Forum on Laura Zanotti,Ontological Entanglements,Agency,and Ethics in International Relations: Exploring the Crossroads (Routledge,2019)

Exploring the Crossroads of Critical and Quantum Thinking: An Introduction to the Forum

Despite being organised around one – unlikely – idea, that the core conceptual framework of quantum physics holds insights for International Relations (IR), the community of ‘Quantum IR’ has from its outset been decidedly pluralist. In a recent special issue on the topic, James Der Derian and Alexander Wendt call for ‘quantum approaches (in the plural) rather than propose a quantum theory (in the singular) of international relations’. ¹ Indeed, despite being relatively quite young compared to other approaches to theorising world politics, quantum IR has already touched on a wide variety of topics, including the One Belt One Road initiative, ² the Anthropocene, ³ international economics, ⁴ systems theory, ⁵ and non-Western philosophical perspectives including Daoist, Buddhist, and Vedic traditions. ⁶ Rather than a new and exclusive club, quantum IR has spread out to include a vast network of approaches to understanding politics and the space of the international.

Laura Zanotti’s Ontological Entanglements, Agency, and Ethics in International Relations: Exploring the Crossroads should be read in this light, demonstrating how quantum can draw on and contribute to a diverse range of theories. Indeed, Zanotti’s book explores a wide variety of themes in social theory, peace studies, feminist theory, metatheoretical debates in IR, international organisations, international development, and beyond. The model for this forum is not a photographic snapshot that seeks to represent Ontological Entanglements as it is, but a prism dispersing light into its spectrum. As I discuss below, the forum offers and assemblage of thoughtful works on gender, affect, temporality, ethics, critique, and the question of what exactly quantum brings to IR theory as an added-value.

The next section offers an outline of the five interventions in the forum, followed by an introduction to the core argument structure of Ontological Entanglements, and a concluding reflection on the through-lines and debates linking forum contributors. In addition to drawing attention to Zanotti’s bold theoretical project developed in Ontological Entanglements, it is our hope that the perspectives and approaches collected in this forum opens up a broader discussion on the future of critical IR and quantum IR, including scholars interested in questions of gender, affect, ethics, temporality, postcolonialism, critique, philosophy of social science, metatheory, international political thought, and – last but not least – the pluralistic community of quantum approaches to IR.

An Outline of the Forum

The five interventions in this forum approach Ontological Entanglements from different directions, highlighting both the multiple threads that Zanotti draws together in the course of her inquiry and the various conversations that can be enriched by engaging with her work. As a book at the crossroads of quantum and critical thinking in IR, it is only natural that the forum would include reflections from both broad tents. Sjoberg, Prügl, and Yıldız-Alanbay speak from outside of the quantum community, interrogating how Zanotti’s engagement with quantum theory can contribute to feminist, critical, and affect-oriented discourses already circulating. McIntosh and Murphy, conversely, speak from within the broad community of quantum IR – although the pluralism of this community means that neither could be understood to speak ‘on behalf’ of quantum IR.

Sjoberg responds to Ontological Entanglements as someone familiar with the quantum IR community, but not a quantum insider. Indeed, it is precisely this ambivalence ⁷ that frames Sjoberg’s engagement with Zanotti’s work. If there is a dominant sentiment about the development of quantum approaches to IR from within the big tent of critical IR, it may well be ambivalence. Sjoberg’s intervention is a careful and provocative discussion from a feminist perspective, and is in its own right grounds important questions about the relationship between quantum, feminist, and critical perspectives in IR. Prügl’s intervention into the forum seeks to understand how Zanotti’s diffractive reading of Barad and Foucault produces a new conceptualisation of the apparatus, in order to argue for gender to be understood not as a thing but as a quantum measurement apparatus. ⁸ In addition to a rich reflection on the ways in Zanotti’s framing of the apparatus permits a new conceptual model for gender, Prügl continues further, unpacking the implications of this novel understanding for feminist ethics. This move complements Zanotti’s descriptive-critical move of Kantian ethics with a praxis-oriented project of feminist critique, adding the crossroads of theory and praxis to the many other crossroads explored in the forum. Yıldız-Alanbay asks how quantum ontologies might be brought into dialogue with affect theory. ⁹ By identifying key metatheoretical affinities, Yıldız-Alanbay argues that approaches highlighting quantum and affect both post important questions around the relationship between agency and ethics, but that without a recognition of affect, quantum ontologies remain limited to a thin understanding of emotion.

McIntosh turns to the temporality of war, ¹⁰ highlighting how Zanotti’s entangled ontology helps break through the confines imposed by simplistic Newtonian assumptions of temporality as clock-time. This leads McIntosh to a three-part reflection on the promise of quantum for IR theory and research – the quantizing of time, a new ontology of war, and a clearer recognition of the stakes of scholarly positionality in research. Echoing Zanotti’s criticism of substantialism in critical IR, McIntosh draws attention to the importance of moving beyond inadvertent reproductions and performances of Newtonian-substantialist assumptions. Murphy’s intervention begins by asking how Zanotti’s critical perspective in Ontological Entanglements differs from prior interventions seeking to quantize IR, or social theory more generally. ¹¹ Calling attention to the specific modality of quantized critique that Zanotti employs, Murphy then argues that Zanotti’s entangled ontological imaginary is an example of post-critical IR, that privileges relationality and connectivity.

A Brief Introduction to Ontological Entanglements

The direct object of critique that Zanotti takes in Ontological Entanglements is the predominance of Newtonian substantialist ontologies in IR theory. ¹² In place of Newtonian substantialism and the abstract ethics that follows therefrom, Zanotti proposes an entangled ontology and an intra-agential ethos. Ontological Entanglements builds towards this goal by first articulating the critique of Newtonian substantialism – in familiar and unfamiliar spaces of critique – before presenting the alternative ontology, and then discussing how agency, norms, politics, and ethics are radically transformed in this quantum ontological imaginary. If the first three chapters represent the critique and alternative, and the next four the development of that alternative in particular theoretical registers, the final two substantive chapters offer an empirical explanation of the failures of Newtonianism and the promise of quantum ethics. Framed as a narrative arc, we can follow Ontological Entanglements as a work in three acts: critique, resolution, and illustration of the conceptual argument through empirical case studies.

Taking the mid-1980s debate on neorealism as a starting point, Chapter 1 highlights how Kenneth Waltz’s approach to ‘scientific theorizing in IR’ is deeply Newtonian, assuming a flat and closed international system where major forces possess agency in proportion to their mass (or, in this case, power). ¹³ Waltz received criticism for the role that unstated assumption had in shaping the contours of his thought at the time, but even those who correctly identified the problems with Waltz’s reliance on unstated assumptions failed to fully appreciate the role of Newtonian physics in limiting his political imaginary. Robert Keohane invokes Newton, but only as an example of how abstract assumptions and predictions work in other disciplines; Robert Cox critiques Waltz’s structuralism by proposing another form; and Richard Ashley critiques the ontological commitment to statism – all highlighting different elements of Waltz’s ‘politically conservative ethos’ that ‘naturalizes and oversimplifies complex processes, imagining that the social is regulated by a few overarching organizing principles similar to Newtonian laws of nature’. ¹⁴ But Zanotti’s point in this introduction is not merely the revival of criticism of Theory of International Politics with the latest vocabulary. Indeed, Zanotti examines how fellow ‘critical’ scholars have used ideas of governmentality, biopolitics, and multitude in ways that reify substantialism, as well as the ways in which constructivists’ analysis of norms have ‘remained deeply entrenched in a Newtonian framework’. ¹⁵ Similar to Wendt’s analysis in Quantum Mind that highlighted the shared commitment to the classical causal closure of physics between interpretivist and positivist accounts of social science, ¹⁶ Zanotti highlights how radically different political imaginaries nevertheless abide the same Newtonian limits. It is to this substantialist paradigm that she responds.

The alternative proposed by Zanotti is a worldview that relies not on the abstractions and assumptions of the Newtonian world – which always and already limit the potential political imaginary – but one that instead abides an entangled ontology. While her discussion of critical materialism and other attempts to rethink agency, structure, and causation identifies prior efforts as rightly guided but insufficient, chapter 3 turns to the quantum question. Drawing on the quantum social theory of feminist philosopher (and trained physicist) Karen Barad, ¹⁷ Zanotti brings notions of intra-action and ontological inseparability to play in a lively and radical rethinking of the conventional mapping of relations to relata and phenomena to entities. Casting aside the Newtonian framework of analysing separable entities who come into relation with one another, our starting-point is the phenomena in which we as researchers are imbricated – the relata emerge through observation and intra-actions within the system and cannot be understood in abstract but only in relation.

The ethical stakes of Zanotti’s reimagining of world politics crystallise first in the discussion of norms and then come fully into focus through the empirical comparison of Newtonian abstraction-driven interventions with the entangled ethos of responsibility. While within the substantialist-Newtonian framework of Waltz and others, it was entirely thinkable that a humanitarian intervention would be justified on the grounds of the responsibility to protect or other universal norms, the entangled ontology demands that ‘ethical decisions should be driven by careful considerations of the entanglements of the situation at hand’. ¹⁸ Beginning with entangled phenomena, there are no agents to be targeted in isolation and the very meaning of collateral damage evaporates. The only possible form of responsibility is radical responsibility, and the preliminary example of the Partners in Health/Zanmi Lasante (PIH) programme is offered as an example. ¹⁹ This programme responded to a need for healthcare in the Plateau Centrale region of Haiti, and has since spread to offer healthcare systems in various places of need around the world. PIH enters the community open to the socio-biological constitution of health crises through human and nonhuman factors, including not only bacteria and viruses, but also poverty, social institutions, hunger, and – significantly – the ways of knowing about these issues. Zanotti argues that the PIH leadership’s focus on the simultaneously epistemological and ethical stakes of knowledge represents a fundamental ontological shift from typical intervention programmes, from the privileging of separable agents to a complex recognition of the entanglement as phenomena. Within this model, radical responsibility guides micropolitical moves. ²⁰

The innovative reading of international ethics, the politics of intervention, and the relation of both questions to international organisations is sure to draw a wide audience for the book. But the landmark quality of the book comes from its place as the first book-length treatment of quantum IR coming from a critical perspective. Wendt’s Quantum Mind and Social Science approaches the quantum question from the hard problem of consciousness, seeking to directly challenge social science on the fundamental incompatibility of Newtonian social science with the existence of consciousness. Drawing on quantum approaches to neuroscience, decision theory, and psychology, he argues that ‘we really are walking wave functions’, ²¹ and that consciousness is an emergent quantum-mechanical phenomenon. Zanotti does not seek to make scientific claims about the nature of reality – indeed, her purpose is to challenge the distinction between science and ethics ²² and in so doing to challenge the fundamental imaginary of the social world. This work is an invaluable resource to critically oriented scholars of IR seeking to engage with the ideas of quantum IR.

Explorers of the Crossroads

As mentioned above, this forum explores the crossroads of critical and quantum thinking, both by teasing out the relation of Ontological Entanglements to broader conversations already underway, but also by posing new questions for where those discussions can turn. While each intervention in this forum is unique in the particular perspective offered towards Zanotti’s text, there are three debates found in the forum that highlight the productive tensions found at the crossroads of critical and quantum thinking.

The first important through-line connecting all contributions explores the status and value of quantum thinking for IR. Sjoberg poses this question in direct terms – if quantum IR questions dominant assumptions alongside feminist and queer-theoretic ontologies, what is preferable about quantum approaches? By engaging with the products of quantum thinking, such as the concept of agential cuts, rather than quantum thinking itself, Prügl undifferentiates the quantum/Newtonian schism – begging rather than stating the question of value added. Similarly, Yıldız-Alanbay’s exploration of the overlapping conceptual insights of affect and quantum question the difference that quantum thinking brings. In both of these cases, the question of quantum added value occurs because the presentation of novelty highlight Zanotti’s originality rather than an essential uniqueness to quantum ontologies. McIntosh and Murphy, on the other hand, explore how both Zanotti’s individual work and the quantum turn more generally offer significant new value to debates around international political theory. For McIntosh, this occurs (perhaps fittingly) at two levels simultaneously: he argues that quantum epistemologies demand humility from scholars of IR while the ontological porosity of quantum thinking opens up new empirical questions. Murphy focuses more directly on the contribution of Zanotti and quantum IR in providing a new model of post-critique, guided not by suspicion but relationality.

To varying degrees, all authors also draw on Zanotti’s consideration of ethics developed from a quantum perspective. In addition to juxtaposing the ethical content of Massumi’s affect theory with Zanotti’s quantum ethics, it is striking that Yıldız-Alanbay considers agency and ethics so frequently as an entangled pair. The reimagining of IR through entangled ontologies is, for Yıldız-Alanbay, only possible if the entanglement is recognised. A similar exploration of how Zanotti’s ethical model engages with existing critical scholarship can be found in Prügl’s diffractive reading of feminist ethics and praxis through Baradian intra-agential ethics. Reaffirming Zanotti’s embrace of the entangled ontology, we see again how this critical-quantum position finds its closest allies in perspectives already destabilising binary decisions and isolated subjects. However, this natural affinity between the ethical claims of existing critical approaches and quantum theory brings us back to the former thread; Sjoberg asks, if this is true, why do we need quantum theory? It is clear that Sjoberg does not intend this as a critique of Zanotti’s work – indeed, the quality of Ontological Entanglements is affirmed by Sjoberg throughout her intervention – but the raising of similar ethical questions returns us to the question of added value. For McIntosh and Murphy, the question of quantum ethics is not a primary concern in engaging with Zanotti’s work, but it remains nevertheless present – the former approaches an ethical reflection most closely in discussing the place of the researcher and the latter in conceptualising relationality.

These two threads – value added and ethics – are most closely intertwined in the conversation between the first two interventions. Taking feminist and queer theory as points of engagement for Zanotti’s quantum ontology, we see how the theoretical dialogue that Zanotti uses as a frame for her dialogue – not only describing Barad as a feminist and quantum theorist but also dovetailing quantum ontology and feminist theory throughout – both bolsters and detracts from the important of a quantum turn. For Sjoberg, again, this leads to a place of what we might call generous scepticism, valuing the intellectual engagement while remaining unconvinced of the necessity of a quantum turn to reach similar points (and identifying places where existing feminist and queer scholarship might reach the destination through a more rigorous reasoning). Conversely, Prügl argues by demonstrating the novel conceptualisation of gender’s thing-ness that becomes possible when theorising through an entangled ontology. In so doing, we see the value but do not receive a direct answer to the question of the necessity of a quantum turn for feminist theory. These two opening reflections mark not a complete conversation but an opening of the question of what relationship quantum, feminist, and queer theories will and should have in IR. Far from an endpoint for this question (or others), this forum-prism instead disperses insights in a full spectrum of directions.

As Badredine Arfi and Oliver Kessler said in the introduction to a recent forum on Wendt’s book, a primary mission of the discussion below is to suggest a serious reading of the book in question. ²³ The interventions below discuss significant elements of the book, but the sheer breadth of the discussion found in Ontological Entanglements means that any such effort will only scratch at the surface. It is our hope that you, the reader, will become entangled in these debates as an explorer of the crossroads.