Violent Interference: Structural Violence, Quantum International Relations, and the Ethics of Entanglement
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Despite frequent reference in both academic and activist contexts, the concept of structural violence still poses a challenge for many ontological, epistemological, and political perspectives. While the ethical stakes of physical violence are generally accessible, conceptual barriers limit the ability to explore the important ethical dimensions of structural violence. Inspired by recent interventions into “quantum international relations,” I argue that the difficulty of understanding structural violence is because conventional social science abides a Newtonian physical imaginary. Drawing on Karen Barad's philosophical methodology of “diffractive reading,” I re-read Johan Galtung's landmark article Violence, Peace, and Peace Research through a critical quantum social–theoretic lens. Identifying key quantum-like elements of Galtung's theory of structural violence allows for a process of “quantizing by translation,” where quantum-like concepts are freed from the constraints of Newtonian social science. By approaching structural violence as a quantum-like social phenomenon, homologous to the concept of destructive interference, we gain an important conceptual model. In instances of structural violence, entangled social wavefunctions of social structures interfere destructively with constituent individuals and groups by limiting the spectrum of future potentialities. Conversely, structural privilege describes the constructive interference of those same social structures extending the spectrum of future potentialities for other constituent individuals and groups. To account for multiple and intersecting elements of identity and social standing, intersectional accounts of structural violence recognize the complex interaction of constructive and destructive interferences at play in delimiting spectra of future potentialities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".