The visualisation of international relations: Using film as pedagogical scaffolding

International relations (IR) scholars have recently taken a more substantial interest in using film to teach theoretical and empirical concepts. However, the use of film as a core pedagogical method often remains ad hoc, undertheorised, and fragmented. This creates significant risks because learners may default to consuming films as entertainment, suffer cognitive overload, or uncritically absorb inaccurate or distorted versions of reality. The core contribution of this article is a comprehensive framework that theorises film-based pedagogy as pedagogical scaffolding. Grounded in socio-cultural learning theory, this framework is explicitly designed to teach IR theory and provides the necessary structure to guide learners from unmediated consumption towards active and critical analysis. To build the pedagogical scaffolding framework, five existing teaching methodologies are surveyed and re-interpreted as valuable and partial scaffolds. Their individual strengths are subsequently integrated into a novel, replicable, and transferable four-phase learning design. The utility of this design is demonstrated through a detailed case study using the film Midway (2019) to teach a core IR concept of the Balance of Power.