University of Groningen Bachelor Thesis IR/IO Core Module: Visual Global Politics Thesis Supervisor: David Shim Dank Memes and Visual Discourse unknown, When youre trying to explain the complexities of the meme economy to some normie, Meme Image, May 19, 2017, http://imgur.com/xpYOgTb. Jakob Schiele S2724421 Paterswoldseweg 53A 9727BA Groningen 22.05.2017 Word Count: 8009 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  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. 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. 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. 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. Moreover, a part of his campaign machinery that particularly appealed to younger voters was an online community named "the_donald". Reddit, “r/The_Donald,” June 27, 2015, https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/. Created by his supporters on one of the biggest internet platforms, Reddit, it continued to create visual content praising Trump and denouncing his opponents. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. However, her findings imply that there seems to 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. 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. 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". Roland Bleiker, Aesthetics and World Politics (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 34. 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. 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. 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 recent communication studies literature dealing with this complex issue, in particular Limor Shifman's book "Memes in digital culture". Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2014). 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. 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. 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.  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'." Saara Särmä, “Collaging Internet Parody Images - An Art-Inspired Methodology for Studying Laughter in World Politics,” 179. 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. 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/. 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. Roland Bleiker, Aesthetics and World Politics, 35. 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. Roland Bleiker, “The Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory,” in Aesthetics and World Politics (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 18–47. Bleiker concludes from this that the irreducible gap between representation and reality has to be examined as "the very location of politics". Roland Bleiker, Aesthetics and World Politics, 19. Thus, art becomes relevant for IR in two 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". Saara Särmä, “Collaging Internet Parody Images - An Art-Inspired Methodology for Studying Laughter in World Politics,” 181. Furthermore, as Särmä observed, in present times it seems even more relevant since "we are constantly bombarded by the visual". Ibid., 175. 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". 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. 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". Jutta Weldes, “Going Cultural: Star Trek, State Action, and Popular Culture,” 119. 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 sufficient analytical attention in the field of IR. 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. 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. 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.” 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. Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 13. 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". 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. 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. Juha Ridanpää, “Geopolitics of Humour: The Muhammed Cartoon Crisis and the Kaltio Comic Strip Episode in Finland,” Geopolitics 14 (2009): 729–731. 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. Saara Särmä, “Collaging Internet Parody Images - An Art-Inspired Methodology for Studying Laughter in World Politics,” 175; ibid., 178–179. 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. 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. 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 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". 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. 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. 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". Limor Shifman, “Memes in a Digital World: Reconciling with a Conceptual Troublemaker,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 18, no. 3 (April 2013): 362–77. 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"). Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture. 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. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 192. 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". Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 7–8. 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. Ibid., 55–56. 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. Ibid., 20–22. These methods of engagement and slightly deviant reproduction leads to the second aspect, the "intertextuality" of memes. Meme images are intertextual 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. 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. Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 4; ibid., 34. 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. Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 33–34. 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. Ibid., 22–23. 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. Lene Hansen, “How Images Make World Politics: International Icons and the Case of Abu Ghraib.” 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. Ibid., 277. 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. Ibid., 263. 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". Ibid., 269. 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. Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 51–54. 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". Ibid., 7–8. 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. Lene Hansen, “How Images Make World Politics: International Icons and the Case of Abu Ghraib,” 269. 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. Ibid. Lastly, Hansen herself points out that the concept of iconic images might be changing due to different media use and ever faster information technology. Ibid., 272. 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. Ibid.; David D. Perlmutter, “Photojournalism and Foreign Affairs,” Orbis 49, no. 1 (2006): 119. 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. Lene Hansen, “How Images Make World Politics: International Icons and the Case of Abu Ghraib,” 271–272. 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. 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/. 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. Burhan Ozbilici, An Assassination in Turkey, Photograph, December 19, 2016, https://www.worldpressphoto.org/collection/photo/2017/world-press-photo-year/burhan-ozbilici. 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. 「Starscream」, “Assassination of Andrey Karlov,” Know Your Meme, January 2017, http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/assassination-of-andrey-karlov. 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, and with which identities and responsibilities". Lene Hansen, “How Images Make World Politics: International Icons and the Case of Abu Ghraib,” 273. 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. Ibid., 275. 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. Ibid., 275–276. 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. Sandra Yao, “‘Pocket-Sized’ Politics - Binders, Big Bird and Other Memes of the 2012 US Presidential Campaign,” 153; ibid., 157. 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". Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 8. 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". Ibid., 122–123; ibid., 136. 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". Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 132. 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 information era is attention. Ibid., 32. 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. Sandra Yao, “‘Pocket-Sized’ Politics - Binders, Big Bird and Other Memes of the 2012 US Presidential Campaign,” 153. Only if a meme is able to connect with other users, it will be likely to be reproduced or recreated. Ibid., 157. 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. Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 127–136. 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. 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. 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. Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 34. 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". Ibid., 99. 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 and some basic photo manipulation software or a few clicks on a "meme-generator" For examples, see "https://imgflip.com/memegenerator", "https://memegenerator.net/", "http://www.memes.com/generator" website. Ibid., 100; Sandra Yao, “‘Pocket-Sized’ Politics - Binders, Big Bird and Other Memes of the 2012 US Presidential Campaign,” 154. As a consequence, an old "read-only" media and pop culture has been transformed into a "read/write culture". Sandra Yao, “‘Pocket-Sized’ Politics - Binders, Big Bird and Other Memes of the 2012 US Presidential Campaign,” 154. 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. 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. 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". Sebastian Kaempf, “The Potentiality and Limits of Understanding World Politics in a Transformng Global Media Landscape,” 22. 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. 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. 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. Lene Hansen, “How Images Make World Politics: International Icons and the Case of Abu Ghraib,” 275–276. This critical use is possible due to images' "inherent subversive force" and their potential as "sites of protest and opposition". Ibid. 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 and turning it around to convey critical messages. Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 118; ibid., 130. 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. Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 150. 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. Ibid., 140–143. 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". Ibid., 144–149; ibid., 123. 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. 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. 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. BBC, “Turkey Guilty Verdict for Depicting Erdogan as Gollum,” BBC News, June 23, 2016, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36610000. 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 use of social media, "the control of information and images is one of the central elements of successful propaganda". 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. 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. Ibid. 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. Sebastian Kaempf, “The Potentiality and Limits of Understanding World Politics in a Transforming Global Media Landscape,” 24–25. 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. Ibid., 14. Nevertheless, as many authors note, any social media discourse comes with a number of caveats. 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. 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. Sandra Yao, “‘Pocket-Sized’ Politics - Binders, Big Bird and Other Memes of the 2012 US Presidential Campaign,” 170. 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. Ibid., 156; Sebastian Kaempf, “The Potentiality and Limits of Understanding World Politics in a Transforming Global Media Landscape,” 27. 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. Rhys Crilley, “Like and Share Forces - Making Sense of Military Social Media Sites,” 56–57. 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. Sandra Yao, “‘Pocket-Sized’ Politics - Binders, Big Bird and Other Memes of the 2012 US Presidential Campaign,” 156. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Saara Särmä, “Collaging Internet Parody Images - An Art-Inspired Methodology for Studying Laughter in World Politics,” 177. 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". 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. 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. 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. 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. Lene Hansen, “How Images Make World Politics: International Icons and the Case of Abu Ghraib,” 277. 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 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. Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 2; ibid., 20–22; ibid., 130–150. 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). Kendall and Kylie, Kendall Jenner for PEPSI Commercial (YouTube, April 4, 2017), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dA5Yq1DLSmQ. 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 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". 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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/. This becomes evident if one looks at the memetic appropriations, the wide range of internet memes referencing the Pepsi ad. Adam, “Kendall Jenner’s Pepsi Ad.” 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". 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. 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. unknown, Pepsi Tank Man, Meme Image, April 2017, https://hugelolcdn.com/i/439515.jpg. 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 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". 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. 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. 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. 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.)". unknown, Photo of the US Military Bombing Syria (Colorized. Circa 2017), Meme Image, April 9, 2017, http://imgur.com/t/funny/1TuS7. 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 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. Geert Lovink, “Techno-Reue in Der Hyperrealität,” Le Monde Diplomatique, April 6, 2017, https://monde-diplomatique.de/artikel/!5390843. 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.  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. Saara Särmä, “Collaging Internet Parody Images - An Art-Inspired Methodology for Studying Laughter in World Politics,” 176.  Bibliography Adam. “Kendall Jenner’s Pepsi Ad.” Know Your Meme, April 2017. Accessed May 10, 2017. http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/kendall-jenners-pepsi-ad. Bachman, Jonathan. Taking a Stand in Baton Rouge. Photograph, July 9, 2016. 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