From analogy to analysis: The Quantum-Continuity Model and discontinuous change in world politics

Drawing on a limited structural analogy to quantum theory, this article develops a framework for identifying when public interpretation changes the actionable identity of a political occurrence—and the warrants that follow—rather than merely expectations about it. The focus is registration: the public classification, circulation, and uptake through which an occurrence becomes operative under a politically consequential description. The Quantum-Continuity Model (QCM) makes this distinction empirically assessable through three conditions—non-composability, relational necessity, and constitutive affordance—and a two-dimensional distinction between public expectations and institutional settlement. Within the quantum turn in International Relations, the article shifts the question from whether quantum concepts are illuminating in principle to when quantum-informed analysis generates distinctions that established accounts do not independently provide. Contrastive analysis of Tunisia, Gafsa 2008, TuniLeaks, and Bahrain 2011 distinguishes publicity from constitutive change, scalar updating from shifts in political standing, and expectational convergence from institutional closure.