Marxist IR

Marxist international relations (IR) is a critical paradigm that treats the world system as a structure organised by capitalist production rather than as an anarchic society of equal sovereign states. Where realists see states pursuing power and liberals see institutions enabling cooperation, Marxists ask who owns what, who labours for whom, and how surplus value flows across borders.

The tradition draws on Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels but became a distinct IR approach through several strands:

• Lenin's theory of imperialism (Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, 1917) framed great-power war as competition between monopoly capitals for markets and raw materials.
• Dependency theory, developed by Latin American scholars such as Raúl Prebisch and Andre Gunder Frank in the 1960s–70s, argued that peripheral economies are systematically underdeveloped by their integration with industrial cores.
• World-systems analysis, associated with Immanuel Wallerstein from the 1974 publication of The Modern World-System, divides the globe into core, semi-periphery, and periphery linked by unequal exchange.
• Neo-Gramscian IR, advanced by Robert W. Cox (notably his 1981 Millennium essay "Social Forces, States and World Orders"), examines how transnational class coalitions produce hegemonic ideas and institutions.

Common claims across these strands include: the state is not a neutral actor but reflects dominant class interests; international institutions (the IMF, World Bank, WTO) help reproduce capitalist relations; and apparent state conflicts often mask deeper struggles over accumulation.

Critics argue Marxist IR underweights nationalism, culture, and security dilemmas that persist regardless of economic system, and that its predictions about capitalist collapse have not materialised. Defenders counter that widening global inequality, debt crises, and climate breakdown make a political-economy lens indispensable. In MUN and policy debates, Marxist analysis is most visible in arguments about structural adjustment, sovereign debt, extractive industries, and North–South negotiations on trade and climate finance.