Abstract
Karin Fierke situates Snapshots from Home at the intersection of two bodies of scholarship: one directed toward globalizing the study of world politics and the other drawing from quantum theory’s insights to study the social world. The first body of scholarship has a long history. That it did not make a mark on the study of world politics until the mid-2010s has to do with the narrow notion of “science” that dominated the study of world politics, also known as disciplinary International Relations (IR). By way of showing the obsolescence of the narrow notion of “science” that IR has modeled itself on, the body of efforts that draw from quantum theory’s insights has the potential to make more room for the first one. Fierke’s book, by way of exploring the parallels between quantum physics and Asian philosophies, allows us to identify this potential. The contributors to this special forum each elaborate on different aspects of this potential.
Since the 1980s, students of world politics have sought to overcome what they identified as the parochial outlook of IR as prevailed in textbooks, journal pages and classrooms. Alker (1981) is a pioneering figure in this regard (as noted by Thomas Biersteker), insofar as he explored plurality of ways of thinking about the world as well as the implications of such plurality for the study of world politics. Among his students, Ling in The Dao of World Politics (Ling, 2013; also see, Agathangelou and Ling, 2009) has probably gone the furthest in exploring the implications of Asian philosophies for the study of world politics (also highlighted by Yong Soo Eun). Alongside Alker and Ling, scholars who sought to address IR’s limitations by turning Eastern philosophies include Chan et al.’s (2001) edited volume entitled The Zen of International Relations: IR Theory From East to West.
If many of us do not know about these efforts and, consequently, are only able to trace globalizing IR literature to the mid-2010s, this has to do with the state of the discipline as captured by Chan (1991: 77) who observed that “in international relations, the movement towards multiple theories of a few things can only enrich debate, but the fear may be that it will disorder debate when, hitherto, the entire professional thrust has been to order it.” Indeed, for most of the 1990s and even the 2000s, scholarship that utilized interpretive methods and drew from other world views were stifled by a discipline where concerns with incommensurability prevailed almost all the others. When Bernstein et al. (2000) suggested that maybe physics is not the best model for IR, their suggestions were not always followed up.
This is where “Quantum International Relations” comes in (Waters, 2022). By drawing on the insights of quantum theory to study world politics, this body of scholarship offers a way to address IR’s “physics envy” while at the same time making room for interpretative approaches—an even bigger and more comfortable room that constructivism offered in the 1990s (as discussed by Kosuke Shimizu).
Through exploring the parallel between quantum theory and Asian philosophies, Snapshots from Home clarifies how the body of efforts that draws on quantum theory’s insights to study world politics has the potential to make room for aforementioned approaches that sought to globalize IR from the 1980s onwards. The potential that she points to is immense, in that she is not merely asking Asian philosophies “so what do you think?” as if there has been no relationship between “Eastern” and “Western” approaches up until that moment (Bilgin, 2021). We learn about entanglements between the two, which allows further exploring such relationality. But then, Snapshots from Home is not about exploring past relations in a historicized manner. Rather, it is about raising our awareness about entanglements (however way in which they may have come about) and exploring the potential for such entanglements for the study of issues that urgently push themselves on the agendas of world politics, including the pandemic of the early 2020s (also discussed by Nadine Voelkner in relation to global health) but also the climate crisis (further explored by Karen O’Brien). By investigating what Quantum IR may mean in practice, Fierke’s study learns from a body of thought that explored similar questions regarding the relationship between humans, nature and the universe. Fierke’s timely intervention has the potential to move the debate forward (on both Quantum IR and Global IR) by leaps and bounds.
