Violent Interference: Structural Violence, Quantum International Relations, and the Ethics of Entanglement

Abstract

Despite frequent reference in both academic and activist contexts, the concept of structural violence still poses a challenge for many ontological, epistemological, and political perspectives. While the ethical stakes of physical violence are generally accessible, conceptual barriers limit the ability to explore the important ethical dimensions of structural violence. Inspired by recent interventions into “quantum international relations,” I argue that the difficulty of understanding structural violence is because conventional social science abides a Newtonian physical imaginary. Drawing on Karen Barad's philosophical methodology of “diffractive reading,” I re-read Johan Galtung's landmark article Violence, Peace, and Peace Research through a critical quantum social–theoretic lens. Identifying key quantum-like elements of Galtung's theory of structural violence allows for a process of “quantizing by translation,” where quantum-like concepts are freed from the constraints of Newtonian social science. By approaching structural violence as a quantum-like social phenomenon, homologous to the concept of destructive interference, we gain an important conceptual model. In instances of structural violence, entangled social wavefunctions of social structures interfere destructively with constituent individuals and groups by limiting the spectrum of future potentialities. Conversely, structural privilege describes the constructive interference of those same social structures extending the spectrum of future potentialities for other constituent individuals and groups. To account for multiple and intersecting elements of identity and social standing, intersectional accounts of structural violence recognize the complex interaction of constructive and destructive interferences at play in delimiting spectra of future potentialities.

State under Challenge: Discerning the Imbroglio of Nigeria’s Religious Conflict and Security Implications

“…Such conditions would contribute to the rise of violence among the population. Conditions caused by the lack of national development and poverty would come in as structural violence that later would exacerbate direct violence done by the individuals (Murphy, 2022). Should the condition remain with neither stopgap nor long term solution, not only would it perpetuate the endless cycle of violence, but it would also cause bigger problems to materialize.…”

Social Laser: Media and Social Mobilization

“…Data collected during spring 2022 is utilized to describe the functioning of social laser. Quantum physics has been actively applied in the field of cognitive psychology, social and political sciences during the last decade (Bagarello 2019, Haven 2019, Murphy 2020, 2022, Wendt 2015, and has demonstrated a significant explanatory power when it comes to decision-making processes (Bruza, Wang and Busemeyer 2015). This development is associated with cognitive science's dissatisfaction with traditional probabilistic modelling based on expected utility theory (von Neumann and Morgenstern 1953) and modifications, as, e.g., the prospect theory (Kahneman and Tversky 1979).…”

Review on Social Laser Theory and Its Applications

“…Nowadays the formalism and the methodology of quantum theory are widely used in applications outside of physics, especially in cognition, psychology, and decision making (see, e.g., monographs [1]- [6]) as well as in social and political sciences (see, e.g., [7,8], [9]- [13] and references hereby). Such applications are known as quantum-like -to distinguish them from real quantum physics, including its applications to cognitive science (quantum physical reductionism).…”