ABSTRACT
Keywords: dialectic, foreign policy analysis, general IR theory, Marxism, Political Marxism, Historical Sociology of International Relations
1. Introduction: From Dialectics to Foreign Policy Analysis
Dialectical thinking entered International Relations (IR) in the context of the rise of the post-
positivist debate from the 1980s onwards (Alker, 1996; Alker & Bierstecker, 1984; Ashley,
1984; Brincat, 2009, 2011; Heine & Teschke, 1996, 1997, 2002; Krombach, 1997; Patoma¨ki,
1992; Roach, 2007).1 Responding to calls for greater degrees of theoretical self-reflexivity in
an intellectual field still restricted by an uneasy alliance between the accumulation of practical
knowledge and its positivistic formalisation into generalising statements, dialectics was intro-
duced as an alternative meta-theoretical resource concerned with the construction, nature, and
status of scientific knowledge-an epistemological tradition within the philosophy of science
and the wider social sciences. Reflexivity meant not simply thinking with a theory, but rather
thinking about the nature of theory. This implied the exposition of meta-theoretical principles
that inform a particular theoretical tradition (epistemology), the explication of the substantive
premises that these traditions hold about the social world (ontology), and the specification of
research methods, which connect these premises to the empirical in non-randomised ways-
the practice of research (methodology).
