Estranged/Entangled: The History, Theory, and Technology of Quantum Mechanics in International Relations

Abstract

In recent years a growing number of scholars of international relations (IR) have looked hopefully towards quantum mechanics (QM) as a source of new analytical tools and critical approaches to address many of the intractable problems — and emergent challenges — faced by the discipline and the world. It now appears that what some call a new ‘wave’ — or ‘turn’ or ‘era’ — and others a paradigm shift may be coming to the discipline. Novel, and more accurate, methods for modelling behaviour are being introduced by Quantum Decision Theory and Quantum Game Theory, and old Newtonian analogies, metaphors, and cosmologies are being challenged and replaced by quantum equivalents. Alexander Wendt has even gone so far as to suggest that scholars need to rethink the social sciences from the (quantum) mind up. In place of traditional mind/body dualism, Wendt proposes a quantum monism based on a panpsychist quantum theory of mind. This is a radical proposal, the ramifications of which could drastically reframe understandings of both the social and physical aspects of the world.

While there is no doubt that the present ‘quantum wave’ in IR is the most significant, it is not the first. In 1927, during his address to the American Political Science Association, William Bennett Munro called for political scientists to engage with QM and to borrow, by analogy, from the ‘new physics’ to “get rid of intellectual insincerities concerning the nature of sovereignty, the general will, natural rights, and the freedom of the individual” and discover “the true purposes and policies which should direct human action in matters of government.” Remarkably, Munro’s appeal came a mere two months after Max Born and Werner Heisenberg declared “quantum mechanics to be a closed theory” at the Fifth Solvay Conference. Some headway was made during the interwar period, but a complex combination of circumstances leading up to, and following, the Second World War estranged this line of scientific inquiry from IR theory. This pattern of estrangement and entanglement has recurred several times in the history of IR.

This thesis employs an experimental methodology to interrogate three neglected aspects of the relationship between QM and IR. The critical approaches of genealogy, semiology, and dromology are applied, respectively, to the historical, theoretical, and technological entanglements of IR and QM. Reinterpreting nearly a century of estrangement and entanglement, the thesis makes the case for a quantum theory of IR that is process-relational and event-ontological. Ultimately, however, this thesis is a work of pre-theory. Rather than presenting a critique of quantum IR, or an attempt at a fully formed quantum theory of IR, this thesis lays the groundwork for future theory and future developments in quantum IR.