Peace, politics, and prudence
Last week's conversation with political scientist Laura Zanotti was about ethics and agency. She reminds us of the dangers of abstraction and the importance of putting ethics into practice.
The road not taken
Peace on Earth. That was my passion, and it’s why I studied international relations as an undergraduate. I wanted to be a diplomat and contribute to global cooperation and collaboration. While waiting for a security clearance, I took a job at The National Geographic Society and became fascinated with environmental issues—something I knew little about. That led me to graduate school, and eventually to becoming a geographer.
Sometimes I think about “the road not taken,” and wonder where it might have led. Would I have come across James Der Derian and Alexander Wendt’s edited book, Quantum International Relations: A Human Science for World Politics? Would I have met Laura Zanotti?
Ethics and Agency
Laura Zanotti is a political scientist at Virginia Tech University, and previously worked with peacekeeping in the United Nations. Her work explores how a radically different cosmology can inspire us to see new possibilities for the world, including through the lens of quantum social science. For example, in her chapter on “The Moral Failure of the Quest for Certainty” in Der Derian and Wendt’s book, she challenges the deterministic outlook associated with a classical, Newtonian paradigm:
What if, instead of imagining the universe as the manifestation of a master plan already written, we think of the universe as unfolding and of ourselves as responsible for the cascade effects we produce in the context of the possibilities that are available for us as finite human beings.
This has practical implications for ethics. Rather than treating ethics and values as abstractions, she emphasizes the need for an intra-agential ethos—one rooted in contextual assessments and in our shared humanity. This approach assumes radical responsibility for the effects of our actions.
Laura discusses how making a firm philosophical distinction between the material and the ideal has led to political failures, often termed “unintended consequences” or “collateral damage.” As she pointed out in our conversation, “bombs don’t bring about democracy.”
Our conversation
It was wonderful to have a conversation with Laura Zanotti about why abstract principles are not enough to justify actions in the world, as well as on the dangers of our failure to reflect on our reasons for failure.
I asked her whether she gets pushback from other political scientists on her quantum work. It was refreshing to hear that quantum international relations is now a “niche” community in the United States, opening space for people to think differently about ethics, responsibility, and power. From a quantum perspective, an ethical path to peace is through prudence—in other words, practical wisdom in action.
Laura sees quantum ways of thinking as compatible with, and resonant with diverse ways of knowing and relating to nature. It decenters the claim to the uniqueness of Western science and opens space for considering and connecting with other epistemologies.
I hope you enjoy the conversation!
[M]icropolitical interventions, while not revolutionizing the status quo, may be relevant to trigger desirable, and maybe unexpected changes.
— Laura Zanotti
Postscript: Over the past few months, I’ve been reflecting on the diplomatic career I didn’t pursue. Last week, I picked up an old novel at a flea market — The Ugly American by William Lederer and Eugene Burdick. This fictionalized account of American diplomacy in Asia, published in 1958, offers a sharp critique of how international relations have been conducted and makes a compelling case for linking foreign policy to ethical actions on the ground — exactly what Laura Zanotti speaks to.
The book argues that “grand patterns are no more than the sum of their tiniest parts,” a perspective that helped inspire the creation of the Peace Corps. In a quantum world, where the tiniest parts are entangled, our ideas and actions can have nonlocal and nonlinear effects. We can contribute to diplomacy and world peace in many ways — not least through ethical actions.
Image: Shutterstock
Karen, This post and the recorded conversation are such a thrill for me. A real boon. Yesterday I spent the day reading Professor Zanotti's journal articles, "Ethics in a Quantum World" and "Cosmologies, coloniality and quantum Critique: Exploring conversations with Native American ways of knowing." I feel like there has been this confluence in my reading (trying to make sense of what is happening in the US and parts of Europe in the move away from the "liberal order" at a time of poly-crisis) and your and others' work cultivating this emergence of Quantum Social Theory..it feels like a very magical entanglement at the personal level.
It struck me during your discussion about what is happening in the US that is is possible to posit that the building and spreading resistance in the US across all the states, involving both parties and independents, and engaging citizens of different socio-economic backgrounds/realities, of various ages, IS a manifestation of quantum entanglement as one would expect if one believes that this ontology rather than the linear, distinct particles theory of knowledge, power, and, material relations. Of course, the Trump Regime is using the latter story to justify its overreach and, unfortunately, this is the paradigm that we in 'the West' have all been weened on. Yep, we can never loose sight of the importance of story/narrative to us humans...
Now living in Sweden, I am an expat US lawyer (civil rights and habeas) and did work on a masters in International Human Rights in 2010-11. I wrote my thesis on the US/Int'l Human Rights dynamic exploring a theory that the American population never experienced/embraced the abstract principals of the UN economic, social and cultural HR instruments in their 'hearts and minds'; the FDR/Eleanor Roosevelt, Francis Perkins' vision of the freedom from want-line of ESC rights never took root in the "small places" (a famous articulation by E. Roosevelt) of the American experience. At that time in this field (at least vis-a-vis my Oxford cohort), the closest source to suggesting QST that I came across was the then somewhat controversial theory of Christof Heyns who explored "A 'Struggle Approach' to Human Rights" stemming from his work in South Africa. He argued along the line that the contours of rights can/should arise out of the struggle of citizens to achieve them rather than delimited by the four corners of instruments drafted in the UN by professionals and politicians. Professor Zanotti's experience was with the peacekeeping rather than the UNHCR 'apparatus of the UN but the underlying Kantian-principles-over-intermeshed-particulars problem are the same to my mind.
Forgive me for the length of this comment. I just wanted to explain the background to my enthusiasm for this work and your Substack offerings. I just ordered your book, Zanotti's book, and Barad's and Wendt's too ...so I will be busy. Tusen Tack!