR
scholarship engaging aesthetic sources, encompassing such diverse media as literature, music
and film, to name some examples. 15 He convincingly argues for an alternative "aesthetic"
approach to IR (as opposed to the mimetic approaches of the mainstream), taking into account
the poststructuralist assumption that we cannot represent reality simply "as it is", since the
meaning of what we conceive as reality is always mediated through some form of socially
constructed representation.16

Bleiker concludes from this that the irreducible gap between representation and reality has to
be examined as "the very location of politics". 17 Thus, art becomes relevant for IR in two

13
Saara Särmä, “Collaging Internet Parody Images - An Art-Inspired Methodology for Studying Laughter in
World Politics,” 179.
14
Kyle Grayson, “The Rise of Popular Culture in IR: Three Issues,” E-International Relations, January 30, 2015,
http://www.e-ir.info/2015/01/30/the-rise-of-popular-culture-in-ir-three-issues/.
15
Roland Bleiker, Aesthetics and World Politics, 35.
16
Roland Bleiker, “The Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory,” in Aesthetics and World Politics
(Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 18–47.
17
Roland Bleiker, Aesthetics and World Politics, 19.
6
ways: Firstly, the analysis of art can help understand the study of politics as such, by
understanding them as analogue, since both are fundamentally concerned with representations
of reality. Secondly, the analysis of how art works politically, how it influences our
understanding of politics, makes it possible to understand, criticize, and attempt to use this
influence.

This paper is mainly concerned with the latter and aims to examine the visual as a particularly
powerful subsection of art, being able to "evoke[s] sensory and emotional responses".18
Furthermore, as Särmä observed, in present times it seems even more relevant since "we are
constantly bombarded by the visual".19 Certainly, the increasing importance of visuality in
shaping the understanding of world politics has been around since the introduction of cinema
and television, leading some to the view of television as "the popular cultural form of the late
twentieth century" or even "the most crucial source of collective consciousness today". 20
However, with the current omnipresence of social media and its visual contents in the daily
lives of people, it can be argued that our exposure to images and videos has reached an
unprecedented level. Therefore, "the visual" as research subject for IR has become perpetually
more significant.

All visual art forms are in some way relevant for IR, but those found in popular culture should
deserve special attention due to the sheer quantity in which they are consumed and the size of
their audience. Jutta Weldes has persuasively argued for the study of pop culture, on the
grounds that "state policy has a pervasive cultural basis" and "state action is made
commonsensical through popular culture".21 This gives pop culture the crucial power to define
what is the "normal" in international relations and what courses of action the "common sense"
suggests, thus discursively constructing the world in a certain way that makes the pop
culture's consumer interpret some sorts of actions as right and others as wrong.

Now if popular culture does possess this power, IR scholars have many reasons to direct their
attention towards a quite recent, but incredibly pervasive and quantitatively exploding
phenomena in digital popular culture: Internet memes. Caitlin Hamilton has observed that
unfortunately, digitally mediated popular culture such as memes has not yet received

18
Saara Särmä, “Collaging Internet Parody Images - An Art-Inspired Methodology for Studying Laughter in
World Politics,” 181.
19
Ibid., 175.
20
Jutta Weldes, “Going Cultural: Star Trek, State Action, and Popular Culture,” Millennium - Journal of
International Studies 28 (March 1999): 119–120; Roland Bleiker, Aesthetics and World Politics, 34.
21
Jutta Weldes, “Going Cultural: Star Trek, State Action, and Popular Culture,” 119.
7
sufficient analytical attention in the field of IR.22 Her book on the topic is the welcome
exception, including chapters by Saara Särmä and Sandra Yao exploring the influence of
political memes, which can provide a starting point for meme research in IR. 23 Laura
Shepherd argues in the same issue that "world politics manifest in digital spaces" and it
appears one of these spaces is to be found in frequently accessed social media websites such
as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, or image forums like Reddit, Imgur, Tumblr, the
infamous 4chan and 9gag, whose content consists to a remarkable degree of humoristic
internet memes.24

It is these images that we just scroll past on the screens of our smartphones or computers, this
freely accessible source of seemingly endless entertainment that forms part of "the banal",
identified by Hamilton as something that should be taken seriously by scholars who want to
study pop culture, as it "attunes us to different places, voices, views and experiences". 25 The
humoristic nature of these contents might discourage many researchers to do so and mislead
them to write memes off as an insignificant and politically innocent pastime, but this would
be mistaken because, as Juha Ridanpää has shown in his work on cartoons, humor is far from
innocent and the politics of humor are relevant for IR.26

Särmä emphasizes this and notes how ostensibly banal memes encountered online daily both
"tap into mass culturally shared assumptions", and in turn reproduce these assumptions, thus
standing in bidirectional exchange with how we know contemporary world politics and
helping to shape our understanding of the world.27 Taking the poststructuralist rejection of the
idea of an accessible and meaningful extra-discursive reality seriously means that the only
way to interpret any political event or phenomenon is as it emerges through discourse. 28 This
discourse is not limited to written and spoken language as such, but includes visual forms of
communication such as images. Consequently, when memes are often the first encounter with
22
Caitlin Hamilton, “World Politics 2.0 - An Introduction,” in Understanding Popular Culture and World Politics
in the Digital Age, Popular Culture in World Politics (New York: Routledge, 2016), 10.
23
Saara Särmä, “Collaging Internet Parody Images - An Art-Inspired Methodology for Studying Laughter in
World Politics”; Sandra Yao, “‘Pocket-Sized’ Politics - Binders, Big Bird and Other Memes of the 2012 US
Presidential Campaign.”
24
Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 13.
25
Saara Särmä, “Collaging Internet Parody Images - An Art-Inspired Methodology for Studying Laughter in
World Politics,” 175; Caitlin Hamilton, “World Politics 2.0 - An Introduction,” 4–5.
26
Juha Ridanpää, “Geopolitics of Humour: The Muhammed Cartoon Crisis and the Kaltio Comic Strip Episode in
Finland,” Geopolitics 14 (2009): 729–731.
27
Saara Särmä, “Collaging Internet Parody Images - An Art-Inspired Methodology for Studying Laughter in
World Politics,” 175; ibid., 178–179.
28
Laura J. Shepherd, “Authors and Authenticity - Knowledge, Representation and Research in Contemporary
World Politics,” in Understanding Popular Culture and World Politics in the Digital Age, Popular Culture in
World Politics (New York: Routledge, 2016), 42.
8
a specific event in world politics to an internet-affluent younger generation, it follows that
these digital artifacts have "direct impact on the ways in which we encounter the real world".29

To summarize, while investigating "high politics" remains a central theme to IR scholarship,

researchers should not commit the fallacy to shy away from the enriching extension of the
discipline on the study of art and culture. In line with an aesthetic approach as proposed by
Bleiker, focusing on the visual as a major aesthetic source, and taking into account the
pervasiveness and global political relevance of pop culture identified by Weldes, I argue the
importance of studying internet memes as an integral part of contemporary digital popular
culture. Memes are a seemingly banal, but omnipresent pictorial background noise in the lives
of a young generation in the 21st century, similar to what television has been since the 1950s,
thus being an increasingly important source of collective consciousness.

International Relations as a discipline should not commit the fallacy of restricting its own
potential by dogmatically limiting its research subject to interstate relations. The transnational
nature of digital communication technology transcends traditional state borders and creates a
space where visual popular culture can develop globally. It is important that these trends are
recognized and the natural conclusion is drawn: The field of IR needs to think outside of the
"black box" of the state and see the bigger picture, this being an advice both metaphorically,
as an invitation to consider topics that have traditionally been located outside of the subject of
IR, and literally, as an encouragement to look at a type of images that are "big" in
contemporary digital popular culture: internet memes.

29
Saara Särmä, “Collaging Internet Parody Images - An Art-Inspired Methodology for Studying Laughter in
World Politics,” 175; Caitlin Hamilton, “World Politics 2.0 - An Introduction,” 10.
9
 Defining Memes and Exploring their Discursive Potential

Writing about internet memes confronts the researcher with a first fundamental problem that
work on other pop culture artifacts does not have to face to the same extent: The problem of
defining what Limor Shifman calls a "conceptual troublemaker". 30 If one talks about movies
for instance, most people have a more or less clear idea what the genre of movies
encompasses and what "a movie" is, namely a video with storyline and confined length.
Internet memes, however, are difficult to delineate both as a genre, as the "whole of memes",
and as a singular artifact, as one token meme. This problem arises partly due to the relative
arbitrariness of form when it comes to internet memes. They can take the form of videos,
photographs, or even certain dance moves or behaviors (as in the example of "planking"). 31
Moreover, the term should not be confused with the broader notion of a "meme" as the basic
building block of all culture, as it has been introduced by Richard Dawkins.32

For the purposes of the present research, "meme" will always refer to internet memes as
visual content primarily in the form of images, using Shifman's definition of an internet meme
as a "group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form and/or stance"
that were "created with awareness of each other" and "circulated, imitated and/or transformed
via the Internet by many users".33 This definition is helpful as it includes three different but
interrelated important aspects that are worth elaborating on.

First of all, defining an internet meme as always consisting of a group of images and not
merely one picture is crucial to understanding the complexity of the genre. One singular
image can go "viral", i.e. receive a lot of attention and be shared and seen by many people,
but virality alone does not make it a meme. 34 It only becomes a meme through creative
replication and "remixing", processes of separation and recombination of certain visual or
compositional elements via image manipulation software such as Photoshop or similar
programs. This logic of "reproduction via copying and imitation" is what creates a meme and
keeps it alive.35 These methods of engagement and slightly deviant reproduction leads to the
second aspect, the "intertextuality" of memes.

30
Limor Shifman, “Memes in a Digital World: Reconciling with a Conceptual Troublemaker,” Journal of
Computer-Mediated Communication 18, no. 3 (April 2013): 362–77.
31
Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture.
32
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 192.
33
Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 7–8.
34
Ibid., 55–56.
35
Ibid., 20–22.
10
Meme images are intertextual36 in the sense that they are created with awareness of each other,
which means they do not acquire their full meaning on their own, but always have to be read
in relation to the other memes or pieces of pop culture that they reference. 37 What follows
from this is that to understand a meme, an internet user has to belong to some extent to a
certain knowledge community, making the meaning of memes even more explicitly
depending on intersubjective, socially constructed elements than other pop culture genres and
at the same time generating a sense of communality. That is what Shifman calls the "social
logic" of memes: By living a form of "networked individualism", people are simultaneously
constructing their "online selves" on the one hand and shaping social networks on the other
hand, thus defining the individual and contributing to a feeling of community at the same
time.38

Thirdly, the importance of that community hints to a crucial social component inherent to
memes that harbors a quantitative aspect. Only the circulation, imitation and transformation of
its images by many internet users makes a meme. However, it is impossible to delimit clearly
how often this needs to happen, to state in a binary fashion whether something is an internet
meme or not, but it is more sensible to imagine the concept to be on a multidimensional scale:
The more often a type of image is shared, referenced, imitated or reproduced in a slightly
changed manner, the more of a meme it becomes. Hence, memes are created, diffused and
reproduced through active processes of selective competition, where publicly shown meta-
information about the attention a meme receives (in terms of clicks, views, likes) influences
its further dissemination.39

Having laid down Shifman's definition of internet memes, it is revealing to point out the
conceptual kinship with Lene Hansen's account of "international icons", which she puts
forward in her article about the influence of iconic imagery in IR. 40 The similarities shown in
the following provide sufficient justification for the limited application of her "analytical and
methodological strategy", originally developed for the analysis of iconic images and their
appropriations, to the new subject of internet memes, thus providing an elaborate method for
the analysis of IR-related memes which will be applied in the analytical part of this paper.41

36
Note: The terms text and intertextual do not necessarily refer to written text here, but include any object that
can be "read" in the broader sense of being understood, thus extending to images and other signs.
37
Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 4; ibid., 34.
38
Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 33–34.
39
Ibid., 22–23.
40
Lene Hansen, “How Images Make World Politics: International Icons and the Case of Abu Ghraib.”
41
Ibid., 277.
11
In her work, Hansen describes international icons as "freestanding images that are widely
circulated, recognized, and emotionally responded to" and whose meanings are constituted in
discourse. This already hints to the resemblance to internet memes, which could be defined in
a similar fashion, but the analogy becomes even clearer when she describes how images "rise
to the status of international icons" partly through processes of appropriation. Undergoing
these processes, the icon can either be fully appropriated or parts of the icon can be inserted
into new images, thus clearly corresponding to the processes of imitation, manipulation and
remixing that Shifman identified as a central feature of internet memes. 42

Moreover, Hansen introduces the distinction between discrete and generic icons, the former
describing "a single image with a definitive sets of elements", the latter referring to the
continuous repetition of certain elements until "the basic scene becomes a familiar staple, a
visual cliché".43 Again, relating these concepts to internet memes is highly insightful. Discrete
icons are often used in meme images in general and particularly in those with a more explicit
political meaning, as Shifman shows in her analysis of the "Pepper Spray Cop" meme, where
different political meanings are constituted through transferring the motive of the pepper
spraying policeman in a wide range of iconic images and historic paintings. 44 Besides
referencing discrete icons, memes appear almost analogue to the concept of generic icons in
their reliance on the repetition of certain elements, since memes are defined through "sharing
common characteristics of content, form and/or stance".45

Hansen goes on to emphasize the importance of the concept of generic icons to identify and
understand the iconic status of discrete icons because the latter "gain some of their visual
power from referring to previous icons", these often being of a generic kind. 46 She refers to
this effect as "inter-iconicity", a similarity to the intertextual nature of memes that Shifman
notes. Furthermore Hansen observes that through "icon quoting" the iconicity of the
referenced image also becomes reproduced, an effect that appears to be congruent with what
Shifman identified as the processes of meme reproduction and diffusion, where every
additional instance of a meme contributes to its popularity.47

42
Ibid., 263.
43
Ibid., 269.
44
Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 51–54.
45
Ibid., 7–8.
46
Lene Hansen, “How Images Make World Politics: International Icons and the Case of Abu Ghraib,” 269.
47
Ibid.
12
Lastly, Hansen herself points out that the concept of iconic images might be changing due to
different media use and ever faster information technology.48 Quoting David Perlmutter, she
introduces the term of "hypericons", described as icons that "pass by fleetingly, gain attention,
and then are replaced quickly by new icons", a description that could easily be taken as
referring to the fluid nature of meme culture: internet memes seem to rise to fame as fast as
they come to be outdated.49

In addition, she refers to the rapid emergence of so-called "instant icons", pictures that gain
immediate iconic status by circulating to a global audience and generating an emotional
response.50 An example of such an image would be the photograph of dead Syrian refugee boy
Alan Kurdi in 2015, seen by many as incorporating the tragedy of the refugee crisis and
Western states' failure to respond to it. 51 Another, more recent instant icon is even more
notable, since it went on to become World Press Photo of 2017 and an internet meme: The
picture of the assassin of Russian ambassador to Turkey Andrey Karlov.52

This photograph of an Turkish off-duty policeman aggressively shouting, with the gun that he
used to kill the man lying behind him still in his hands, became iconic in representing the
international impact of the Syrian Civil War and the conflicting interests of Turkey and
Russia therein. On the same day of the murder, the picture was appropriated in quite cynical,
silly and almost dadaistic ways by meme-makers on the image board 4chan, an internet
community particularly famous for its indecency.53 Although these memes were rather
unpolitical in nature, they still show how quickly internet users can "memeify" news pictures.

Having in mind this conceptual kinship between iconic images and internet memes, it
becomes crucial for the study of IR-related memes to pay attention to how Hansen views the
workings of international icons in world politics. She proposes to ask how icons take part in
the discourses constituting "the international" with its dichotomous constructions such as
self/other, universality/particularity, progress/repetition, reason/barbarism, etc., thus helping
to define who appears in global politics as "subjects, objects, actors, threats and opportunities,

48
Ibid., 272.
49
Ibid.; David D. Perlmutter, “Photojournalism and Foreign Affairs,” Orbis 49, no. 1 (2006): 119.
50
Lene Hansen, “How Images Make World Politics: International Icons and the Case of Abu Ghraib,” 271–272.
51
Bryan Walsh, “Alan Kurdi’s Story: Behind the Most Heartbreaking Photo of 2015,” TIME, December 29, 2015,
http://time.com/4162306/alan-kurdi-syria-drowned-boy-refugee-crisis/.
52
Burhan Ozbilici, An Assassination in Turkey, Photograph, December 19, 2016,
https://www.worldpressphoto.org/collection/photo/2017/world-press-photo-year/burhan-ozbilici.
53
「Starscream」, “Assassination of Andrey Karlov,” Know Your Meme, January 2017,
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/assassination-of-andrey-karlov.
13
and with which identities and responsibilities".54 Consequently, this is a question which meme
research should also ask about political memes.

She goes on to attribute to icons the ability to influence public debate in an "indirect and long-
term fashion", thus having an impact on foreign policy formulation and implementation. 55
Apart from locating iconic images in the international discourse and the discourse of "the
international", Hansen emphasizes how much scholarly work particularly notes the critical
potential of appropriations of existing images.56 This would underpin a possible critical
capacity for memes, being a form of pop culture clearly based on these types of appropriation.
Starting from these conclusions, I will further explain how memes work as discourse and why
their critical potential seems to be much bigger than that of older forms of popular culture.

As Sandra Yao has noted in her work on memes in the 2012 US presidential election,
complex ideas and arguments can be compressed into "pocket-sized media" such as internet
memes and these memes can serve as "communication ties" between users. 57 This is crucial to
understand how internet memes work as a new form of visual global political discourse.
According to Shifman, internet memes can be understood as "socially constructed public
discourses in which different memetic variants represent diverse voices and perspectives". 58
They are politically relevant as an "accessible, cheap and enjoyable route for voicing one's
political opinions", with the pop cultural basis serving as an arena where individuals can
"communicate with each other about politics in a playful and engaging way".59 The
"multifaceted discussion" comes about through a constant interaction between arguments and
counterarguments, memes and "countermemes", so that "diverse opinions and identities are
expressed and negotiated".60

What makes the meme discourse so interesting is that it entails inherently democratic features:
Meme arguments are constantly ranked and evaluated via the shares, likes (on some pages
called upvotes) and views they receive on the respective social media platforms they are
published on. Hence, they are in a continuous selective competition for approval and
attention. Shifman calls this an "economy-driven logic", resulting from contemporary digital
society being based on an "attention economy", where the most valuable resource in the
54
Lene Hansen, “How Images Make World Politics: International Icons and the Case of Abu Ghraib,” 273.
55
Ibid., 275.
56
Ibid., 275–276.
57
Sandra Yao, “‘Pocket-Sized’ Politics - Binders, Big Bird and Other Memes of the 2012 US Presidential
Campaign,” 153; ibid., 157.
58
Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 8.
59
Ibid., 122–123; ibid., 136.
60
Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 132.
14
information era is attention. 61 Memes incorporating messages or arguments that are deemed
irrelevant by users (because they do not make sense or state an already uncontroversial,
widely accepted opinion) thus fail to receive sufficient approval and attention to survive in the
social medium, that is, they cease to be part of the discourse, they cease to be memes.

On the contrary, memes that receive much approval will spark far more replications and
appropriations, as the online community "curates and assigns value" through these
processes.62 Only if a meme is able to connect with other users, it will be likely to be
reproduced or recreated.63 Subject to these processes of meme reproduction, popular opinions
will thrive in the attention economy, while also being under more scrutiny, as appropriation
techniques allow for public criticism and the creation of countermemes gaining quick
attention in the popular meme's wake, as shown by Shifman in the examination of the Occupy
Wall Street movement and the use of memes by its proponents and opponents.64

Naturally, being a discourse alone does not make meme culture revolutionary, since pop
culture has always acted as a form of public discourse. However, what makes meme discourse
so different has its roots in the distinctiveness of new digital media to old media, such as
television, radio, cinema and newspapers.65 Memes are a subsection of popular culture, but
simultaneously operate on a meta-level, supervening on all kinds of pop cultural references
that often can only be understood with some knowledge of the referenced material, which has
something to do with their origin in participatory fan culture. 66 According to Shifman, they are
based on what Jean Burgess describes as "vernacular creativity", i.e. "everyday innovative and
artistic practices that can be carried out by simple production means". 67 Old media mostly had
relatively high barriers for production of content and thus more "gatekeepers" for
participation in the public discourse: Not everyone could easily have their own radio show,
TV station, newspaper, or produce their own movies. In contrast, all it takes materially to
produce and spread memes is a computer (or merely a smartphone) with internet connection

61
Ibid., 32.
62
Sandra Yao, “‘Pocket-Sized’ Politics - Binders, Big Bird and Other Memes of the 2012 US Presidential
Campaign,” 153.
63
Ibid., 157.
64
Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 127–136.
65
Sebastian Kaempf, “The Potentiality and Limits of Understanding World Politics in a Transformng Global
Media Landscape,” in Understanding Popular Culture and World Politics in the Digital Age, Popular Culture in
World Politics (New York: Routledge, 2016), 14.
66
Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 34.
67
Ibid., 99.
15
and some basic photo manipulation software or a few clicks on a "meme-generator" 68
website.69

As a consequence, an old "read-only" media and pop culture has been transformed into a
"read/write culture".70 The new dominant actor in this type of digital pop culture is the
individual, leading to a bottom-up or grassroots nature of the new medium, as opposed to the
rather top-down hierarchical and monopolized structures of old media. 71 One key feature of
the participatory meme culture is thus a quantitative and qualitative difference in terms of
participation when compared to old media, what Sebastian Kaempf calls a "broadening and
diversification".72 Firstly, there is a quantitative difference since participation is simply greater
in numbers, resulting in a larger amount of opinions to be heard. Secondly, there is a
qualitative difference as not only "established" individuals can produce, disseminate, and
evaluate, possibly leading to a greater variety in the pool of opinions. Jean Burgess goes so far
to equate the individual practice of vernacular creativity with direct political participation,
stating that practicing such "cultural citizenship" could be understood as a relevant form of
civic engagement that goes further than processes of formal politics.73

The participatory nature of digital culture that allows everyone's voice to be heard is one
factor contributing to the critical potential of meme discourse, but there are more to be found.
Another factor can be located in the aforementioned critical use of appropriations noted by
scholars of Media Studies and Art History and brought up by Hansen in relation to iconic
images.74 This critical use is possible due to images' "inherent subversive force" and their
potential as "sites of protest and opposition". 75 Shifman also notices that the transformative
work of meme-makers can harbor criticism towards contemporary pop culture and traces the
origins of meme-makers active for the "Occupy Wallstreet" movement in the subversive
practice of "culture jamming", using techniques to modify and appropriate brand advertising

68
For examples, see "https://imgflip.com/memegenerator", "https://memegenerator.net/",
"http://www.memes.com/generator"
69
Ibid., 100; Sandra Yao, “‘Pocket-Sized’ Politics - Binders, Big Bird and Other Memes of the 2012 US
Presidential Campaign,” 154.
70
Sandra Yao, “‘Pocket-Sized’ Politics - Binders, Big Bird and Other Memes of the 2012 US Presidential
Campaign,” 154.
71
Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 122–123; Sandra Yao, “‘Pocket-Sized’ Politics - Binders, Big Bird and
Other Memes of the 2012 US Presidential Campaign,” 153–154.
72
Sebastian Kaempf, “The Potentiality and Limits of Understanding World Politics in a Transformng Global
Media Landscape,” 22.
73
Henry Jenkins, “‘Vernacular Creativity’: An Interview with Jean Burgess (Part One),” Confessions of an Aca-
Fan, October 8, 2007, http://henryjenkins.org/2007/10/vernacular_creativity_an_inter.html.
74
Lene Hansen, “How Images Make World Politics: International Icons and the Case of Abu Ghraib,” 275–276.
75
Ibid.
16
and turning it around to convey critical messages.76 Thus, successful appropriation techniques
could be able to delegitimize dominant discourses.

The subversive element of humorous memes with political contents puts them in the tradition
of political jokes, but they are disseminated even quicker and more easily through internet
virality. Additionally, their visual form often allows for them being open to multiple readings,
enabling more nuanced and concealed forms of critique. 77 Poking fun at authorities, especially
at their sometimes clumsy attempt to use modern media for their purposes, is a central theme
in memes and this aspect has lead Shifman to frame them as a form of satire, as "bottom-up,
digital incarnations" of political Late Night Shows like those by Jon Stewart and Stephen
Colbert.78

While this function can be assumed in more democratic societies, it seems to become even
more evident in nondemocratic contexts. Shifman shows how Chinese memes have been used
to criticize internet censorship in very sophisticated ways, using wordplays and transforming
them into seemingly random pictures and videos that attain a critical meaning, leading him to
accredit to memes an element of "democratic subversion".79 Furthermore, whether one
believes in the critical potential of memes or not, autocratic governments certainly seem to do
so, looking at their attempts to punish memes making fun of their leaders. In Russia, the
national internet regulator reminded of the prohibition against "using a photo of a public
figure to embody a popular internet meme which has nothing to do with the celebrity's
personality" in 2015, while in April 2017, the spreading of a meme depicting Russian
president Putin as homosexual was made illegal. 80 In increasingly autocratic Turkey, there
even has been a case of a man sentenced to suspended prison time for posting a meme
engaged in an unflattering comparison of president Erdogan and the slimy creature Gollum
from Lord of the Rings.81

These endeavors can be seen as attempts to regain complete control over the partly lost story-
telling power of media and pop culture. As Rhys Crilley notes when writing about military

76
Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 118; ibid., 130.
77
Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 150.
78
Ibid., 140–143.
79
Ibid., 144–149; ibid., 123.
80
Caitlin Hamilton, “World Politics 2.0 - An Introduction,” 6; Avi Selk and David Filipov, “It’s Now Illegal in Russia
to Share an Image of Putin as a Gay Clown,” The Washington Post, April 5, 2017,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/04/05/its-now-illegal-in-russia-to-share-an-
image-of-putin-as-a-gay-clown/?utm_term=.d1dccbc548e8.
81
BBC, “Turkey Guilty Verdict for Depicting Erdogan as Gollum,” BBC News, June 23, 2016,
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36610000.
17
use of social media, "the control of information and images is one of the central elements of
successful propaganda".82 This full control could be upheld with monopolized state media or
central institutions overseeing all media, but the decentralized nature of social media
combined with the constant flood of information and images seem to make such complete
control impossible.83 Accordingly, governments' ability to consciously influence pop cultural
discourse and censor critical voices from media appears to be declining with the increasing
presence of digital participative culture.84

In summary, understanding memes as a visual global political discourse seems to give some
reasons for optimism. The different, more participative nature of new social media and meme
culture compared to old media appears to make pop cultural discourse more democratic. It
allows for critical disruption of dominant discourses and unites a larger number of potential
meme producers with the audience's ability to "vote" and react on the ideas and opinions put
forward in memes.85 Nevertheless, as many authors note, any social media discourse comes
with a number of caveats.86

First of all, the aforementioned possibility for everyone with an internet access to participate
in meme discourse already includes the first caveat: The global "digital divide". This term
describes the existing worldwide inequalities in internet access, where people in richer
developed states tend to have more widespread and faster internet connections than those in
poorer developing countries.87 Moreover, the social media platforms are not neutral actors
simply providing digital infrastructure, but "industrial giants that make billion-dollar profits"
and follow their own interests while often deciding with their algorithms what we see and
what we not see.88 Additionally, these corporations have often been quite willing to cooperate
with governments and participate in censorship, as shown by Crilley when discussing
Facebook's and Twitter's coverage of protests against police shootings in the US. 89

82
Rhys Crilley, “Like and Share Forces - Making Sense of Military Social Media Sites,” in Understanding Popular
Culture and World Politics in the Digital Age, Popular Culture in World Politics (New York: Routledge, 2016), 54.
83
Ibid.
84
Sebastian Kaempf, “The Potentiality and Limits of Understanding World Politics in a Transforming Global
Media Landscape,” 24–25.
85
Ibid., 14.
86
Caitlin Hamilton, “World Politics 2.0 - An Introduction,” 5–6; Rhys Crilley, “Like and Share Forces - Making
Sense of Military Social Media Sites,” 54; Sebastian Kaempf, “The Potentiality and Limits of Understanding
World Politics in a Transformng Global Media Landscape,” 25–28.
87
Sandra Yao, “‘Pocket-Sized’ Politics - Binders, Big Bird and Other Memes of the 2012 US Presidential
Campaign,” 170.
88
Ibid., 156; Sebastian Kaempf, “The Potentiality and Limits of Understanding World Politics in a Transforming
Global Media Landscape,” 27.
89
Rhys Crilley, “Like and Share Forces - Making Sense of Military Social Media Sites,” 56–57.
18
Furthermore, whereas most digital pop cultural content stems from individual users, there
have been attempts by governments and corporations to influence both the creation and the
diffusion of these memes.90 Also, besides the abovementioned punishments for inconvenient
meme posts and attempts to control social media through censorship, an increasing number of
states seem to maintain their own so-called "troll armies", commentators paid to disseminate
pro-government opinions online.91 Nevertheless, all these factors do not seem to defeat the
idea of a more democratic social media discourse, but only limit and hinder it to some extent,
they thus seem to be a problem that can be fixed.

Conclusively, I have given a definition of internet memes based on Shifman's work. The
insightful comparison of this meme concept to Hansen's account of iconic images has
revealed their conceptual kinship. Moreover, I have shown how memes can be understood as
a new form of visual discourse and what makes this discourse different from old media and
pop culture, namely that it is more participatory and more democratic in nature, although with
some limitations. Furthermore I have named the critical potential that memes possess, which I
will demonstrate in the next section by applying Hansen's methodology to a recent internet
meme and its instances.

90
Sandra Yao, “‘Pocket-Sized’ Politics - Binders, Big Bird and Other Memes of the 2012 US Presidential
Campaign,” 156.
91
Freedom House, “Freedom on the Net 2013,” October 3, 2013,
https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/resources/FOTN%202013%20Summary%20of%20Findings.pdf;
Freedom House, “Freedom on the Net 2015 - Russia,” 2015,
https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/resources/FOTN%202015_Russia.pdf; Freedom House, “Freedom
on the Net 2016 - Silencing the Messenger: Communication Apps Under Pressure,” 2016,
https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/freedom-net-2016; Shaun Walker, “Salutin’ Putin: Inside a
Russian Troll House,” The Guardian, April 2, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/02/putin-
kremlin-inside-russian-troll-house.
19
 Pepsi Can Solve World Problems - Analysis of a Contemporary Meme

Analyzing political memes presents the researcher with some difficulties, as the
methodological precedents in analyses of internet memes are quite scarce. The few IR
scholars who dealt with memes in their work have done so in different manners. While Sandra
Yao picked three representative memes that received major attention in the 2012 US
presidential election campaign and qualitatively assessed their argumentative function in an
examination of some example images, Saara Särmä decided to follow the rather unorthodox
art-based approach of "junk feminist collaging", which she developed herself.92 Both
approaches are united in being qualitative in nature and very limited in their data collection,
only including few selected meme images. Särmä goes so far to consider it "impossible to
collect a systematic and coherent 'data-set' of digital artifacts such as [...] memes", due to the
fluid and dynamic nature of internet pop culture.93

Although I agree that the mere mass of data makes such a collection difficult, I would deem a
coherent quantitative analysis indeed feasible, considering the many built-in ranking options
of social media allowing for a selection of the "biggest" memes in a certain time frame. This
analysis could perhaps take the form of content analysis as described by Gillian Rose,
enabling the critical researcher to discover patterns "too subtle to be visible on casual
inspection".94 Nevertheless, this would rather be a direction for future research, and this paper
will pursue a qualitative analysis of a recent meme with IR relevance, on the grounds that
memes are such a new research field for IR and thus primarily require an in-depth
examination of a limited case, to thoroughly demonstrate their global political relevance.

Consequently, I will analyze the meme that developed in April 2017 around a controversial
Pepsi Ad involving US celebrity Kendall Jenner.95 For this purpose, I will use the "three-tiered
analytical and methodological strategy" as proposed by Lene Hansen for examining iconic
images and their appropriations.96 Although the application of this methodology to memes is
limited in some ways since memes are not necessarily based off iconic images, it is very
92
Sandra Yao, “‘Pocket-Sized’ Politics - Binders, Big Bird and Other Memes of the 2012 US Presidential
Campaign,” 157–168; Saara Särmä, “Collaging Internet Parody Images - An Art-Inspired Methodology for
Studying Laughter in World Politics,” 176.
93
Saara Särmä, “Collaging Internet Parody Images - An Art-Inspired Methodology for Studying Laughter in
World Politics,” 177.
94
Gillian Rose, “Content Analysis and Cultural Analytics - Finding Patterns in What You See,” in Visual
Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials (London: Sage, 2016), 87.
95
Kendall and Kylie, Kendall Jenner for PEPSI Commercial (YouTube, April 4, 2017),
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dA5Yq1DLSmQ; Adam, “Kendall Jenner’s Pepsi Ad,” Know Your Meme,
April 2017, http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/kendall-jenners-pepsi-ad.
96
Lene Hansen, “How Images Make World Politics: International Icons and the Case of Abu Ghraib,” 277.
20
useful in showing the workings of the meme images as appropriations of the original ad and
can be justified by the aforementioned conceptual kinship between iconic images and internet
memes. Due to the fact that the process of appropriation is a central feature of all internet
memes and my aim to illustrate the critical potential of digital pop culture, it seems sensible to
use an approach that deals with the critical effects of appropriations. 97 Additionally, applying
a modified version of Hansen's methodology allows me to evade the effort of creating a
comprehensive method for analyzing IR memes from scratch, which would exceed the scope
of this research.

The first tier of Hansen's method is concerned with the analysis of the original iconic image,
thus here dealing with the examination of the original Pepsi ad that was later referenced in
meme images. The central questions posed about the original concern the formal composition,
the meaning attributed, the inter-iconicity/intertextuality and the rise to fame. The second step
consists in analyzing the international status and political impact of the icon, which can be
translated into revealing what kind of "international" the Pepsi ad aims to construct and how it
wants to be understood, asking about the circulation, the constitution of "the international",
and the political impact. Lastly, the third tier engages the most relevant issue for this paper,
namely scrutinizing the original item's appropriations, i.e., the memes that the Pepsi ad
sparked, where the analysis will focus on the range of appropriations and especially the
critical intervention made by the singled out memes.

As follows, the first question is about what can be seen in the Pepsi advertisement. As it is a
video with a duration of 2 minutes and 40 seconds, I will not be able to describe every detail
but instead provide a quick summary of what happens and try to focus on the essential,
namely the overall impression that the ad gives (Note: it might be helpful for the reader here
to watch the video).98 In the video, a young photojournalist goes out to a demonstration taking
place in the streets of an inner city. In the protest, a diverse crowd of young people of
different ethnicities are making music, dancing and march on happily while carrying signs
showing peace symbols and hearts. They walk past a shop where the main protagonist
Kendall Jenner, an attractive white woman, is doing a model shoot. She looks at the
demonstration, when a young protestor smiles and nods at her, inviting her to join. She
follows the invitation, takes off her blonde wig and wipes off her lipstick, then joins the
protest. Jenner goes on to pick up a Pepsi can from a barrel filled with ice, with more

97
Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 2; ibid., 20–22; ibid., 130–150.
98
Kendall and Kylie, Kendall Jenner for PEPSI Commercial (YouTube, April 4, 2017),
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dA5Yq1DLSmQ.
21
protestors nodding and smiling at her as she walks past them towards the riot police. Finally
she walks up to one of the policemen and hands him the Pepsi can, while the photojournalist
takes a picture of the moment. The policeman takes the Pepsi can, opens it to the excessive
cheers of the crowd, while people around high-five and hug each other. Then the ad ends with
the Pepsi logo and the slogan "live bolder, live louder, live for now". The whole video is
underlaid by a hopeful pop song with an "empowering" vibe and there is a notable
multicultural aspect of the protest crowd.

The meaning attributed by the ad to the scene seems to revolve around a hopeful message of
opposing sides coming together via the little things, where this little thing is the consumption
of a cool soft drink. In Pepsi's own statement after the quickly arising controversy around the
ad, the brand claimed to have wanted to spread "a global message of unity, peace and
understanding".99 In line with this, the video suggests that what makes the policemen and the
protestors fraternize is their common identity as humans, here to be understood as consumers
of a global brand, as members of the community of customers. The message seems to be
something like the possible unity of humans of all ethnicities and overcoming of differences
through the unifying powers of capitalism: Business does not differentiate, it homogenizes us
and as consumers we are all equal.

The video references the generic visuality of multiculturalism and protest, with the key scene
of Jenner handing the can to the policeman reminding of the iconic "Flower Power"
photograph taken during anti-war protests in the 60s, where a young protestor puts a flower in
the rifle of a national guardsman, and specifically quotes the famous 2016 photograph of a
woman facing off police in a protest against a police shooting of an unarmed black man in
Baton Rouge, USA.100 However, it does not only reference these discrete icons, but also tells
the story of the production of an iconic protest image itself, namely the picture that the
photojournalist takes of Jenner handing the Pepsi can to the policeman (see annex, figure 1).
This meta-reference to iconic imagery is something that makes it even more viable for
appropriation, since this still frame is easily remixed by putting it into different contexts.

99
Julia Carrie Wong, “Pepsi Pulls Kendall Jenner Ad Ridiculed for Co-Opting Protest Movements,” The Guardian,
April 6, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/apr/05/pepsi-kendall-jenner-pepsi-apology-ad-
protest.
100
Ibid.; Jonathan Bachman, Taking a Stand in Baton Rouge, Photograph, July 9, 2016,
https://www.worldpressphoto.org/collection/photo/2017/contemporary-issues/jonathan-bachman; Bernie
Boston, Flower Power, Photograph, 1967,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower_Power_(photograph)#/media/File:Flower_Power_by_Bernie_Boston.jpg.
22
The video's rise to virality is quickly explained by the celebrity status of the main actress, the
brand status of Pepsi and especially the controversial aspects of the advertisement.

The second step of the analysis requires the assessment of the international status and political
impact. Although the ad's effects initially took place in a domestic US-American setting, it
had a fast global reach through internet virality and the range of meme appropriations that it
sparked. It can be said that the video constitutes "the international" as a very happy,
multicultural and peaceful world, where complicated political and social problems can be
easily transcended by the power of capitalist consumerism. However, this message was
widely perceived as "fake" and Pepsi was blamed for "gentrifying" protest and belittling the
problem of police violence for the purpose of promotion.101

This becomes evident if one looks at the memetic appropriations, the wide range of internet
memes referencing the Pepsi ad.102 Many users went on to photoshop either Jenner handing
out the can, or simply Pepsi cans and bottles into historical iconic images of protests or wider
forms of violent conflict. These appropriations resemble the "adbusting" techniques of
"culture jamming" and mock what is perceived to be the main message of the ad: A Pepsi can
is presented as able to solve complex world problems. They are thus practicing a form of
"reductio ad absurdum", pointing out how grotesque this message is if thoroughly applied.
Meme instances in a domestic US setting mostly showed police violence against (often black)
protestors, sarcastically commenting that they should have carried Pepsi with them. An
example can be found in Martin Luther King's daughter Bernice King tweeting a picture of
her father being pushed by police with the laconic caption "If only Daddy would have known
about the power of #Pepsi".103 Another, more international example (see annex, figure 2)
references the iconic Tiananmen Square "Tank Man" picture, with the man facing down the
tanks shown having Pepsi cans in his bag, implying that this was what made the soldiers
stop.104

However, there are two instances of the Pepsi meme that stick out due to their explicitly IR
related themes. The first (see annex, figure 3) is a tweet with a picture of a hot air balloon in

101
Ian Bogost, “Pepsi’s New Ad Is a Total Success,” The Atlantic, April 5, 2017,
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/pepsi-ad-success/522021/.
102
Adam, “Kendall Jenner’s Pepsi Ad.”
103
Be A King (@Berniceking), If Only Daddy Would Have Known about the Power of #Pepsi, Meme
Image/Tweet, April 5, 2017, https://twitter.com/BerniceKing/status/849656699464056832/photo/1; Kate
Taylor, “Martin Luther King Jr’s Daughter Just Called out Pepsi for Its Controversial Ad,” Business Insider, April 5,
2017, https://www.businessinsider.nl/martin-luther-king-jrs-daughter-calls-out-pepsi-2017-4/?
international=true&r=US.
104
unknown, Pepsi Tank Man, Meme Image, April 2017, https://hugelolcdn.com/i/439515.jpg.
23
the shape of a Pepsi can and the caption "BREAKING: Donald Trump launches giant Pepsi
can to North Korea in an attempt to end conflict". 105 This image can be read as mocking the
hegemonic US-American narrative of being able to bring peace and prosperity to countries
with differing cultures on the other side of the globe through the simple means of spreading
liberal capitalist democracy and consumerism. Interestingly, its framing is even more complex
than the first sight would suggest, as it references the actually existing balloon propaganda
campaigns that have happened between North and South Korea. 106 Again, the "reductio ad
absurdum" implies the courageous assumption that a giant Pepsi can solve a deeply
entrenched international conflict such as the Korean situation.

The second example meme (see annex, figure 4) refers to another initially domestic violent
political conflict turned international proxy war: It shows a photoshopped picture of US air
force fighter jets dropping Pepsi bottles instead of bombs, accompanied by the caption "Photo
of the US military bombing Syria (Colorized. Circa 2017.)". 107 Here the mocking can be read
in two ways, highlighting the polysemic nature of memes. Firstly, it can again be viewed as a
critique of capitalist Americanizing "cultural imperialism" represented by the dropping of a
US-American brand product. Secondly, it can be seen as a deeper criticism of military
interventions, especially in the form of aerial bombardment, shown through the stark visual
contradiction of delivering something presented as positive by advertisement (a refreshing
soft drink) via the quite brutal means of bombardment. Hence, it can be interpreted as a
criticism of "just war" discourses proposing military interventions for humanitarian reasons,
which analogously pretend to deliver something positive (peace or freedom) via violent
memes. As in the Korea example, the meme is implying an obviously erroneous simplistic
solution to a very complex and violent situation such as the Syrian civil war, hence
simultaneously criticizing real-life simplistic solutions to political conflict, such as foreign
military intervention.

What makes these memes so intriguing is how naturally internet users appear to move from
seemingly "domestic" topics like protests and police violence to "international" topics such as

105
Fill Werrell (@FillWerrell), BREAKING: Donald Trump Launches Giant Pepsi Can to North Korea in an Attempt
to End Conflict, Meme Image/Tweet, April 18, 2017,
https://twitter.com/FillWerrell/status/854424512426803200.
106
Jin-Heon Jung, “Ballooning Evangelism: Psychological Warfare and Christianity in the Divided Korea (MMG
Working Paper)” (Max Planck Insitute, July 2014),
http://www.mmg.mpg.de/fileadmin/user_upload/documents/wp/WP_14-07_Jung%20Ballooning
%20Evangelism.pdf.
107
unknown, Photo of the US Military Bombing Syria (Colorized. Circa 2017), Meme Image, April 9, 2017,
http://imgur.com/t/funny/1TuS7.
24
military intervention and wider state violence. This mirrors how many people easily transcend
the artificial and often arbitrary dichotomous distinction between "the domestic" and "the
international" found in mainstream IR discourse. The profound meanings that can be read into
the banal digital pop culture texts that memes constitute show the actual potential of complex
criticism, against the accusation of meme discourse simply being a "dumbed down" form of
communication that some scholars bring up.108

Conclusively, the qualitative analysis of meme images sparked by a viral and controversial
Pepsi advertisement, based on the methodology for examining iconic images and their
appropriations, has shown how memes are able to contain multi-layered and complex
criticism of contemporary issues of world politics, thus incorporating what can be understood
as "pocket-sized" visual IR arguments contributing to a global discourse. This examination of
a concrete recent meme serves as an illustration of the new form of visual global political
discourse that memes constitute, and as an argument for further investigation into the
argumentative potential of political memes.

108
Geert Lovink, “Techno-Reue in Der Hyperrealität,” Le Monde Diplomatique, April 6, 2017, https://monde-
diplomatique.de/artikel/!5390843.
25
 Conclusion: See the Memes, Seize the Memes

With this paper I have argued that the discipline of IR should cast its analytical net wide,
concurring with Bleiker and other authors of the "aesthetic turn" in valuing the relevance of
art-based research, while paying particular attention to the powerful influence of visual forms
of art. Moreover, I agree with Weldes that popular culture, understood as having the power of
defining "the normal" and commonsensical in IR, deserves extensive scrutiny and conclude
from this that the relatively unresearched domain of digital popular culture constituted by
internet memes should be further explored from an IR perspective, adding onto the works of
Särmä and Yao, while utilizing communication studies literature from authors such as
Shifman and Burgess.

By connecting their research about the discursive nature of memes with Hansen's findings on
iconic imagery and IR, I have demonstrated the relevance of memetic discourse as a new form
of visual global political discourse and illustrated the critical potential of internet memes both
theoretically, by contrasting memes with older popular culture media, and practically, by
examining the recent example of the "Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad" meme. Consequently,
summarizing the abovementioned, my first conclusion is that internet memes discourse is a
completely new, but increasingly relevant topic for IR research that should be explored
further: I invite the discipline of IR to "see the memes".

However, there is another implication of regarding internet memes as a new form of visual
global political discourse that arises from memes' critical potential and participatory nature.
Recent political events such as the election of Donald Trump and the British decision for
"Brexit" have arguably demonstrated the power of social media to disrupt dominant
discourses, albeit in a quite worrying way. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to dismiss meme
culture with its apparent "political incorrectness" as inherently reactionary. On the contrary,
such a pervasive tool for global discourse and dissemination of ideas should not be left to
right-wing populists. Thus, inspired by Särmä's idea of "art-making as part of a research
process to get beyond language-based IR" attempting to "make academic discussions easier to
approach for anyone through light-hearted visualizations", and taking into account the lower
barriers to participate in pop cultural discourse evident in participatory meme culture, I call on
critical IR scholars, rephrasing Marx, to "seize the memes", tap their full critical potential and
join the new visual global political discourse with their ideas and opinions.109

109
Saara Särmä, “Collaging Internet Parody Images - An Art-Inspired Methodology for Studying Laughter in
World Politics,” 176.
26
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Figure 1: Pepsi ad still frame, showing Kendall Jenner handing Pepsi can to policeman

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Figure 2: Meme image, Tank Man with Pepsi cans

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Figure 3: Meme image, Pepsi balloon over North Korea

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Figure 4: Meme image, Pepsi bottle bombardment over Syria

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