Critical international theory and meta-dialectics

During the 1990s, IR scholars began to debate the merits of the dialectic as a method of IR theory. Much of the debate focused on Christian Heine's and Benno Teschke's efforts to situate dialectics in IR theory. Heine and Teschke, for instance, argued that dialectics had remained an overlooked social scientific (holistic) method of international relations theory. Despite their insights into its methodological value, dialectics has yet to evolve into an IR research programme. Part of the problem, I claim, is that critical IR theorists have yet to 'structure' adequately a dialectical theory of international relations. The central aim of this article is to position dialectics in IR theory by formulating a meta-dialectical theory that counterposes negative dialectics to positive dialectics. The main argument in the article is that while negative dialectics remain in many respects a nonredemptive method, it does constitute an important functional (and reflexive) limit of a meta-dialectical theory of IR. It is this limit, I claim, that is essential to understanding meta-dialectics as an alternative critical IR theory research programme.