A central concept in Global International Relations (IR) is 'global' or 'globality,' which has been commonly understood as the sum total of all geo-cultural parts of the world. This understanding underpins Global IR's efforts to make IR more geo-epistemologically representative and inclusive, but it has been criticized for its essentialism trap and geo-epistemology. While many critics problematize Global IR's conception of globality, few pay attention to an alternative form of existence of globality, namely, its embodiment within each of the 'geo-cultural' parts. This article aims to engage with this form of globality by drawing on the conceptual framework of quantum holography, which sees the whole as not just comprising its parts but also being encoded within them. The implications are that if global-local relationality is holographic in nature, globalizing IR should entail not only externally expanding IR's geo-epistemological horizon but also discovering and appreciating the globality that always already exists within each locale. Thus, this approach may help us tackle the stubborn binary of global vs. local/national in the Global IR debate and mitigate its essentialism trap and geo-epistemology. To illustrate, we apply this framework to problematize 'Chineseness' in the Chinese School of IR theory.

About 25 years ago, James Rosenau called for a new ontology for global governance; 25 years on, this call remains relevant, because one of the main sources of many ‘global’ challenges (and their potential solutions) ultimately lies in the way we think, at the core of which is ontology or the fundamental assumption about reality. As the Newtonian atomistic ontology of independent things continues to dominate the theory and practice of global governance, this article proposes quantum holography as an alternative ontological framework. Treating parts as embodying the whole and lacking their own separate status, quantum holography draws on the radical ontology of quantum holism to dissolve the boundaries between matter and meaning, nature and human, whole and part, global and local/national. The article argues that to better understand and more effectively deal with the many challenges of the complex and volatile world, fostering a quantum holographic consciousness is essential.

Once considered a bunch of "small islands in a far sea" by outside powers, the South Pacific now looms increasingly large on the global geopolitical landscape, attracting the strategic attention of an array of great powers. This has prompted many scholars and commentators to focus on the rise of great power rivalry in the region. Yet, with few exceptions, the existing literature has paid little attention to how the regional dynamics are framed by the dominant narrative of great power politics in the first place and how as a result it has failed to adequately consider alternative voices, concerns and narratives from within the region. This Special Issue aims to tentatively address this neglect by questioning the unreflective narration of regional power dynamics as mere "great power politics" and by highlighting the competing narratives about this region and their policy implications for conducting relations between the South Pacific and "outside powers". In doing so, it seeks to provide a new critical and self-reflective angle for the debate on the South Pacific. This article first examines the extent to which "great power politics" reflects the reality of the power dynamics in the South Pacific. It then explains why it is important to focus on the theme of narratives and to understand their socially constitutive role in producing knowledge and shaping reality. The third section briefly introduces the five articles in this Issue and outlines their contributions.

Many Western countries, the perceived 'zone of security' in world politics, have failed miserably in their COVID-19 responses. This 'COVID-19 Westfailure', this piece argues, has in large part to do, rather ironically, with the very Western knowledge and practice of dividing the world into zones of security and insecurity along some (often imagined) global colour lines. The racialised politics of (in)security contributes to the COVID-19 Westfailure on three levels. On the ontological level, it mistakes racialised Others for the source of a fundamentally non-racial and transnational threat. Methodologically, its adoption of often racist half-measures has proven largely ineffective. Epistemologically, epistemic racism fails to learn valuable lessons and experiences from its Others who are routinely viewed as civilisationally and scientifically inferior and backward. The pandemic, neither recognising nor operating along colour lines, has laid bare the limits and fallacies of Western racialised knowledge and practice of security.

The chapter argues that adopting a development-based approach to North Korean human rights may provide a more realistic, though not exclusive, much less perfect, path towards human rights improvement in North Korea. It engages with this approach both in terms of its increasing salience within Chinese discourses and from a perspective informed by practice theory in international relations. To illustrate this, the chapter uses Chinese practice as an empirical case study of how a development-based approach helps partly address human rights challenges. By pointing to China as an example, this chapter does not intend to spruik China's human rights achievements per se or assess the overall human rights situations in China. Much rather, it seeks to demonstrate how a development-based approach may effect positive changes in some key aspects of human rights over time. The development-focused approach certainly has not and cannot solve all, even most, of China's human rights problems. Nonetheless, it cannot be denied that in some important aspects, human rights have seen improvement as a result of the focus on development. In this case, it is logical to examine whether a similar development-based approach should be brought to bear on the human rights challenge in North Korea.

The relational turn in International Relations (IR) has made important contributions by challenging the substantialist claim to substance/thing as ontological primitives, by drawing much-needed attention to relations as ontologically fundamental, and by introducing a diversity of relational ways of being/becoming, knowing and doing. Yet, while rightly repudiating substantialism, the relational turn has remained ambivalent about the concept of substance itself, leaving open an important question: How should we understand substance within a relational ontology? As a result, we are left with different and sometimes confusing positions on the issue of substances vis-à-vis relations. Seeing this gap as a missed opportunity for relationalism in IR, this article seeks to bring substance back in without falling back into substantialism. It draws on a quantum conception of substance via the idea of quantum holography (QH) and its related notion of whole-part duality, and stresses the little-understood dual and inseparable nature of substance-relation (‘relatance’). The concept of substance-relation duality not only enriches our relational thinking, but also allows us to engage in relational analysis through a reimagined notion of substance. To illustrate, the article turns to a substance-based relational analysis of US-China relations.

One of the mysteries in contemporary world politics is why in recent years Australia has been leading the world in its hawkish approach to China, its largest trading partner. More than most of its allies, the Australian government seems to regard the China emergency — fuelled by threat perceptions ranging from foreign influence operations to economic coercion — as more pressing than, say, climate change. This article extends and supplants existing explanations of this puzzle by providing a more theoretically oriented account. Situating Australia's China emergency in the context of its ontological (in)security, this article traces the rise of such insecurities and Australia's responses through the conceptual frameworks of state transformation and neoliberal governmentality, which together offer a more socially and historically grounded account of the dynamics of ontological (in)security. The article argues that the China emergency narrative, as a specific routinised form of neoliberal governmentality, both helps sustain Australia's dominant identity construction as a free, democratic, and resilient state, and provides a raison d'être for the national security state that has become part and parcel of the evolving techniques of neoliberal governmentality.

That the news media should operate as an impartial and responsible "fourth estate" in a democracy is a pervasive ideal, but there are serious obstacles - economic, organizational and political - to its achievement in practice. These obstacles, we argue, may be lower when an outlet reports on politics in another country, which is strategically allied to its own. And, for this reason, the quality of news coverage of that country's politics may be higher in the reporting by foreign media outlets than in the reporting by domestic outlets. This article outlines the theory behind this conjecture and then examines it empirically through a content analysis of media representations of Donald Trump's rise in two non-American outlets,The AustralianandThe Guardian. Their coverage, our analysis suggests, approximated fourth-estate ideals more closely than did the domestic coverage of Trump's rise.

The relationship between Chinese soft power and Chinese media has been a focus of a growing body of literature. Challenging a resource-based conception of soft power and a transmission view of communication that inform much of the debate, this article adopts a discursive approach to soft power and media communication. It argues that their relationship is not just a matter of resource transmission, but one of discursive construction, which begs the questions of what mediated discursive practices are at play in soft power construction and how. Addressing these oft-neglected questions, we identify a typology of three soft-power discursive practices: charm offensive, Othering offensive, and defensive denial. Focusing on the little-understood practice of Othering offensive, we illustrate its presence in Chinese media through a critical discourse analysis of China Daily’s framing of Donald Trump and the United States, and argue that the Othering offensive in Chinese media that portrays Trump’s America as a dysfunctional and declining Other serves to construct a Chinese self as more responsible, dynamic, and attractive. Adding a missing discursive dimension to the study of soft power and the media, this study has both scholarly and practical implications for analysing a nation’s soft power strategy.

This article stands at the intersection between the relational turn in International Relations (IR) and the quantum turn in the social sciences (and more recently in IR as well). The relational turn draws much-needed attention to the centrality of relations in global politics, yet its imprecise conceptualization of whole-part relations casts shadow over its relational ontological foundation. The quantum turn, meanwhile, challenges the observed–observer dichotomy as well as the classical views about causality, determinacy, and measurement. Yet, despite their common stance against the Newtonian ontology, the relational and quantum turns have largely neglected each other at least in the IR context. This article aims to bridge this gap by introducing a quantum holographic approach to relationality. Drawing on theoretical physicist David Bohm’s work on quantum theory and his key concepts about wholeness and the implicate order, the article argues that the world is being holographically (trans)formed: its parts are not only parts of the whole, but also enfold the whole, like in a hologram. This quantum holographic ontology contributes to both a clearer differentiation between internal/implicate relations and external/explicate relations and a renewed emphasis on wholeness and whole-part duality. In doing so, it not only provides new conceptual tools to rethink IR as holographic relations which involve the dynamic processes and mechanisms of enfoldment and unfoldment, but also has important policy and ethical implications for the conduct of “foreign” relations and for transforming the way we think about identity, survival, relationship, and responsibility.

Liberal democracies often include rights of participation, guarantees of protection, and policies that privilege model citizens within a bounded territory. Notwithstanding claims of universal equality for “humanity,” they achieve these goals by epistemically elevating certain traits of identity above “others,” sustaining colonial biases that continue to favor whoever is regarded more “human.” The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated these fault lines, unveiling once more the often-hidden prevalence of inequalities that are based on race, gender, class, ethnicity, and other axes of power and their overlaps. Decolonial theories and practices analyze these othering tendencies and inequalities while also highlighting how sites of suffering sometimes become locations of solidarity and agency, which uncover often-erased alternatives and lessons.