Quantum Mechanisms: Expanding the Boundaries of Power, Space, and Time in Global Security Studies

Abstract

This inaugural issue of the Journal of Global Security Studies stakes out important new frontiers in security studies, pushing the boundaries of the possible in power politics (Goddard and Nexon), space (Adamson), and time (Ward). Goddard and Nexon attempt to wrest global security studies away from the traditional international relations (IR) perspective of states as primary actors acting within the structure of anarchy; Adamson calls for a “spatial turn” in IR, drawing attention to geographies that challenge the dominant conception of the world as a set of territorially defined entities; and Ward challenges the field to move beyond description and prescription. They offer a broad pluralistic view that focuses attention on collective mobilization processes rather than covering laws, erases boundaries between states, and promotes prediction as a goal for theories. However, expanding the boundaries of power, space, and time in global security studies cannot be fully realized within traditional IR philosophies of science. To reap these benefits requires a rejection of the traditional neo-Newtonian view of mechanisms in favor of a quantum mechanical perspective. Ward begins with a discussion of the Antikythera Mechanism, constructed to predict future events based on the Ancient Greek (pre-Keplerian) understanding of the motion of celestial bodies. The use of this (literal) mechanism as a starting place for discussing predictions in political science is quite apt, in that social science is still stuck with a neo-Newtonian conception of mechanisms for both prediction and explanation. Jon Elster aptly describes this orthodoxy in this paean to methodological individualism: “To explain is to provide a mechanism , to open up the black box and show the nuts and bolts, the cogs and wheels, the desires and beliefs that generate the aggregate outcomes” (emphasis in original; Elster 1985, 5). For Elster, as for many in social science, mechanisms are …