Netflix and the shaping of global politics

International Relations is a discipline that understands power on a global scale. Such understanding includes the concept of ‘soft power’ and the role of popular culture in projecting and universalising hegemonic state values. While a growing number of IR scholars are now using an ideational conceptualisation that draws from discursive theories from other disciplines, much of mainstream IR underestimates the power of popular culture to represent, reflect and constitute world politics. The reason for this is largely epistemological: as a social science IR privileges positivist approaches that specify the importance of data collection, the macro, the structural. Such approaches usually focus on the power of states as unitary actors. But in the globalised world of today, the power of individuals often transcends state boundaries. As a global actor, the leading entertainment streaming service, Netflix, has considerable capacity to influence its audiences’ ideas about the world, projecting immense soft power worldwide. Examining the ideological basis of this agent of power is important in understanding world politics. A comprehensive database that categorises all Netflix Original films according to a carefully selected set of ontologies provides the epistemological tools necessary to meet the tendency of IR to privilege positivist methodologies. As viewing analytics is key to its competitive advantage, macro investigation will show changes to the data-driven production of the Netflix worldview over time, providing evidence that the subjects of power, Netflix subscribers, also have agency, the causal concern missing from much of the popular culture/world politics field. Such application of hybrid digital humanities methodologies to the soft power discourse should create legitimacy to the study of popular culture within the International Relations discipline, leading to a more complexly articulated and relevant theoretical basis for the understanding of what constitutes world politics.