Anything quantum can spark curiosity, confusion, or both, and even incredulity, especially when the term ‘quantum’ is bandied about outside of physics. To link quantum holography (QH) to international relations (IR) is, therefore, almost certain to raise eyebrows. The word ‘holography’ – often associated with the projection of a floating 3D image in entertainment or displays – can add further mystery to an already enigmatic subject.

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While this impression of holography (in one of its practical applications) is not wrong, it isn’t what QH is primarily about in quantum social (and IR) theory (Pan 2025b). Here, holography refers to a particular, counterintuitive notion of relationality between whole and part: the whole is not only constituted by parts, but ‘contained’ within them (Pan 2020). This form of relationality is evident in a hologram, a type of silvery or metallic sticker commonly found on modern bank notes, passports, and ID cards. Unlike traditionally printed pictures, a small fragment of a hologram retains the whole picture of the original. This is the thrust of QH: every part holographically encodes the whole, albeit not perfectly. Not arguing literally that a grain of sand contains the entire world, QH is best seen as a way of thinking and doing, which sees and values the centrality of the whole to the emergence of its parts.

Long aware of the Chinese term for holography (quanxi, 全息, or whole information), I didn’t see its IR significance until I had to grapple with a lingering question left from my book (Pan 2012). Mainly about how not to understand China’s rise, the book deconstructs Western discourses of China’s rise as ‘opportunity’ and ‘threat’, but it otherwise says little about what China is. That was partly a matter of focus, and partly because I didn’t have a satisfactory answer to it, until around late 2016 when I was visiting Peking University on an Australian government fellowship. One day, as I stared through the hotel window, I stumbled upon an idea, somehow aided by my background knowledge of quanxi: didn’t Beijing look like a small version of China (with people speaking different accents, restaurants offering food from all over the country, and so on)? Then what about China itself? Wasn’t it a microcosm of the world?

These hunches led me to Alexander Wendt’s then new book Quantum Mind and Social Science, where he draws the analogy of holographic projection to conceptualize a participatory part-whole relationship: ‘the whole is present in the parts’ (Wendt 2015, 229, emphasis in original). He sees the state as such a whole: while largely invisible, it is enfolded holographically within the minds and practices of its parts (e.g., citizens) (ibid., 273). Another important source is quantum physicist David Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order, in which he uses the hologram analogy to illustrate undivided wholeness that is implicated in parts. These eye-opening insights, and the emergence of a quantum IR community (Der Derian and Wendt 2022), have since provided me with the impetus and intellectual space to work on this QH approach.

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