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Abstract
World politics has conventionally been a realm of ideas, instead of things. While ideas matter, the paucity of research into the artefacts of world politics and particularly the everyday artefacts of world politics represents a gap in how we know the world. By developing a form of artefact analysis specifically designed to study the things of world politics, I examine what three types of everyday artefacts – graphic novels, textiles and internet memes – can tell us about world politics. Graphic novels, for example, show how conflict and the everyday co-exist in a curious mash-up of banality and violence; they also complicate narratives of world politics with which we may be more familiar, highlight the fundamental importance that everyday makers play in the lived experience of world politics, and they have significant parallels with the research processes involved in producing scholarship. Textiles are a vehicle for everyday makers to explore and express their ethnic and national identities and can function as a form of documentation. Some everyday makers of these artefacts have also explored innovative ways of physically incorporating the everyday into their work, while others have used the medium to subvert dominant representations of weapons. Finally, internet memes have been used as tools for grassroots political lobbying as well as to challenge representations of a variety of actors in world politics. They also, however, reproduce some of the problematic logics that can be found in more conventional sources of world politics and the humour that drives internet memes may have significant ethical implications. Taking these everyday artefacts seriously as sources of world politics, I argue, allows us to better know the world that we study, the people that inhabit it, and the lived experience of world politics.