Description
Dialectics has been a pivotal method in various critical approaches to IR theory. Yet this approach has been erroneously seen as deriving solely from a Western and modern philosophical canon. Studies have rarely engaged with the historical forms of dialectical thinking that contributed to the conceptual development of dialectics, instead largely reducing it to a particular Marxist-Hegelian heritage. This paper overcomes this problem by ‘Worlding’ dialectics (as in the thought of LHM Ling) by engaging with the emergence of dialectical thinking in the Axial Age Civilizations: India, China, Persia, Greece and Palestine. Various elements of how this form of critical theorising emerged and contributed to social advances during this period are examined alongside the question of how dialectical thinking can advance IR theory in today’s crisis-ridden world.
