In order to celebrate having produced over one hundred episodes of the Thinking Global podcast, this week Professor Alexander Wendt chats with Kieran (@kieranjomeara) and Daniel Drury about the ontological security threat to the state and the state system posed by Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs), his career trajectory, writing his award winning books, international relations theory and so much more.
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Alexander Wendt is Mershon Professor of International Security and Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University. Wendt is interested in philosophical aspects of social science, with special reference to international relations. He is most well-known for his work on constructivism in world politics, including Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1999), which received the International Studies Association’s “Best Book of the Decade” award in 2006. In 2017 Wendt was named the most influential scholar in International Relations over the past 20 years in a TRIP survey of 1400 IR faculty. And in 2023, for their contributions to constructivism Wendt and Martha Finnemore were awarded the prestigious Skytte Prize in Political Science. In his more recent work, Quantum Mind and Social Science (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and beyond, Wendt explores some implications for social science of the finding that the Kahneman-Tversky anomalies in rational decision-making can all be resolved if quantum theory is used as a baseline rather than an expected-utility model based on classical probability theory. If the human mind is actually a quantum phenomenon, that could revolutionize today’s classical social sciences in the same way that quantum theory did physics in the 1920s. Taking a short break from quantum, Wendt’s most recent book The Last Humans (Oxford University Press, 2026) explores Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs) and human security, in light of the 2021 Pentagon Report confirming that UAP (formerly “UFOs”) are real and a “potential threat to national security.”
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