ABSTRACT
Verstand connotes the ‘either-or’ determinations of things (something that Hegel consistently
shows the limits of in the Logic), dialectical understanding ‘refers to thinking in “both-and”
terms’, the ‘inner and outer’ relations, as well as their ‘contradictory inner unities’ (Alker,
1982b, p. 23). As affirmed by Ollman, the key of dialectics is to think of social life as
process and relation. Unlike those trapped by Verstand the question is never:
It is for these very reasons that dialectics is particularly well poised to offer an alternative analy-
sis of the forms of relationalism in world politics. IR is a field with a tendency to reify relations
of a particular type, specifically sovereign and formal relations between states. These are typi-
cally interpreted in complete isolation from their embeddedness in social relations, so that the
field’s understanding of the states-system or the foreign policy of states, grasps only at their
abstract, formal, and objectified form, removed or isolated from all other parts. Dialectics
instead offers a relational ontology of the social forces and contradictions in world politics
that are routinely downplayed in these orthodox approaches. By focusing on the totality of
relations as the objective context of human agency rather than alleged self-perpetuating systemic
forces (realism), institutions of interest (liberalism), or promulgation of norms (constructivism),
dialectics brings into view the immanent tendencies for social transformation through an under-
standing of change as something open-ended or ‘possibilistic’ rather than determined or
teleological.
