This guest post by Shannon Brincat and Heikki Patomäki introduces their new book on dialectics as a global form of thought, drawing on a range of non-Western as well as European traditions.
Dialectical Dialogues in Global International Relations offers a distinctive intervention in comparative philosophy and International Relations theory by examining dialectics as a genuinely global form of thought. Structured as a series of sustained dialogues of Shannon Brincat with Deepshikha Shahi, Jay Garfield, L. H. M. Ling, Kaan Kangal and Heikki Patomäki, the book brings Hegelian and Marxian dialectics into conversation with Advaita, Buddhist, Daoist, Islamic and Critical Realist traditions. Rather than treating these traditions as isolated civilisational inheritances or absorbing them into a single universal framework, it explores their differences, affinities and productive tensions through open-ended philosophical exchanges. In doing so, it models a pluralistic form of Global IR that seeks neither the rejection of Western theory nor the romanticisation of non-Western thought, but a more dialogical, reflexive and genuinely intercultural practice of knowledge production. This attempt to place philosophical traditions into a relationship of mutual interrogation recalls certain ambitions of Bhaskar’s From East to West: Odyssey of a Soul, particularly its effort to overcome rigid East-West dualisms and to bring Western philosophy into serious engagement with Asian traditions, but without its overstatements and end-of-history ramifications.
As explained in the introduction, dialectics is best understood as a way of thinking rather than some fixed method. It is a way of thinking that understands things through their own development, change, and movement, and through their relations and interconnectedness with other things. It involves an ontology of an interconnected, contradictory, and dynamic whole or totality in constant flux. And it pursues knowledge dialogically, that is, in open dialogue with all perspectives, data, and opinions, with a concern for pursuing better truth-claims rather than winning or power. Indeed, the book’s basic premise is that there are different systems of dialectical thinking and that our understanding of dialectics is best deepened by engaging in dialogue between these systems. While in the West dialectics is most often associated with the tradition of Hegel and Marx – despite its Western origins in the ancient Greek art of dialogue and argumentation – parallel traditions have existed in China, India, the Islamic world and elsewhere. While the book returns to Hegel and Marx time and again, it opens up a truly global perspective on dialectics. Moreover, it draws on dialectics to think through past and contemporary issues in international relations and world politics.
The connections between deep ontological and epistemological issues and world politics are evident in all chapters. In Chapter 1, Shannon Brincat discusses with Deepshikha Shahi the ethical and political implications of Advaitic trialectics (referring to a threefold movement from duality to mutual ontological dependence to underlying unity), which is also a key theme of Chapter 3 on international relations, Hegel, and the Dao. Understandings of the nature of reality shape how we understand the self, the other, their relations, and the overall process. Advaitic trialectics provides an interesting contrast to progressivist interpretations of Hegel and Marx. Opposites are re‑situated within a deeper unity without a Hegelian aufhebung (sublation). The choice between the schemes need not be metaphysical, however, but may be level- and context-specific. The dialogue with Shahi culminates in a discussion of whether the Advaitic trialectics – and especially the assumption of underlying unity – lead to some kind of theism and its consequences, which may include dogmatism, dogmas, and even clerical power. The idea that reality is ultimately non‑dual, and that apparent distinctions –subject/object, mind/world, self/other – are provisional and tend to be misleading, is widely shared among dialectical thinkers, but what is at stake is the assumption of the hidden unity of everything. A lot hinges upon how this hidden unity is understood. If it is conceived as substance‑like reality, it is easy to identify it with some kind of concept of God. But it is also possible to understand it as an abstract ontological characterisation, according to which the world in general is relational and processual (this understanding comes close to Bhaskar’s philosophical ontology, according to which we can conclude that the world must be processual, differentiated, stratified, causal, open-systemic, etc.).
Chapter 2 stages a dialogue between Shannon Brincat and Jay L. Garfield on the negative dialectics of Madhyamaka Buddhism, particularly the philosophy of Nāgārjuna. Its central concepts – Emptiness (Śūnyatā) and Dependent Origination (Pratītyasamutpāda) – are presented not as nihilistic denials of reality but as mutually implicating claims about the relational constitution of the world: things exist conventionally and causally but nothing possesses an independent or self-sufficient essence (svabhāva). This bears directly on several Critical Realist concerns. Like Critical Realism, Madhyamaka contests atomism, reification, and the reduction of reality to isolated events; it directs attention instead to the conditions and relations through which determinate phenomena emerge. Yet it also poses a serious challenge to any interpretation of causal powers as intrinsic properties contained within independently constituted entities. If the seed, sprout, and tree are conventional differentiations within a continuous spatiotemporal and causal manifold, then causation cannot be understood as the transmission of something from one self-identical substance to another. Causal efficacy remains real, but it is relationally and contextually conditioned. The chapter therefore anticipates the later debate in Chapter 5 over whether relations are universally internal or instead level- and context-specific, and whether causal powers can be distinguished analytically without reifying the entities to which they are attributed. Emptiness also resonates, although not straightforwardly, with Bhaskar’s concept of absence: Śūnyatā does not designate non-being but the determinate absence of independent essence, or intrinsic identity. Politically and ethically, this relational ontology undermines the liberal image of the atomised individual and makes intelligible an ethics of compassion, mutual recognition and social obligation. The discussion consequently moves from the Buddhist brahmavihāras –friendliness, care, sympathetic joy and impartiality – to welfare, education, positive rights and the duties generated by social interdependence. The central question is whether recognising interdependence merely recommends individual compassion or entails transforming the institutional relations that produce suffering. In Critical Realist terms, the chapter moves from ontological critique towards explanatory critique and transformative praxis: emancipation requires not only correcting false beliefs about the isolated self but changing the social structures that reproduce egoism, deprivation and avoidable suffering.
Chapter 3,the dialogue between Brincat and L. H. M. Ling on Hegel and the Dao, examines two dialectical traditions that begin from relationality and movement but conceptualise transformation differently. Hegelian dialectics emphasises contradiction, determinate negation, and Aufhebung, whereas Ling’s Daoist approach stresses yin-yang complementarity, wu, wuwei and “difference without alienation” (cf. our summary of chapter 1). The chapter’s importance for Critical Realism lies in its sustained examination of how a differentiated world can nevertheless form an interconnected whole. Both traditions reject fixed identities and external relations between already completed entities; subjects and objects become what they are through historically unfolding relations. Yet the dialogue also warns against collapsing all difference into either an ultimate unity or a premature harmony (again, cf. chapter 1). For Critical Realists, this raises the crucial distinction between recognising relational interdependence and specifying the different kinds, depths, and causal consequences of relations. Daoist “harmonising” is not presented as a static equilibrium that abolishes contradiction, but rather an ongoing practical activity through which differences may coexist without becoming relations of hierarchy, domination, or epistemic violence. This has affinities with Bhaskar’s understanding of a differentiated totality and with dialectical Critical Realism’s insistence that totality must preserve – and in some contexts, cultivate – rather than eliminate concrete particularity. As Bhaskar wrote in Dialectic: “the concrete universal, and totality generally, do not negate, but depend upon them” and later that “concrete singularity is the relational condition of concrete universality”.At the same time, the contrast between revolutionary transformation and wuwei raises a difficult question for emancipatory praxis: when does acting in accordance with relational processes enable transformation, and when does an emphasis on harmony accommodate structures that should be negated? The discussion of Franz Fanon brings this issue into sharp focus. Simply reversing the coloniser-colonised hierarchy leaves the underlying relation intact; emancipation requires transforming the social relation that produces both positions. This closely resembles the Critical Realist movement from identifying an oppressive structure, through explaining its reproduction, to absenting the constraints that sustain it. The concept of the “double transition”, in which difference is first distinguished and then reconstituted within a transformed relation, thus offers a valuable intercultural analogue to determinate negation. It suggests that liberation is neither the victory of one pole over another nor their absorption into sameness but the creation of relations in which “difference gets its due”.
Chapter 4 presents a dialogue with Kaan Kangal on dialectics and Islamic thought, returning to questions of metaphysics, causation, and first principles through the dispute between the falāsifa – especially al-Fārābī, Ibn Sīnā and Ibn Rushd – and Islamic theologians such as al-Ghazālī. The chapter demonstrates that Islamic philosophers did not merely preserve an inherited Greek tradition but transformed dialectics through their engagement with law, cosmology, theology and metaphysics. Of particular interest to Critical Realists is al-Fārābī’s understanding of dialectics as the critical “probing” of accepted opinions and premises. Dialectics does not itself supply apodictic proof; rather, it exposes inconsistency, tests plausibility, and makes explicit the presuppositions on which specialised forms of knowledge depend. This resembles the Critical Realist use of post-Kantian transcendental argument: inquiry asks what must be the case for a practice, discourse, or scientific activity to be possible, whilst keeping the resulting claims fallible and open to revision. The chapter therefore reinforces Critical Realism’s distinction between ontology and epistemology. What exists cannot be reduced to what is currently known or demonstrated and claims about Being must remain answerable to rational interrogation nonetheless. The dispute over First Cause makes the stakes especially clear. A static and necessary First Cause threatens to close the open, processual, and differentiated universe that dialectical inquiry discloses, and al-Ghazālī’s theological determinism risks dissolving the relative autonomy and causal efficacy of natural processes into divine will – and endangers subsuming any critical thought at all. Critical Realism, by contrast, requires a world of real causal powers operating in open systems without either mechanistic regularity or theological occasionalism. The disagreements among Ibn Sīnā and Ibn Rushd over whether metaphysics or physics should establish God’s existence consequently raise a wider question about the proper relation between philosophical ontology and scientific inquiry. Neither can simply replace the other: science presupposes ontological categories, whilst metaphysical claims must remain constrained by the intelligibility and findings of the sciences. The chapter ends without resolving the contemporary implications of these disputes but shows how this incompleteness is analytically productive. It identifies Islamic dialectics as a major resource for the critique of dogmatism, showing why no appeal to revelation, first principles, or metaphysical necessity should be insulated from dialectical examination.
The final dialogue in Chapter 5 is between the two of us on dialectical critical realism. The readers may be familiar with Bhaskar’s criticism of confusing concepts, category mistakes, and fallacies, which are due to the fundamental irrealism of Western thought. These confusions succeed in many ways in objectifying and perpetuating our current knowledge and thereby also justifying the prevailing order at any given time. The typical role of Western philosophy and political thought has been the unconscious and vague normalisation of past changes involving some limited freedoms. Often, such normalisation has amounted to merely justifying the master/servant relationships prevailing at the time. Sharing this fundamental critique of Western metaphysics, in Chapter 5, we examine causal powers, real contradictions, absences, open systems and the stratified and context-dependent relations through which global social processes unfold. A key point of contestation concerns the relationship between internal and external relations. Bhaskar criticises the kind of philosophy of internal relations that neglects causation and external relations and thus also external constraints and contradictions, and we start by disagreeing about the meaning and importance of this criticism. The debate quickly moves to the question of whether the current era should be labelled the Anthropocene or the Capitalocene. However, the bulk of the chapter engages with Bhaskar’s Fourth Dimension of dialectic: the movement from explanatory critique towards transformative practice, universal self-realisation, and forms of human flourishing grounded in autonomy, community, and ecological well-being. In the course of the discussion, the set-up of the dialogue is reversed: at first, Bhaskar serves as the basis for a critique of the philosophy of mere internal relations, but soon the object of criticism finds much more to defend in Bhaskar, and especially in his critique of capitalism, against more reformist interpretations of emancipatory dialectics. We conclude the dialogue by debating the extent to which democratic, green global Keynesianism could be seen as a rational tendential direction in the early 21st century. Here, the debate becomes more concrete than in any of the previous dialogues, and at the end of the dialogue we discuss not only the rational, tendential directionality of world history in general but also, albeit only briefly, various concrete reform proposals for the global political economy and the world system. We conclude by fully agreeing that any rational tendential direction would also be just an interim stage in world history. The rational direction changes as relational processes progress, and there is always room for more freedom to come.
Shannon Brincat, with Deepshikha Shahi, Jay Garfield, L. H. M. Ling, Kaan Kangal and Heikki Patomäki (2026) Dialectical Dialogues in Global International Relations, Oxford University Press, xxxvii + 291 p. The book was published on 30 June 2026, and the publisher’s webpage is available at https://global.oup.com/academic/product/dialectical-dialogues-in-global-international-relations-9780198993209.