ABSTRACT
As intimated earlier, it was Lenin who was arguably the first to offer a dialectical account of
subject matter directly related to the concerns of IR ‘proper’ (this is not, however, to deliberately
overlook the internationalist content of older forms of radical socialist thought). Lenin (1950)
offered both an explanation for international war through capitalist expansion and a new form
of capitalist expropriation that linked finance capital to colonialism. Trotsky’s analysis of
uneven and combined development-how states developed independently, in ways that are
quantitatively unequal and qualitatively different, and yet in relation to each other-was also
instrumental in grounding a theory of IR and International Political Economy that were
openly dialectical (see Trotsky, 1931). Lenin and Trotsky demonstrated the keen potential for
a dialectical analysis of global social forces that combined economic, imperialist, colonial,
and state processes. Both works, though particularly Lenin’s, were deeply influential in the
development of World-Systems and, in turn, Dependency Theory, not only methodologically,
but also in the construction of analytic concepts such as the Core-Periphery, and their approaches
to global social contradictions through long-term historical processes and geographical regions.
Drawing from these roots, dialectics has since had various interpretations in postcolonial politi-
cal thought, with Fanon and Guevara providing distinct revolutionary expressions. Fanon’s
engagement with race, violence, and colonialism reveals a dialectical problematisation of the
radical implications of otherness and the subaltern (Gidwani, 2008). More recently, McMi-
chael’s (1990) work on incorporated comparison can be seen as a unique form of dialectical
analysis, though the term is not used. This approach examines world historical change
through both multiple/diachronic and singular/synchronic forms and conceptualises variation
across time and space, in which neither are separate or uniform. Such postcolonial approaches
have been particularly adept in drawing out the epistemological limitations of incomplete dia-
lectical approaches that miss out on the ongoing legacy and practices of colonialism.
