Rethinking challenges of a holographic world: Towards a quantum ontology for global governance

Abstract

About 25 years ago, James Rosenau called for a new ontology for global governance; 25 years on, this call remains relevant, because one of the main sources of many ‘global’ challenges (and their potential solutions) ultimately lies in the way we think, at the core of which is ontology or the fundamental assumption about reality. As the Newtonian atomistic ontology of independent things continues to dominate the theory and practice of global governance, this article proposes quantum holography as an alternative ontological framework. Treating parts as embodying the whole and lacking their own separate status, quantum holography draws on the radical ontology of quantum holism to dissolve the boundaries between matter and meaning, nature and human, whole and part, global and local/national. The article argues that to better understand and more effectively deal with the many challenges of the complex and volatile world, fostering a quantum holographic consciousness is essential.

From all things One and from One all things.

– Heraclitus

The ontological turn in global governance: Mission unaccomplished

Coinciding with (though not related to) the founding of the British Journal of Politics and International Relations 25 years ago, James Rosenau (1999) called for a new ontology for global governance. In doing so, he hoped to recast the relevance of territoriality, pay closer attention to the temporal as well as spatial dimensions in international relations (IR), and take more seriously the porosity of boundaries at various levels of governance. As he wrote:

If the interactions of sovereign states in an anarchical world lie at the heart of the old ontology, at the center of the new one are the interactions of globalizing and localizing forces, of tendencies toward integration and fragmentation that are so simultaneous and interactive as to collapse into an erratic but singular process to which I have attached the label of fragmegration. Grating as this term may be, it has the virtue of capturing the inextricably close and causal links between globalization and localization, highlighting the possibility that each and every increment of the former gives rise to an increment of the latter, and vice versa (Rosenau, 1999: 293, emphasis in original).

A quarter of a century later, while much progress has been made in the subfield of global governance, the call for alternative ontologies for global governance still resonates today. Despite the proliferation of multilateral institutions, growing sophistication and influence of global civil society, and accumulative effects of international norm diffusion and compliance, the list of global challenges has been expanding, not shortening. The magnitude, complexity, and gravity of those challenges have been increasing, not decreasing. Many common challenges such as the ravaging pandemic and record-shattering climate crises, instead of motivating collective action for global cooperation, have further driven the world apart (Esty and Moffa, 2012; Fagan, 2017).

The myriad challenges facing the world today and the persistent global governance deficit, while no doubt subject to different and context-specific explanations and solutions (Berten and Kranke, 2024; Pegram and Acuto, 2015), also reveal the continued need for ontological rethinking 25 years on. As Wendt (2015: 2) reminds us, ‘In philosophy there is a long-standing suggestion that when debates persist for many years with no discernible progress, this is because all sides are making an assumption that is in fact mistaken’. Such a shared assumption is often ontological in nature. For all the heated debates in IR, scholars have generally assumed the givenness of sovereign states with their own interest and identity, a belief that bears the ontological hallmark of Newtonian atomism (Zanotti, 2019; Zohar and Marshall, 1994). In the context of global governance, such an atomistic assumption is manifested not only in the now old-fashioned state-centrism and methodological nationalism, but also in many non-state-centric, multilevel governance, liberal institutionalist, new interdependence, and multiplexity approaches. Useful in various ways, most of these approaches still assume that the world is made up of separate agents and structures at different levels, although they acknowledge that the numbers and types of actors are multiplying, their interactions more extensive, fluid and complex, their boundaries increasingly blurred, and contradictions and uncertainties becoming commonplace (Acharya, 2017; Börzel, 2020; Kahler, 2016; Keohane and Nye, 2001). To follow Rosenau’s (1999: 289) conceptual distinction between ontology and paradigm, much of the questioning of state-centrism is a paradigm shift, not an ontological one. Another example of such a paradigm – rather than ontological – shift is given by quantum physicist David Bohm. As he notes:

When man [sic] thinks of himself in this [atomistic] way, he will inevitably tend to defend the needs of his own ‘Ego’ against those of the others; or, if he identifies with a group of people of the same kind, he will defend this group in a similar way. He cannot seriously think of mankind as the basic reality, whose claims come first. Even if he does try to consider the needs of mankind he tends to regard humanity as separate from nature, and so on (Bohm, 1980, xii–xiii).

Here, despite the expanding circle of self-identity, the fundamental assumption of ontological separateness persists, which sees ‘things as inherently divided, disconnected, and “broken up” into yet smaller constituent parts’ (Bohm, 1980: xii, emphasis in original). Such an atomistic belief in the essential separation of parts, as Bohm (1980: xii) notes, has been ‘preventing mankind from working together for the common good’. As long as such an ontology continues to inform the theory and practice of IR, foreign policy, and global governance, the potential for reimagining the world as well as for effective global cooperation is likely to remain largely unfulfilled (Cashore and Bernstein, 2023; Fagan, 2017). The source of the ‘global’ challenges, despite their complex material and institutional roots in the ‘real world’, ultimately lies in thought, or ontological assumption. Because we take our ontological assumption as given, and act upon it often unreflectively, including in our attempt to tackle many social and global problems, we end up (inadvertently) prolonging or aggravating them because ‘the means by which we try to solve them are the source’ (Bohm, 1994: 3).

In this context, Rosenau’s ontological intervention was prescient and on target, but the ontological turn in global governance he helped start remains a work in progress. By drawing attention to complexity, non-linearity, and turbulence in world politics, he suggests that world affairs ‘exhibit all the characteristics of complex adaptive systems’ (Rosenau, 2006a, 112). This argument about complexity, contradiction, and uncertainty points to the promise of an emergent ontology (Rosenau, 2006b: 31–32) and represents an important step forward from the reductionism of Newtonian atomism. However, even as scholars explicitly call for focusing on ontology as a ‘first step to understanding changing global governance’, many still assume the unproblematic prior existence of ‘basic elements’ or ‘entities’ (presumably at a ‘lower’ or ‘simpler’ level) as central to global reality (Hewson and Sinclair, 1999: ix; Rosenau, 1997: 32). The consequence is that the spectre of Newtonian ontology of independent things and distinctive levels is left largely undisturbed. Given the implicit Newtonian bias of such seemingly innocuous concepts as ‘basic elements’, ‘entities’, ‘interactions’, and ‘causal links’, it is perhaps unsurprising that there has been a lack of engagement with relational ontology in the study of global governance (Hofferberth, 2019: 131).

The main purpose here is not to dwell on the ontological intervention of Rosenau (and others) per se, which would require a whole different project; instead, I use his provocation as a valuable jumping-off point to pivot to an alternative ontological framework for global governance. By drawing on an idea from an unlikely source which is to be explained below, the article hopes to provoke reflection and debate on ‘what makes the world hang together’ (Ruggie, 1998) and why such questions matter for global governance.

Quantum holography: A quantum relational ontology

As the ontological turn in global governance needs some fresh momentum, the recent IR scholarship on relationalism provides a fruitful opportunity for global governance to explore an ontological alternative (Hofferberth, 2019: 129). The relational IR scholarship itself is diverse and continues to grow (Fierke, 2022; Jackson and Nexon, 1999, 2019; Kavalski, 2018; Kurki, 2020; McCourt, 2016; Nexon, 2010; Nordin et al., 2019; Pan, 2021a; Qin, 2018; Trownsell, 2022). In this article, I just focus on the promise of one particular relational approach, that is, the idea of quantum holography, as it has yet to receive any attention in the global governance scholarship but may offer some highly relevant insights into this subject matter.

Quantum holography is a relational ontology inspired partly by quantum mechanics (Pan, 2020, 2021a). Unlike its classical or Newtonian counterpart, quantum mechanics holds a fundamentally relational view of reality (Lewis, 2016: 175; Rovelli, 2021: 108–109). Instead of separate Newtonian atoms, particles are ‘quantised states of a field that extends to the whole of space’ (Bohm and Hiley, 1993: 322). They are parts of an irreducible whole, and their properties cannot be said to exist in their own right without the whole or their relationships with it (Zohar, 1990: 81). In other words, the whole cannot be reduced to separate ‘parts’ because the parts cease to exist once their relationships are taken out through reductionism.

This kind of quantum holism raises a fundamental question about the relationship between whole and part, which, coincidentally, is also a central question in the theory and practice of global governance (see Camilleri and Falk, 2009). Conventional holism emphasises the whole’s emergent property which does not exist in its parts (like the property of a computer which does not exist in its individual components), while still taking the existence of independent parts as given. Quantum holism, by contrast, sees the property of parts as inevitably emergent from the whole (Der Derian and Wendt, 2020: 404; Esfeld, 2004: 611; Pan, 2020, 2021a; Talbot, 1991). Through quantum entanglement, parts and whole are ‘co-emergent’ (Wendt, 2015: 257, emphasis in original). As parts emerge out of the whole, what is in the whole is also in the parts, just as the whole picture of an original hologram can be found in a smaller piece of the hologram (Bohm, 1980: 224–226), hence the term quantum holography.

Quantum holography provides a more complete description of ‘the complex relation between part and whole’ than what is on offer by complexity theory and its ontology of one-way emergence (Snyder and Hui, 2023). Thus, it builds on yet goes beyond Rosenau’s emergent ontology. It also adds a specific and largely overlooked form of relationality to the relational turn literature by prompting us to fundamentally rethink what a part is. Though somewhat related, here holography does not refer to the technological effect of a virtual three-dimensional image projected out of a two-dimensional image, or to the quantum gravity proposition about information of objects inside a black hole being preserved on its event horizon (the ‘holographic principle’). Although the term holography or hologram (holo means ‘whole’ and gram means ‘to write’, Bohm, 1980: 183) is borrowed metaphorically or analogously, the idea that the whole is relationally constitutive of its parts and thus embedded in the latter is more than a metaphor. At this point, a brief note on the metaphysics of this approach is in order.

Certainly we can take a metaphorical position to avoid the tricky question of whether quantum holography is a ‘realist’ description of the world. But this may come at a cost: if holographic relations do not exist in reality, why should this idea be taken seriously? The holographic relationship between whole and part is implied by the entanglement of the part to everything (the whole), and quantum entanglement is regarded as a fundamental nature of reality (Barad, 2007: 160; Wendt, 2015: 54). This, Esfeld (2004: 604) argues, ‘commits us to realism’ (see also Pan, 2020: 20–21).

This ‘realist’ commitment, however, should be distinguished from representationalism or metaphysical realism, which asserts that reality exists independently of our interpretation of it as spectators. In Bohr’s concept of quantum wholeness, there is no separation between object and its observation (Barad, 2007: 118), since we are not detached spectators, but part of the world we observe. Bohr insists that physics ‘concerns what we can say about nature’, not nature itself (quoted in Malin, 2012 [2001]: 261; see also Zeilinger, 2010: 40). Drawing on Bohr but departing from his anthropocentrism, feminist theorist and quantum physicist Karen Barad (2007: 207) reformulates realism in terms of agential realism, which aims at ‘providing accurate descriptions of that reality of which we are a part and with which we intra-act, rather than some imagined and idealized human-independent reality’. It is in this agential realist sense that I stake out my ontological claim about quantum holography. It describes a ‘real’ condition of the world which is nonetheless not independent of such a description, just as the illumination of the holographic image cannot do without the reconstruction beam. In this way, we could avoid the dichotomous trap of either ‘realism’ or analogy, which has frequently dogged the emerging quantum IR scholarship. It is worth noting here that Barad’s agential realism is not the only rendition of quantum realism, which has taken the forms of ‘open’ and ‘participatory’ realism, among others (see D’Espagnat, 2006; Fuchs, 2017). For the sake of brevity, a brief and qualified observation can be made that there are considerable overlaps between agential realism and these other forms of quantum realism. Such overlaps perhaps indicate metaphysical complexity rather than outright metaphysical inconsistency.

Now a further question arises: Does the quantum holographic phenomenon exist beyond the domain of quantum physics? Applying this insight to the brain, neuropsychologist Karl Pribram argues that memory is not encoded in a particular area of the brain, but spreads throughout the brain so that each part of the brain contains the whole memory (Talbot, 1991). In biology, similarly the whole genome of an organism is located not in any particular part, but in almost every cell, making the cell a kind of whole (Wendt, 2015: 135). Indeed, ‘life works via order that goes all the way down from the structure and behavior of whole organisms to the position of protons along its DNA strands’ (McFadden and Al-Khalili, 2014: 215), both confirming Schrödinger’s prediction and implying a holographic mechanism at work. Of course, even if quantum holography is real in physics, chemistry, neuropsychology, and biology, its applicability to the social world could be another matter. However, quantum physicists such as Niels Bohr and John von Neumann maintain that quantum theory does not just apply to the subatomic world or to physics, but to the macroscopic world, or even to astronomical scales. According to Barad (2007: 206, emphases in original), quantum relational ontology can be extended all the way to the social world: ‘humans (like other parts of nature) are of the world, not in the world’. If quantum wholeness does not separate object from its observation, then nor does quantum mechanics obey the boundaries between matter and meaning, nature and human, the microscopic and the macroscopic (Barad, 2007; Malin, 2012 [2001]).

What makes all of these inseparable is information, which has been regarded as the fundamental building block of reality by many quantum physicists including David Bohm, John Archibald Wheeler, Henry Stapp, and Anton Zeilinger. As Wheeler puts it, ‘every it from a bit’ (Heller, 2010: 47). Bohm suggests that information is both physical and mental (Pylkkänen, 2017: 307). To recall the relationship between the quantum field and the particle, ‘the quantum field informs its associated particle about the environment, giving it a “perspective”’ (Wendt, 2015: 88, emphasis added; Bohm and Hiley, 1993: 35). In this sense, information exercises participatory agency in consistence with Barad’s (2007: 174) posthumanist agential realism, which does not depend on a human observer per se. And the fact that the social domain is filled with information means that the holographic phenomenon may be particularly relevant here, especially if information, or more precisely, the superposition of all potentially available information, is treated as quantum social wave functions (Murphy, 2021; Wendt, 2015: 258). For example, each individual, like a particle, enfolds information from their field-like whole (be it the family, workplace, the community, the state, the biosphere, or the global society), and it is such information that constitutes and defines what the individual is. Of course, a part has multiple wholes, and each of its important aspects such as a child or a citizen carries the relevant social wave functions of its respective wholes (e.g. their parents or the state).

One difficulty of understanding quantum holography is that it describes a relation that is hard to see directly. But thanks to the informational entanglement between whole and part, the relationship with the whole can be ‘known’ or even ‘felt’ by the part. No one has seen a state or a nation (a ‘whole’) per se, but its presence can and often has been felt by its citizens (‘parts’). It is such knowledge, experience, and consciousness where ‘evidence’ of quantum holography may be found, if only interpretively or hermeneutically. As such, it can be ignored as well, or can be interpreted differently, which demonstrates that the realness of the holographic phenomenon is not independent or fixed; it is ‘an ongoing dynamic of intra-activity’ (Barad, 2007: 206).

Consequently, what is and what is not holographic, or where to draw the ‘line’, is hard to answer a priori, particularly because holographic entanglement is more of a dynamic process than a static, ideal-type end product. However, to the extent that information is the key to quantum holography and is ‘the currency of reality’ (Stapp, 1999: 11), nonetheless, holographic entanglement may be something unavoidable, with its being/becoming varying only in degree. This is not to say that everything is quantum holographic all the time. Classical phenomena such as Newton’s cradle, the spread of a disease, and the explosion of bombs in a warzone do seem to exist, especially if they are observed classically. Things can be connected globally, say, a long-haul flight from Sydney to London, without immediately engendering holographic entanglement between the two places. However, all such classical phenomena involve information flow, and when they ‘add up’ spatially and temporally, the overall effect on an entangled part is likely to be holographic in nature, that is, it is informed by the whole with which it has been intra-acting. We can infer that wherever information inflow – which may be measured, such as in the social world, through the availability and intensity of trade, investment, travel, telecommunication, and infrastructure connectivity – is extensive and sustained and wherever a part’s capacity to enfold and process such information is strong, the part will necessarily display holographic characteristics. For instance, a metropolis is more holographically connected with the whole than an isolated village on a remote island. That said, the village is not without its wholes either; otherwise, it would not have come into existence. While both the metropolis and the village exhibit the duality of glocality, one could say that the former has more ‘global’ or ‘whole’ characteristics than the latter.

Insofar as information is fundamentally non-local, whole and part need not be spatially close to each other. Therefore, holographic relations do not seem to exist between a computer and its components as a computer component does not embody a computer. But if we see the computer as a part, its components turn out to collectively embody some non-local wholes (the global supply chains, for instance). Similarly, whole-part entanglement in holographic phenomena need not be synchronic either. As a Brazilian dependency theorist once suggested, within a cup of coffee was the entire history of imperialism and colonialism (Biersteker, 2022: 213n6). Understood in terms of non-local and diachronic informational entanglement between whole and part, quantum holography is consequently what Bohm (1980) calls the implicate order. It is ‘implicate’ in that such an order is not easily obvious to our naked eye or ‘common sense’, unlike the explicate order made up of all the apparently discrete, observable things. While the implicate nature of quantum holography renders it largely invisible, it is all the more important to understand it, because whole-part entanglement is nonetheless real, and as such, the state of the whole inevitably and constantly affects – or indeed, holographically reconstructs – its parts. Especially, when the effect of the whole on the parts is negative, failure to understand the workings of the holographic implicate order may prove to be disastrous for the parts.

At this stage, the concept of the whole still sounds rather fuzzy. Does it have a boundary or specific shape, for example? How can we recognise it given its importance? Intuitively, we all know the notion of wholeness is not just an illusion, but defining it is no easy task. In quantum mechanics, the field, relative to the particle, is a whole. In the IR context, the system of states and world society have been referred to as a whole (Bull, 1977: 9; Waltz, 1979); to individual citizens, a state can be a whole (Wendt, 2015: 268–273). While these specifications are useful, in quantum holography, the whole is best understood according to two criteria: relevance and undividedness. First, there is probably no a priori universally recognised whole for every part. What is a whole is always relative to the specific part or issue in question. Thus, the whole does not have objective, well-defined, and pre-determined boundaries or shapes. According to agential realism, the marking of its specific meanings and boundaries requires the intervention of apparatuses (e.g. a specific kind of consciousness or observational lens) (Barad, 2007: 143), just as a hologram needs a reconstruction beam to bring it to light. For the practical purpose of strengthening global governance concerning particular issues, for example, the whole may be differentiated functionally, in terms of the economic, environmental, or social whole. Second, whatever kind of relative shape or boundary is given to a ‘relevant’ whole, it should be understood as ultimately indivisible both within and without. While a state may be a whole for its citizens, it is itself a holographic part of still larger wholes, such as the global community and the planetary ecosystem. On ontological grounds it rejects the segmentary differentiation of the whole into nominally equal but otherwise independent sub-wholes or parts (e.g. Westphalian territorial states), and ultimately, stratificatory (hierarchical) and functional differentiations of wholes and parts should not be reified as evidence of real separation (see Albert et al., 2013). In this sense, quantum holography is also a way of thinking, the kind of epistemological consciousness, or understanding referred to by Wolfgang Pauli as the capacity to ‘recognize that a great many different phenomena are part of a coherent whole’ (quoted in Waltz, 1979: 9).

Implications of quantum holography for global governance

What does quantum holography mean for global challenges and global governance? Due to space limitations, fully addressing this question is beyond the scope of this article, but some broad points can be outlined here. Above all, quantum holography allows us to rethink and redefine global governance, which should, from the outset, be about the ‘right’ kind of thought or ontological assumption about the world, its problems, and solutions. Central to this onto-epistemological assumption is the consciousness of the world as an irreducible, holographically entangled whole, always already hanging together, whether economically, socially, or ecologically. This is not simply a rebranding of globalisation and global interdependence where the boundaries between domestic and international are believed to have been eroded, because these ideas still assume the prior independence of connected entities (Pan, 2021a: 601). According to quantum holography, the wholeness of the world is not something outside of its parts (e.g. states and other communities), but it is found inherently within them. There exists shared and indispensable wholeness in each of these parts, not just between or above them. We do not just have global interests as something extra to our national or individual interests; we are fundamentally global interests through and through, even though they are often specifically manifested or unfolded as ‘local’ or ‘individual’. If the whole is unwell (be it economically, environmentally, or politically), its parts will suffer.

The quantum holographic consciousness challenges the conventional conceptions of the ‘world’ or the ‘global’, which assume global challenges as existing somewhere ‘out there’ at a distinctively global ‘level’, which may (or may not) affect each local and independent actor such as a sovereign state. Current calls for ‘collective efforts’ in global governance have been predicated on this ontological separation between ‘global’ and ‘local’, and on the understanding that pre-existing ‘capacities of individual states’ have become inadequate to deal with complex global challenges (Weiss, 2009: 257). These assumptions treat the global and the local, though interconnected, as inherently different in scale and separable in space, rather than holographically entangled. Consequently, though they may justify pragmatic cooperation, such assumptions are also behind the populist belief in the desirability and possibility of decoupling and ‘taking back control’, a sentiment which has already fed into policy practices such as Brexit, Trump’s border wall, and protectionist industrial strategies in many countries, all of which further exacerbate the global governance deficit. Such a sentiment is not exclusive to populist politicians or redneck bigots, but widely (though certainly not universally) shared, however implicitly, in the intellectual community as well. In the subfield of global governance, the word ‘global’ serves largely as a scalar modifier, indicating the scope and scale, or the ‘sum total’, of the issues at hand, meaning ‘the “big”, the “macro”, the “total”’ (Coen and Pegram, 2018; Weiss and Wilkinson, 2015). Apart from its ‘analytical utility’ (Dingwerth and Pattberg, 2006; Weiss and Wilkinson, 2014: 207, 211), the term ‘global’ has no significant ontological significance. Similarly, ‘collective’ is ultimately divisible back into ‘individual’. Not surprisingly, this Newtonian ontological image of the world would set limits on how far global governance and collective action can go. Indeed, the ontological prioritisation of ‘individual’ and ‘local’ has been partly responsible for the creation of the collective action problem (Wendt, 1999: 294).

The fundamental rethinking of the wholeness of the world and the holographic entanglement between the world and its ‘parts’ can help overcome this onto-epistemological limit, which arguably is the most formidable though often invisible barrier to effective global governance. As Richard Falk notes, ‘The tendencies toward the destruction of life cannot be dealt with until there emerges a much stronger sense of the reality of wholeness and oneness, of the wholeness of the earth and of the oneness of the human family’ (quoted in Aginam 2019: 53). Quantum holography provides precisely such a sense of wholeness and oneness. With this consciousness, it is possible to reconsider what global challenges mean and what global governance may entail. I shall single out three implications by way of illustration.

First, from a quantum holographic perspective, global challenges are holographic challenges, in the sense that such challenges are always present simultaneously in the whole and in its parts. If the ‘global’ is always already in the ‘local’, then ‘global’ challenges are necessarily ‘local’ challenges and cannot be seen as something ‘out there’ or ‘far away’. The climate change challenge is a prime example here. The warming up of the planet of which human society is a part has already resulted in changed ‘local’ weather patterns and affected various aspects of ‘local’ life, such as flood, drought, bushfires, crop failure, mass extinction, diseases, eco-anxiety, civil unrest, climate-induced displacement, supply-chain disruption, and even inter-state conflict. While the science of climate change itself, especially global warming, may be explained by theories such as complexity and chaos or even quantum resonance (Wordsworth et al., 2024), there is scepticism about the quantum entanglement between climate and human, let alone the idea of their holographic connection. The point here is not to force such an idea in the absence of more empirical research, but it is logical to think that the idea should not be dismissed out of hand. The foundation of the social world consists in human life and consciousness, both of which in turn emerge from the environment, including climate. The human being, ‘like the plant, gets all its substance and energy from the universe and eventually falls back into it. Evidently the human being could not exist without this context (which has very misleadingly been called an environment)’ (Bohm and Hiley, 1993: 389; see also Barad, 2007: 170). There is now a sizable body of literature on posthumanism, new materialism, and the History of Climate and Society (HCS) to show the fundamental entanglement of nature and human (Degroot et al., 2022; Harrington, 2020). Such entanglement, like the holographic entanglement between a field and its particles, can be seen as holographic in the sense that human life is constituted by the interference patterns of the climate, the biosphere, and the social whole. The United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have been based on the idea that global environmental sustainability is vital to human survival, health, and prosperity. Consequently, the challenges facing the global environment are challenges to each individual and each locale on the planet. The global environmental whole, for better or worse, is in each of its parts.

Second, if the ‘local’ is a holographic embodiment of the ‘global’, then seemingly ‘local’ events or crises may be ‘global’ in disguise. As a result, the scalar difference between ‘local’ and ‘global’ becomes insignificant, displaying the scale-free or scale-invariance character of fractal phenomena, which can be seen as a particular form of holographic connections (Chapman, 2015: 87–88). What is local is global, thanks to the non-locality characteristics of information entanglement between whole and part. As such, ‘local’ crises are fundamentally non-local and require ‘global’ or wholistic responses, even though the crises are yet to be played out ‘globally’. Currently, there is a tendency to localise the nature and/or source of a crisis or challenge, as if it is just an isolated phenomenon associated only with the conditions of its particular space and time from which it ‘originates’. For example, when the COVID-19 pandemic first broke out in China, some European countries were not interested in discussing this issue at the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors Meeting in Riyadh in late February 2020, with one Italian representative allegedly saying that COVID-19 ‘is a yellow people’s disease, not ours’ (Pan, 2021b: 42). Here I do not suggest that the pandemic itself follows some quantum physics logic; rather, the fact that the world has always already been holographically structured means that the interference effect of the pandemic may display some holographic characters. The failure to appreciate such characters in part contributed to the fragmented, nationally based, and ultimately inadequate responses in many parts of the world.

Third, quantum holography also helps us rethink agency, power, and authority, all of which are key concepts in global governance. The conventional understanding of such concepts in IR has been constrained by the classical consciousness, which assumes that these are essentially the properties of individual actors, be they states, non-state actors, or transnational corporations. Consequently, scholars ‘conveniently locate agency on different levels and frame it in “individual” and “collective” terms’ (Hofferberth, 2019: 131). Such an atomistic conception of power may usefully enable us to expose who exercises power in certain contexts. But at the same time, it may also have contributed to the popularity of a Hobbesian approach to power politics. This approach, by rationalising the fragmentation and dispersal of authority among ‘different’ actors, has been the very source of the many problems facing global governance, such as ‘the inherently competitive dynamics of the security dilemma and collective action problem’ (Wendt, 1992: 392).

Quantum holography emphasises the centrality of the whole in the empowerment of the parts. Neglecting the whole or in the absence of a healthy or well-functioning whole, the ‘individual’ parts cannot exist or flourish, which inevitably will affect their perceived agency and power. While the ‘relational’ dimension of power and agency has been well acknowledged (Emirbayer, 1997: 291–292; Hofferberth et al., 2022; Kurki, 2020; Wendt, 1999: 171), thus far the holographic relational nature of power and agency has not. But recognising this point is essential to promoting positive and sustainable social change. Relevant here is Karen O’Brien’s (2021) fractal-agency approach, which regards individual and collective agency as self-similar patterns that repeat themselves at various scales, including the scale of the whole. It bears certain resemblance to the holographic reading of agency and power. As such, to the extent that human agency acts on the basis of values that apply to all and inhere in the ‘individual’, its action can go beyond its ‘local’ realm and recursively repeat at all scales to contribute to the eventual transformation of the world. And to the extent that agency and power are scale-free and ultimately arise out of the whole, the ontological foundation of zero-sum competition for power (as if power could be owned ‘locally’) would be weakened, allowing for a quantum holographic ontology that would be more conducive to cooperation in dealing with the myriad challenges facing our common home.

Conclusion

Echoing yet moving beyond Rosenau’s important call for a new ontology for global governance, this article has sketched a quantum holographic approach to ‘global’ challenges and global governance, arguing that current ontological frameworks in the understanding of the subject matter, however intuitively sound, are in large part the very source of the problems which such an understanding aims to address. The world already hangs together holographically as a whole, and the world order is the implicate order of everyone of and with everyone, not the Hobbesian explicate order of ‘every man against every man’. According to quantum game theory (Wendt, 2015: 171–172), to better address the malaise of global governance and facilitate more effective and longer-lasting cooperation, a quantum ontological turn to entanglement, wholeness, and undividedness of the world is called for. Cooperation on the basis of quantum holographic entanglement is more organic and less mechanistic than cooperation on the Newtonian basis of fundamental individual interest.

Still, how to promote organic cooperation is an ongoing daunting challenge in itself, given that the explicate, Newtonian order of apparently separate things has continued to shape our ontological assumptions about the world. It is ironic that the very global dominance of this consciousness of a fragmented world testifies to the fundamental informational entanglement of the world, in which we are never discrete, self-contained atomistic parts, but a kind of Leibnizian monads ‘who mirror the social whole’ (Wendt, 2015: 269). It is just that we happen to mirror the social whole of a Newtonian nature, which is just a particular way of measuring and collapsing the social wave function of our entangled quantum realities. Understood this way, other kinds of measurement, such as the one proposed here, are inherently possible. Much more research needs to be done and many more questions should be asked and answered along the way, to be sure, but such possibility has been observed on smaller scales, such as the emergence of an ‘imagined community’ about the nation-state or a shared religious consciousness about a common God. Consequently, there is no reason, at least in principle, that we cannot cultivate a collective consciousness about the wholeness of the world and its holographic relations with its parts. Both a proper understanding of the nature of ‘global’ challenges and a more adequate response to such challenges in global governance will depend on such a consciousness being enfolded into the ‘parts’ of this fundamentally holographic world. If there is any discipline that should take the lead in nurturing this quantum consciousness of wholeness and exploring its largely untapped potential for empirical research and ethical practice, IR should be it.