Quantising Post-critique: Entangled Ontologies and Critical International Relations

All research communities have questions that hang around conference panels, book reviews, and other forms of commentary; the community of quantum international relations (IR) is dogged by the question of actuality and analogy. Namely, when one picks up the conceptual tools of quantum theory, does this entail a claim about actual quantum processes, structures, and relations, or a claim that quantum concepts can provide useful analogies for thinking about a social world whose physical macroscopic Newtonianism is not directly problematised? In many ways, this is a question from without – there is no actualist/analogist schism at the proverbial heart of quantum IR that divides the community as the mythology of IR describes in the inter-paradigm debate – but that does not mean that insiders can move past the question simply because it does not aid in understanding a particular intervention. If we make claims about a quantum reality, what experimental data do we assemble? If we are introducing new analogies, what do we add that was not there before?