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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.

This forum addresses Laura Zanotti's Ontological Entanglements, Agency, and Ethics in International Relations: Exploring the Crossroads, a landmark work for quantum International Relations (IR) that seeks to demonstrate the critical purchase of quantum thinking for exploring novel worldview. Interveners question the value added by the quantum turn in IR theory, both as it related to critical and broader debates. Zanotti's particular intervention – drawing on a wide variety of themes in social theory, peace studies, feminist theory, metatheoretical debates in IR, international organisations, international development, and beyond – is approaches from the perspective of feminist theory, affect theory, temporality, philosophy of social science, and critical theory. In the spirit of exploring the crossroads, this forum brings together different lines of thinking that intersect through Ontological Entanglements but also extend onward, opening provocative questions for future scholarship in critical quantum IR.

Emergent forms of political protest and constitution often provide limit cases for their contemporary theoretical models, and transnational protest movements from Occupy to Democracy in Europe 2025 are no exception. The recent special issue of the Journal of International Political Theory offers a number of different conceptual paths towards understanding these developments, revising and refreshing categories like civil disobedience, opposition, resistance, as well as constituent and destituent power. However, the plurality of perspectives in the special issue leads to a certain degree of uncertainty in the use of terms. This response to the special issue begins with a reflection on its major conceptual developments, addresses the missed encounter with Giorgio Agamben's theory of 'destituent potential' and develops a framework for contrasting different theoretical approaches to political protest and constitution through their relation to potentiality. This taxonomy of emergent forms of political protest and constitution complements the substantial theoretical developments undertaken in the special issue by making the important conceptual relationships between them more readily visible. As well, by demonstrating the applicability of potentiality to the study of International Relations, this framework contributes to the project of the theoretical investigation of international politics.

Over the past two decades, securitization theory has developed into a robust literature of cases and critiques. The vast majority of the attention paid to securitization has been to the securitizing actor and the referent object, leaving the audience – the body that determines the fate of a securitizing move by accepting or rejecting the securitizing actor's request – undertheorized. The audience is presented as a problematic contradiction, because as a collectivity called by the securitizing actor it appears to be a passive body, critiqued thereby as potentially irrelevant. On the other hand, both the original Copenhagen school formulation of securitization theory and many of its current theorists reaffirm the agency of the audience to actively determine the success or failure of the securitizing move. This article turns to political theology for guidance, and explains the contradiction of the passive/active audience through homology to the ekklesia and the acclamation of 'amen' in liturgical doxology. The fact that the congregation is passive recipient of a call does not negate the essential and substantial role that it must actively play, just as the contradiction of the passive/active description of the securitization audience is not a problem of illogic, but a paraconsistent truth.