Book Review: The World Politics of Disco Elysium

Part of the Routledge’s book series “Popular Culture and World Politics,” “The World Politics of Disco Elysium” (2025) edited by Vic Castro and Nicholas Keirsey utilizes a multidisciplinary approach, from International Relations (IR) to Video Games Studies, to creatively analyze the highly acclaimed Estonian video game Disco Elysium (2019) as both a complex political text and a popular culture artefact. The volume demonstrates how the game challenges the politics of both the in-game and ‘real' worlds and provides emancipatory ways of thinking our social dynamics anew. The narratives and game mechanics of Disco Elysium offer the player/reader different fantasies and imaginative avenues as ‘second-order representation' of our political world. Departing from these possibilities, the contributors to this edited volume crafted an excellent addition to the—yet—incipient scholarship on computer games, Popular Culture and World Politics (PCWP), and IR. Together, the chapters effectively explore how the speculative fictional world of Disco Elysium enables the aesthetic renegotiation of our own reality. As a result, the book successfully fulfills its aims: furthering non-Western perspectives in the field; presenting how alternatives to capitalism can be reimagined; and innovatively exploring how not only narrative and visual aspects of the game but also procedural elements challenge the operative logics of our society.

The co-constitution of the fragmented isola of Insulinde, where the events of the game unfold in the fantastic world of Elysium, its political struggles, our own social, and the very discipline of IR is explored in four well-balanced sections that are followed by an evaluative conclusion of this endeavor: (1) “An Introduction to Disco Elysium”; (2) “Disco Elysium and Late Capitalism”; (3) “World Order, Liberalism, and Security in Disco Elysium”; and (4) “Oppression and Liberation in Disco Elysium”. In the different sections, the contributors successfully combine close readings of the game with broader theoretical reflections ranging from Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy to Right-Wing Studies, albeit most chapters engage more directly with IR concepts. It is the concept of “cognitive estrangement”, created by Darko Suvin, that drives the introductory chapter and permeates the rest of the discussion. This idea can also be intuitively grasped through one of the most iconic quotes in the game when Harry du Bois, the detective protagonist, awakes from his initial amnesiac state: “Mother, help me, there is a head attached to my neck and I’m *in* it”. Through making the familiar seem strange and the strange seem familiar, Disco Elysium reconfigures core concepts of our sociopolitical world, such as identity, memory, violence, and colonialism, alongside key concepts of IR, including sovereignty, liberal interventionism, global governance, and security. The first section of the book examines the worldwide online reception of the game and how gaming communities engage with the political themes in it.

Section Two is responsible for a very strong contribution to both the game and the book by presenting us with an estranged Late Capitalist world that reflects our own current Late Capitalist stage of production. By mobilizing concepts such as Capitalist Realism and collective traumatic memory, the authors show how narrative and procedural elements of Disco Elysium inform the relationship between everyday life and video games and provide platforms for subverting capitalist domination and confronting violent pasts. These interrelationships are compellingly illustrated by unique ludic features present in the game, such as the “Thought Cabinet”, which help us escape utilitarian and neoliberal understandings of the political economy and even fantasize about how revolutions can take place, as it is convincingly argued.

Drawing from the idea of an estranged Estonia, Section Three explores key concepts of IR and recognizable real-world international institutions that are present in the complex dynamics underlying the insecure environments in Disco Elysium. Here, the authors contend that the game facilitates critical engagements through speculative scenarios that enable a clearer visualization of fundamentally convoluted ideas such as sovereignty and social orders. In the first two chapters, through Revachol and Insulinde’s own experiences with colonization, institutionalization, and marketization, the authors arguably show how Disco Elysium can make the player/reader interrogate collective security, liberal interventionism, and supranational organizations for instance. The analysis at the level of the sovereign individual is also interestingly carried out throughout the section, which questions the very procedures behind a player controlling a character and examines the interplay between sociopolitical settings and the construction of subjectivities.

Section Four reflects on political power and the struggle for emancipation, showing how the game critically engages with notions of policing, oppressive ideologies, disability, and ableism through satire and mockery. Using humor and subverting of the detective fiction genre, Disco Elysium transgresses operating logics of colonial and capitalist domination, such as the idea of mastery, and highlights the fragilities of oppressive ideologies, such as fascism. Finally, the concluding section of the book invites two IR scholars who have previously engaged with video games scholasrhip to fruitfully reflect on the volume's position within PCWP and its main contributions to the field. The section identifies potential weaknesses that readers may encounter and future research should address, such as the site of the audiences and consumption patterns and more inclusion of non-Western IR perspectives. Considering the game as a visual artefact, I would also propose that an analysis of the site of production of Disco Elysium would have been a welcome addition to the book, as a more pluralist methodology, as proposed by Roland Bleiker (2015) derived from Gillian Rose’s “Visual Methodologies” (2016), should be present in the aesthetic IR scholarship.

Overall, the book successfully shows the politics of Disco Elysium and how they operate and have consequences in both the real and in-game worlds. The plethora of approaches makes the arguments even more robust and reflects the game’s own uniqueness: aesthetic IR requires the employment of diverse subjectivities, which makes the edited-volume format a sound choice. One could argue that the multiple playthroughs undertaken in each chapter cannot be exactly replicated due to the game's role-playing nature, thereby posing a methodological limitation. However, I sustain that this is one of the greatest strengths of the book, for it enables the player/researcher to experience and theoretically interpret Disco Elysium using mixed “colour choices, brushstrokes, angles, [and] framing”, borrowing Bleiker’s (2001, 513) metaphor of the social scientist as an artist. The volume maintains a coherent diversity that ultimately reinforces rather than fragments its central arguments. Although the book could also intrigue Disco Elysium’s fans who are interested in discussions about politics and culture, this volume is aimed at IR, Culture Studies, and Video Game Studies students and scholars interested in Popular Culture, Critical Theory, Narratives, and Post-Soviet politics. “The World Politics of Disco Elysium” is a provocative and inspiring contribution to the field of Popular Culture and World Politics.