Description
The utility of quantum ontologies to international relations has been a recent point of contention. A critique of the prospect of a ‘quantum international relations’ is that the so-called ‘quantum turn’ offers nothing new: its claims to novelty are redundant, predicated on an unhelpful science fetishism and an ignorance of both post-structural and critical theory. In this paper I argue that a unique utility of quantum ontologies pertains to the problem of epistemic injustice. I posit that epistemic injustice – the evaluation of someone’s knowledge as less legitimate than someone else’s as a result of identity prejudice or, more pertinently, a lack of the necessary epistemic tools – often has its roots in a limited scientific understanding of the world based in classical physics. In short, religious and Indigenous knowledge-systems are often unjustly, and perhaps unconsciously, dismissed as ‘backwards’ or ‘unscientific’. Quantum ontologies offer the antidote to those whose minds are closed to religious and Indigenous knowledge-systems, and to the role played by creativity and intuition in knowledge-production. By putting the literature on epistemic injustice into dialogue with that of quantum social theory, I point in the direction of a more inclusive international relations.
