How did the collapse of actually existing socialism and the triumph of neoliberalism marginalize Marxist frameworks in IR, despite the persistence of global inequality and exploitative core-periphery relations?

The collapse of actually existing socialism — symbolized most dramatically by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 — alongside the global triumph of neoliberalism in the late 20th century profoundly reshaped the intellectual terrain of international relations (IR). This twin transformation marginalized Marxist and critical frameworks in IR, not necessarily because the empirical problems they addressed (such as global inequality, imperialism, and core-periphery exploitation) disappeared, but because the global ideological and institutional landscape shifted in ways that undermined their perceived relevance and intellectual authority.

At the structural level, the end of the Cold War eliminated the most prominent geopolitical embodiment of Marxist aspirations: the Soviet-led socialist bloc. For much of the 20th century, actually existing socialism provided a concrete referent for Marxist and radical critiques of capitalism, shaping both global power configurations and the ideological contest underpinning international order. With the collapse of the USSR and the transition of China, Vietnam, and other nominally socialist states toward market-oriented reforms, the bipolar ideological architecture that had undergirded much Marxist IR theorizing collapsed. As Fred Halliday (1994) noted, the Cold War was not just a geopolitical standoff but also a “revolutionary global conflict” over competing visions of world order; its end delegitimized Marxist frameworks by severing their link to state-based projects.

Simultaneously, the rise and consolidation of neoliberalism — both as a policy paradigm and as an intellectual framework — reoriented the global political economy and reshaped dominant theoretical approaches in IR. Neoliberalism, as David Harvey (2005) and Quinn Slobodian (2018) have argued, represents not merely a set of market-friendly policies but a broader political rationality that seeks to extend competitive, market-based logics into all domains of social life. Within IR, this shift was reflected in the ascendancy of neoliberal institutionalism, as articulated by scholars like Robert Keohane (1984), which sought to explain cooperation under anarchy by focusing on institutions, information, and rational strategies — often detaching economic governance from deeper questions of class power or structural exploitation.

The intellectual victory of neoliberalism marginalized Marxist approaches in several ways. First, it reframed key questions in IR away from systemic critique and toward problem-solving governance: how to manage global markets, foster cooperation, and mitigate market failures, rather than interrogate the underlying dynamics of capital accumulation and imperialist hierarchy. Second, it reshaped academic incentives and institutional contexts, as IR departments increasingly prioritized formal modeling, positivist methods, and policy relevance aligned with liberal democratic norms — often sidelining critical or historical materialist approaches perceived as ideologically outdated or analytically irrelevant.

Despite these shifts, the persistence — and in some respects, intensification — of global inequality, extractive economic relations, and core-periphery asymmetries should, in principle, have reinforced the relevance of Marxist and neo-Marxist frameworks. Dependency theory (Prebisch, 1950; Cardoso & Faletto, 1979) and world-systems analysis (Wallerstein, 1974), for example, offered powerful tools for understanding how historical patterns of colonialism, unequal exchange, and imperialism continued to shape the global order even after formal decolonization. Yet the intellectual climate of the 1990s and early 2000s often cast these frameworks as relics of a bygone era, superseded by the apparent dynamism of globalization and the spread of liberal-democratic norms. The “end of history” thesis (Fukuyama, 1992) epitomized this mood, suggesting that systemic alternatives to liberal capitalism had been decisively defeated.

Moreover, the collapse of actually existing socialism allowed critics to dismiss Marxist frameworks by conflating them with the authoritarian practices and economic failures of Soviet-style command economies. The association of Marxist theory with the perceived failures of socialist states — rather than as a critical framework for understanding capitalism as a global system — further narrowed the intellectual space for Marxist IR. This conflation obscured the fact that many Marxist approaches in IR, particularly those within critical international political economy (IPE), had long critiqued both capitalist exploitation and the statist distortions of socialism, emphasizing the need to understand the systemic logics of global capital beyond any particular state formation.

Despite this marginalization, Marxist frameworks have persisted and even regained traction in some corners of IR scholarship, particularly in response to the contradictions of neoliberal globalization. Scholars such as Robert Cox (1981) and Stephen Gill (1995) developed critical IPE perspectives that analyze the role of global capitalist structures, transnational class formations, and hegemonic projects in shaping international order. More recently, Marxist and neo-Gramscian approaches have been revived to analyze the 2008 global financial crisis, austerity regimes, and the resurgence of authoritarian populism, highlighting the enduring relevance of class, inequality, and structural exploitation in global politics.

In sum, the collapse of actually existing socialism and the triumph of neoliberalism marginalized Marxist frameworks in IR by transforming both the geopolitical landscape and the dominant intellectual paradigms of the field. Yet the persistence of global inequality, core-periphery exploitation, and the contradictions of global capitalism suggests that the critical insights of Marxist approaches remain indispensable for understanding the deeper logics of international relations — even if they operate today from the margins of mainstream IR discourse. Reintegrating these frameworks into contemporary analysis requires moving beyond Cold War legacies and recognizing the systemic dynamics of capital accumulation, class struggle, and imperialism that continue to shape the world order.