Anything quantum can spark curiosity, confusion, or both, and even incredulity, especially when the term ‘quantum’ is bandied about outside of physics. To link quantum holography (QH) to international relations (IR) is, therefore, almost certain to raise eyebrows. The word ‘holography’ – often associated with the projection of a floating 3D image in entertainment or displays – can add further mystery to an already enigmatic subject.
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While this impression of holography (in one of its practical applications) is not wrong, it isn’t what QH is primarily about in quantum social (and IR) theory (Pan 2025b). Here, holography refers to a particular, counterintuitive notion of relationality between whole and part: the whole is not only constituted by parts, but ‘contained’ within them (Pan 2020). This form of relationality is evident in a hologram, a type of silvery or metallic sticker commonly found on modern bank notes, passports, and ID cards. Unlike traditionally printed pictures, a small fragment of a hologram retains the whole picture of the original. This is the thrust of QH: every part holographically encodes the whole, albeit not perfectly. Not arguing literally that a grain of sand contains the entire world, QH is best seen as a way of thinking and doing, which sees and values the centrality of the whole to the emergence of its parts.
Long aware of the Chinese term for holography (quanxi, 全息, or whole information), I didn’t see its IR significance until I had to grapple with a lingering question left from my book (Pan 2012). Mainly about how not to understand China’s rise, the book deconstructs Western discourses of China’s rise as ‘opportunity’ and ‘threat’, but it otherwise says little about what China is. That was partly a matter of focus, and partly because I didn’t have a satisfactory answer to it, until around late 2016 when I was visiting Peking University on an Australian government fellowship. One day, as I stared through the hotel window, I stumbled upon an idea, somehow aided by my background knowledge of quanxi: didn’t Beijing look like a small version of China (with people speaking different accents, restaurants offering food from all over the country, and so on)? Then what about China itself? Wasn’t it a microcosm of the world?
These hunches led me to Alexander Wendt’s then new book Quantum Mind and Social Science, where he draws the analogy of holographic projection to conceptualize a participatory part-whole relationship: ‘the whole is present in the parts’ (Wendt 2015, 229, emphasis in original). He sees the state as such a whole: while largely invisible, it is enfolded holographically within the minds and practices of its parts (e.g., citizens) (ibid., 273). Another important source is quantum physicist David Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order, in which he uses the hologram analogy to illustrate undivided wholeness that is implicated in parts. These eye-opening insights, and the emergence of a quantum IR community (Der Derian and Wendt 2022), have since provided me with the impetus and intellectual space to work on this QH approach.
Already informing research in physics, philosophy of science, cognitive science and neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and consciousness studies, QH can be seen as a particular interpretation of quantum holism. While conventional holism focuses on what the whole is (e.g., more than the sum of its parts), this approach goes one step further by theorizing what a part is: it is both part and whole. To me, the idea of part-whole duality (contra Cartesian either/or dualism) offers a fresh perspective on the China puzzle: obviously a part of the world, China at the same time encodes that world (whole). Its rise or re-emergence is essentially a process of holographic transition (Pan 2018): by taking in the world economically, technologically, culturally, normatively, and institutionally, it has itself been profoundly transformed. In this context, what China is can be understood through its ongoing holographic entanglement with the world.
QH isn’t a China-specific phenomenon. Wherever there are wholes and parts, there exists holographic relationality. When other states, actors, and contexts are viewed through the same lens, international relations look more like a hologram than mainstream IR’s imagery of billiard-ball-like states in a state of nature or anarchy. While mainstream IR is mostly concerned with external relations between states (and non-state actors), the holographic interpretation exposes states (and other actors) as constituted fundamentally by holistic relations embedded within them. This means that before interacting with each other, states are already inherently intra-connected (to echo Karen Barad’s intra-action concept, see Barad 2007) through their shared wholes.
The two types of relations correspond respectively to two different yet inseparable orders: explicate and implicate (Bohm 1980). External relations (such as state visits, trade, interdependence, military alliance, and war) belong to the familiar explicate order of discrete and independent things as observed by classical or Newtonian physics. Mainstream IR, schooled in the Newtonian ontology of things, deals with the world primarily in its explicate-order manifestation, aka the Hobbesian state of nature. Interestingly, Thomas Hobbes explains the state of nature in terms of a mushroom analogy, treating men ‘as if they had just emerged from the earth like mushrooms and grown up without any obligation to each other’ (quoted in Temby 2015, 729).
To continue this metaphor, however, mushrooms are not separate entities at all, but entangled together by the vast networks of mycelium deep underground, which in turn are connected with the wider ecosystem. Such an implicate order, not captured by Hobbes’s mushroom metaphor, is seen by Bohm (1980) as reflecting deeper, underlying quantum reality; the explicate order results from the unfoldment of the implicate order into individual entities, like mushrooms popping up from the subterranean mycelium networks. While certain quantum phenomena do not scale up to the macroscopic world, Bohm and Hiley (1993, 354) argue that the enfoldment and unfoldment processes that continuously weave the explicate and implicate orders together run through both quantum mechanics and ‘ordinary experience’.
IR (and indeed social sciences more broadly) could benefit from this QH way of thinking and doing. Human beings and states are like mushrooms not only above the ground, but also below it as complete fungal organisms. ‘To know what a man is’, according to F. H. Bradley, ‘you must not take him in isolation. He is one of a people, he was born in a family, he lives in a certain society, in a certain state…. The mere individual is a delusion of theory’ (quoted in Pettit 1996, 168). Sovereign states, which are often modeled on individual personhood, are similarly a theoretical reification which misses the implicate-order dimension of states. Since the Newtonian or Hobbesian ontological understanding of the state is incomplete, its associated key IR concepts such as national identity, national interest, national security, and state power need to be rethought. What is ‘national’ is in fact always entangled with the ‘global’.
Recognizing national-global (or part-whole) duality is a critical first step to overcoming the collective action problem in global governance. While each state does have its ‘local’ interest, such self-interests are, like mushrooms, the visible fruiting bodies of larger common wholes: the global economy, global health systems, world peace, international normative structures, the planetary ecosystem, and so forth. When the wellbeing of such wholes is under stress – as exemplified by global financial crises, the COVID-19 pandemic, the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, rapid AI disruption, and the myriad climate catastrophes – the interest and security of each part are almost certain to be negatively affected. Viewed from a QH perspective, such crises can be opportunities for the ‘parts’ to respond collectively and cooperatively to the common challenges. These challenges are not susceptible to populist policies such as border closures and economic decoupling, policies rooted in a classical worldview of fundamental separation.
QH speaks to both the quantum and relational turns in IR, serving as a bridge between them. Drawn from Bohm’s philosophical thought on the quantum order, it identifies a specific form of relationality largely overlooked in the vibrant relational-turn scholarship. One advantage of QH is that it helps dissolve the stubborn relation-substance binary in IR theorizing (Pan 2021). The ‘quantum’ in QH aims not to simply imitate or privilege quantum physics as the authoritative way of knowing in a new bout of physics envy, but to acknowledge an important intellectual context of this idea. Quantum physics itself is indeed a holographic product that has drawn inspiration from the whole edifice of human knowledge, ‘Eastern’ philosophies included.
Like most quantum-inspired approaches in IR and social sciences, QH remains a work-in-progress. Facing possible pushback from the longstanding suspicion of totalizing thought, it should outline a working and contextualized definition of what the whole looks like, and demonstrate its broader application and empirical operationalization in IR. Yet, its relevance to issues such as China’s rise, US-China relations, global governance, and Global IR knowledge production has already been tentatively explored (Pan 2018, 2021, 2025a; Pan and Zhao 2025; Pan and Chen 2026). Insofar as part-whole relationships are ubiquitous in world politics and central to peace and development, the promise of this unconventional approach may deserve more critical curiosity.
References
Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bohm, David. 1980. Wholeness and the Implicate Order. New York: Routledge.
Bohm, David, and B. J. Hiley. 1993. The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory. London: Routledge.
Der Derian, James, and Alexander Wendt eds. 2022. Quantum International Relations: A Human Science for World Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pan, Chengxin. 2012. Knowledge, Desire and Power in Global Politics: Western Representations of China’s Rise. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Pan, Chengxin. 2018. “Toward a New Relational Ontology in Global Politics: China’s Rise as Holographic Transition.” International Relations of the Asia-Pacific 18(3): 339–367.
Pan, Chengxin. 2020. “Enfolding Wholes in Parts: Quantum Holography and International Relations.” European Journal of International Relations 26 (1 suppl.): 14–38.
Pan, Chengxin. 2021. “Reclaiming Substances in Relationalism: Quantum Holography and Substance-Based Relational Analysis in World Politics.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 49 (3): 577–603.
Pan, Chengxin. 2025a. “Rethinking Challenges of a Holographic World: Towards a Quantum Ontology for Global Governance.” The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 27 (2): 529–41.
Pan, Chengxin. 2025b. “Quantum Theory.” In Beate Jahn and Sebastian Schindler eds., Elgar Encyclopedia of International Relations, Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, pp. 330-331.
Pan, Chengxin, and Wanyi Zhao. 2025. “The China Challenge: A Holographic Global China Perspective.” In Maximilian Mayer, Emilian Kavalski, Marina Rudyak, Xin Zhang eds., Routledge Handbook on Global China, London: Routledge, pp. 94–104.
Pan, Chengxin, and Nahui Chen. 2026. “Globalizing International Relations from Within: Discovering Globality in Chineseness in Chinese IR Theory.” International Theory (First View: https://doi.org/10.1017/S175297192510016X)
Pettit, Philip. 1996. The Common Mind: An Essay on Psychology, Society, and Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Temby, Owen (2015) “What Are Levels of Analysis and What Do They Contribute to International Relations Theory?” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 28(4): 721–742.
Wendt, Alexander. 2015. Quantum Mind and Social Science: Unifying Physical and Social Ontology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chengxin Pan is Associate Professor of Political Science in the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Macau. His current research interests are in quantum social theory and its relevance to international relations and China’s international relations in particular. His articles have appeared in Australian Journal of International Affairs, The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, European Journal of International Relations, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, International Theory, Journal of Contemporary China, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, The Pacific Review, Politics, and Review of International Studies, among others.
Acknowledgements: I thank Wei Pan, Kaian Lam, Di Wu, Xi Yuan, and Wanyi Zhao for their constructive comments on earlier versions of this article. The usual disclaimer applies.
Editorial Credit: Qi Zhang