Quantum International Relations: A Human Science for World Politics
By James Der Derian and Alexander Wendt
Oxford University Press, 2022

The turn of this century was marked by a series of fateful events in world politics such as the Asian financial crisis and the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States (and the subsequent “Global War on Terror”). As most IR scholars were rightly preoccupied with understanding such challenges, two leading IR scholars, James Der Derian and Alexander Wendt, had separately begun to cast their eyes on a rather different subject: quantum theory.

Der Derian made his first reference to quantum mechanics in his introduction to The Virilio Reader (Der Derian, 1998). In 2001, Wendt spotted a book in a Chicago bookstore remainder bin: The Quantum Society: Mind, Physics, and a New Social Vision (Zohar and Marshall, 1995). That, as Wendt (2015) wrote later on, was his “aha!” moment. These seemingly unremarkable anecdotes changed the main research trajectory of both scholars. Their initially “separate” encounters with quantum mechanics then became “entangled” as they joined forces on the broad and ambitious project of quantizing IR. One of the fitting products of this collaboration is their co-edited book Quantum International Relations: A Human Science for World Politics.

Expanding on their co-edited Special Issue “Quantizing International Relations” in Security Dialogue (Der Derian and Wendt, 2020), the book seeks to make a case for grounding the study of international relations in quantum approaches, broadly and diversely defined. Being the very first — and still probably the only — edited book dedicated to quantum IR, this volume is a truly welcome and much anticipated addition to this endeavor. Anyone who wonders about how IR can benefit from quantum perspectives should not hesitate to pick up a copy and delve into it (if they have not already done so). The reward would be an incredible intellectual feast like no other.

Despite its bold title “Quantum International Relations”, the book does not call for building “a single grand theory of quantum IR,” or launching “another great debate or a polemical attack on other theoretical approaches” (p. 18). Rather, it has a more modest, but still profoundly important and challenging, goal of........

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