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

Abstract

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.