Dialectics in World Politics

This volume provides a critical resource for those deploying dialectics in their own research by showcasing its effectiveness for understanding and transforming world politics. Chapters show how dialectical thinking can benefit politics studies, including conceptual or meta-theoretical dimensions of dialectics; methodological features and general principles of dialectical approaches; and applications that deploy a dialectical approach to global politics. The book analyses the social forces and contradictions involved in the transformation of world politics, yet routinely downplayed in orthodox views on international relations. This book was published as a special issue of Globalizations.

This volume explores the conceptual, methodological and praxeological aspects of dialectical analysis in world politics. As dialectics has remained an under-theorised analytical tool in international relations, this volume provides a critical resource for those seeking to deploy dialectics in their own research by showcasing its effectiveness for understanding and transforming world politics. Contributions demonstrate a number of innovative ways in which dialectical thinking can be of benefit to the study of world politics by covering three thematic concerns: (i) conceptual or meta-theoretical dimensions of dialectics; (ii) methodological features and general principles of dialectical approaches; and (iii) applications and/or case studies that deploy a dialectical approach to world politics. Canvassing a diverse range of dialectical approaches on key issues in world politics – from global security to postcolonial resistances, from the theoretical problems of reification and complexity, to the study of the global futures and the intercultural historical expressions of dialectics – Dialectics and World Politics offers key insights into the social forces and contradictions that are generative of transformation in world politics and yet routinely downplayed in orthodox approaches to international relations. Each chapter demonstrates how dialectics can be utilized more broadly in the discipline and deployed in a critical fashion as part of an emancipatory project.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Globalizations.