New Article by DGPA Professor Chengxin Pan Published in a Well-Known Academic Journal

Department of Government and Public Administration Associate Professor Chengxin Pan’s new article, entitled “Rethinking challenges of a holographic world: Towards a quantum ontology for global governance”, was recently published in The British Journal of Politics and International Relations (2024 World of Science SSCI Q2 in Political Science, 5-Year Impact Factor: 2.5). Below is a brief summary of the main points of this article:

Despite impressive progress in global governance theory and practice over the decades, there has been the ever-presence and, indeed, proliferation of global challenges of increasing magnitude, gravity and intractability. In light of this puzzle, this article agrees withJames Rosenau that an ontological shift is needed for better global governance. However, it argues that Rosenau’s important ontological intervention doesn’t go far enough because, ultimately, the Newtonian atomistic ontology has been left largely intact. There is still a widely-shared and little-questioned assumption of the world as being made up of individual, atom-like actors (at various levels and with various complexities). Such an assumption may allow pragmatic cooperation among those actors, especially when dealing with challenges is understood to be beyond their separate capacity, but otherwise the illusion of individual interest and identity continues, which sets ultimate limits on the understanding of the nature of “global” challenges and on how such challenges can be tackled.

To challenge the Newtonian ontology that still dominates our conceptions of international relations in general and global challenges in particular, this article turns to the idea of quantum holography (QH) for a new ontological base for global governance. Quantum entanglement and quantum field theory imply that particles are entangled with their whole(s). 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.

In quantum holism, a part is thus an emergent embodiment of the whole, just as a smaller piece of a hologram contains the whole information of that hologram. This holographic ontological shift has important implications for global governance and IR more broadly. Among other things, it means that “global” challenges are never just out there, but found inside each part of the world. Equally, problems found in a part of the world are likely reflections of problems on a greater scale, thus demanding “wholistic” attention & response. By helping dissolve the dichotomy between “individual” and “collective”, “part” and “whole”, “human” and “nature”, this ontology may point to a way forward for thinking about and doing global governance.