Have a personal or library account? Click to login
The Strategic Imagination: Chess as a Political and Cultural Analytic Cover

The Strategic Imagination: Chess as a Political and Cultural Analytic

By: Can Büyükbay  
Open Access
|Dec 2025

References

  1. Alexis-Martin, B. (2024, September 27). Chess: A game rooted in military strategy that has become a tool of international diplomacy. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/chess-a-game-rooted-in-military-strategy-that-has-become-a-tool-of-international-diplomacy-239739
  2. Anchor, R. (1978). History and play: Johan Huizinga and his critics. History and Theory, 17(1), 63–93. https://doi.org/10.2307/2504942
  3. BBC News. (2014, September 30). Chess and the Scottish referendum. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-29430734
  4. BBC News. (2022, February 24). Putin’s chess game: Ukraine and geopolitics. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjjw6l53xe2o
  5. Burçak, B. (2008). Modernization, science, and engineering in the early nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. Middle Eastern Studies, 44(1), 69–83.
  6. Caillois, R. (1961). Man, play and games (M. Barash, Trans.). University of Illinois Press. (Original work published 1958)
  7. Chadha, Y. (1997). Gandhi: A life. John Wiley & Sons.
  8. Chase, W. G., and Simon, H. A. (1973). Perception in chess. Cognitive Psychology, 4(1), 55–81. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(73)90004-2
  9. Cienciala, A. M. (2009). The United States and Poland in World War II. The Polish Review, 54(2), 173–194.
  10. Danilovic, S., and de Voogt, A. (2020). Making sense of abstract board games: Toward a cross-ludic theory. Games and Culture, 16(5), 499–518. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412020914722
  11. Davidson, H. A. (2012). A short history of chess. Crown.
  12. De Groot, A. D. (1965). Thought and choice in chess. Mouton.
  13. Dobbs, M. (2008). One minute to midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the brink of nuclear war. Alfred A. Knopf.
  14. Financial Times. (2014, December 6). Diplomatic chess: The geopolitics of trade. https://www.ft.com/content/38378ebe-7bd2-11e4-a695-00144feabdc0
  15. Gobet, F.& Simon, H. A. (1996). Templates in chess memory: A mechanism for recalling several boards. Cognitive Psychology, 31(1), 1–40.
  16. Gobet, F., de Voogt, A., & Retschitzki, J. (2012). Moves in mind: The psychology of board games. Psychology Press.
  17. Guelzo, A. C. (2004). Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The end of slavery in America. Simon & Schuster.
  18. Huggins, N. I. (2007). Harlem Renaissance. Oxford University Press.
  19. Huizinga, J. (1955). Homo ludens: A study of the play element in culture. Beacon Press. (Original work published 1938)
  20. Isaacson, W. (2011). Steve Jobs. Simon & Schuster.
  21. Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
  22. Kirk, J. A. (2004). Martin Luther King, Jr. Journal of American Studies, 38(2), 329–347.
  23. Kissinger, H. (2011). On China. Penguin Press.
  24. Kövecses, Z. (2002). Metaphor: A practical introduction. Oxford University Press.
  25. Lakoff, G., and Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press.
  26. LePrince-Ringuet, D. (2018, November 28). How chess became a pawn in Russia’s political war games. Wired. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/world-chess-championship-2018-london-carlsen-vs-caruana
  27. Mann, T. E., & Ornstein, N. J. (2016). It’s even worse than it looks: How the American constitutional system collided with the new politics of extremism. Basic Books.
  28. Masters, P. A. (2008). Play theory, playing, and culture. Sociology Compass, 2(3), 856–869. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9020.2008.00118.x
  29. Murray, H. J. R. (2002). A history of chess. Oxford University Press.
  30. Musolff, A. (2016). Political metaphor analysis: Discourse and scenarios. Bloomsbury.
  31. Plouffe, D. (2009). The audacity to win: How Obama won and how we can beat the party of Limbaugh, Beck, and Palin. Penguin.
  32. Salen, K., and Zimmerman, E. (2004). Rules of play: Game design fundamentals. MIT Press.
  33. Sarotte, M. E. (2014). The collapse: The accidental opening of the Berlin Wall. Basic Books.
  34. Schelling, T. C. (1960). The strategy of conflict. Harvard University Press.
  35. Shenk, D. (2006). The immortal game: A history of chess. Doubleday.
  36. Simon, H. A. (1957). Models of man: Social and rational. John Wiley.
  37. Stone, B. (2013). The everything store: Jeff Bezos and the age of Amazon. Little, Brown and Company.
  38. Sunder, M. (2018). Intellectual property in experience. Michigan Law Review, 117, 197–220.
  39. Sutton-Smith, B. (1997). The ambiguity of play. Harvard University Press.
  40. Thaler, R. H. (2015). Misbehaving: The making of behavioral economics. W. W. Norton.
  41. The Conversation. (2014). Chess and politics collide once more in Kasparov’s failed presidential bid. https://www.theconversation.com/chess-and-politics-collide-once-more-in-kasparovs-failed-presidential-bid-30437
  42. The Courier-Herald. (2023). Chess and democracy: Control the field and treat your pawns well. https://www.courierherald.com/opinion/chess-and-democracy-control-the-field-and-treat-your-pawns-well-in-focus
  43. Turner, V. (1969). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Aldine de Gruyter.
  44. Vance, A. (2015). Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the quest for a fantastic future. Ecco.
  45. Walfisz, J. (2023, May 2). Culture re-view: The success of the MCU in numbers. Euronews. https://www.euronews.com/culture/2023/05/02/culture-re-view-the-success-of-the-mcu-in-numbers
  46. Wikström, P. (2009). The music industry: Music in the cloud. Polity Press.
Language: English
Page range: 1 - 23
Published on: Dec 11, 2025
Published by: Ludus Association
In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services
Publication frequency: 1 issue per year

© 2025 Can Büyükbay, published by Ludus Association
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.