Abstract

The TV series Game of Thrones, an adaption of George Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books, has already become a part of popular contemporary culture.The fantasy story is an epic sword-and-sorcery drama about the struggle for power of several noble dynasties to win the throne of Westeros and seems to be a perfect incarnation of realist thinking. Based on ideas of Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Thomas Hobbes and twentieth-century thinkers Hans Morgenthau, Kenneth Waltz, and John Mearsheimer, the essence of realism is the following: politics is about power and survival, the state of nature is the state of war. The permanent threat of “winter is coming” seems to fit very well to the grim picture realism paints of world politics.This chapter will introduce realist thinking and discuss elements of realism in Game of Thrones.