The Hunger Games and Realism Part1
Have you ever thought about the relationship between the Hunger Games and the realist ideology?
Today I will talk about something that you may read or watch: The Hunger Games. However, rather than writing about the whole series and the events in it, I will try to give you an analysis in two parts. The general claim here is that the arena that is used in the games can be related to the idea of an anarchical international system from the perspective of realism.
If you don’t know anything about the Hunger Games, don't worry. In this first part, I am gonna give you some context and some basic information that will help us make and understand the analysis better.
The Hunger Games shows us a dystopian world with developed technology. In the movie, there are 12 districts that are specified for certain things, such as 4th district fishing, 12th district mining, and so on. These districts are bound to the Capital, which is very developed compared to them. Each of the 12 districts is sending two children, a girl, and a boy, between certain ages, and they are chosen by lot or voluntary based. Then they were sent to The Capital in order to join the Games. There is a training room in a building where tributes (kids that are chosen) can work for 3 days before The Hunger Games in order to develop their abilities. For example, if you are coming from the 4th district, you are expected to be good at fishing, and this room is useful to develop or find other talents in order to use them as an advantage in the arena.
So, this is basically the world we are looking at, but the part that reflects the world structure that I will relate to what realists think of is the arena.
The movie continues with the tributes being sent to an arena made by Capital and locked there. As a rule, once they are locked in there, there is no one outside to help them or take them out. All of them stand there alone and when the starting bell rings they all are equal in the sense of arm power or having access to other weapons. Thus, they are in an anarchical structure if we think of the arena and the tributes as a concrete reflection of the anarchical society.
When the bell rings, they have choices; they may run away to the woods, they may run towards the weapons or they can fight as the first order of business. We can see that they may seek power by running to grab a weapon like an arrow or a knife in order to survive in the future. Thus, we can say that we are seeing some kind of power politics in this arena. Similarly, the games are starting with the fight for arm power. The first aim of tributes is to have military power because they think that this is what they need in order to survive. This leads us to the core realist idea, which is that military power and power politics are two of the main essential ways to stay alive.
To be continued…
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