The revival of Leon Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development (UCD) into an international social theory has been successful. Spearheaded by Justin Rosenberg (1996), its explanatory capabilities thus far have been wide, accounting for state formations in medieval Persia (Matin 2007), Northeast Africa (Makki 2011), Korea (Miller 2016), and China (Cooper 2015), the rise of political multiplicity itself (Rosenberg 2010), the transition from feudalism to capitalism in England (Anievas and Nişancioğlu 2015), the formation of the peculiar ruling class of post-Meiji Japan (Allinson and Alexander 2010), the rise of nationalism (Matin 2020; Cooper 2023), the concretisation of Occidentalism (the idea of a united Western sphere) (Leigh 2020), Brexit and the rise of Trump (Rosenberg and Boyle 2019), the resurgence of far-right ideologies (Anievas and Saull 2020), and the modern Brazilian novel (Schwarz, Brown, and Rosenberg 2021). Within the past three years, a special issue and a forum on the theory have been published in Cambridge Review of International Affairs and Millennium (Rosenberg 2021a; Rosenberg et al. 2022). Collectively, these scholars not only expand the explanatory scope of the theory beyond Trotsky’s specific interest in the Russian Revolution to other uneven and combined dynamics under the global capitalist epoch, but through the examples above they also show that the theory holds transhistorical explanatory power, arguing that international unevenness as a causal locus is not specific to capitalism (for the theoretical basis of this expansion of the theory, see for example Rosenberg 2021b).
Amidst this successful revival of Trotsky’s theorising, however, one concept has been mostly left behind: “backwardness.” Indeed, Trotsky’s use of backwardness to describe Russian society in his original application of UCD has been condemned as outdated even by UCD scholars because the term seems to suggest a normative ranking of developmental stages between different societies (Felipe Antunes de Oliveira in Rosenberg et al. 2022, 321). Relatedly, the remnant of this concept in a typical contemporary application of UCD—the “privilege of historic backwardness” (see for example the case of China’s supposed backwardness in Rosenberg and Boyle 2019)— is where UCD theorists receive the most criticisms.
However, I argue that backwardness, (re)understood correctly as self-perceived backwardness, is an important concept without which UCD’s explanation of historical change is incomplete (a detailed elaboration of this argument can be found in Nguyen 2025). To that end, this article proceeds in two steps. First, I briefly sketch what UCD is exactly and the kind of contributions it is making towards international relations scholarship (IR). Second, I dwell upon the subtle but very important difference between backwardness as alluding to a normative ranking of societies and backwardness as describing self-perceived backwardness as an important part of uneven and combined historical change.
The Renaissance of Uneven and Combined Development
To understand what kind of explanations UCD offers, it is useful to look at its original application in Trotsky’s seminal History of the Russian Revolution (Trotsky 2008, especially Chapter 1). Here, he observes that over the course of the nineteenth century, there emerged stark unevenness between Western advanced capitalist nations and a “backward” Czarist and semi-feudal Russia that was still maintaining a peasantry-centric production economy. Pressure emanating from the former—what he terms the “whip of external necessity”—compelled Russian society to “catch up.” Yet in this process of “modernising” the nation, Russian society would/could not retrace the course of early adopters of capitalism in Britain and France. Instead, it could, and did, make use of what Trotsky terms the “privilege of historical backwardness” to skip repeating the intermediate, bourgeois-centric developmental stages experienced by its predecessors and, in the end, initiated a proletariat revolution that would take over the revolutionary tasks of the bourgeoisie. The revolt against the oppressive Czarist state, thus, was led by the proletariat and not the politically weak/Czar-dependent bourgeoisie: such is the unique combined outcome that was the Russian Revolution. The original significance of this argument, as Rosenberg (2006, 309) emphasises, is that it poses a challenge to Marx’s observation of a homogeneous “world after its own image” by showing that the ongoing history of capitalism was proliferating an array of unique combined developments, the Russian Revolution being the exemplar as it dramatically diverged from Marx’s stagist and linear understanding of capitalist “modernisation.”
Importantly, while focussing on explaining concrete events belonging to a particular historical epoch, Trotsky coins UCD at a high level of abstraction. This is most clearly seen when he observes unevenness as ‘the most general law of the historic process’ (Trotsky 2008, 5). And if unevenness is to be understood as a transhistorical law, then processes of combined development must be so accordingly.
Indeed, Rosenberg picks up this cue in spearheading the theory’s revival. In a move faithful to Trotsky’s spirit, Rosenberg argues that UCD, rather than being a toolkit just for the Russian Revolution or just for development under the capitalist epoch, is a transhistorically observable phenomenon—a fact ‘intrinsic to the historical process itself’ (Rosenberg 2006, 309). Taking seriously Trotsky’s observation about unevenness being a historical “law,” Rosenberg extends UCD from a particular analysis of Russian development into an international social theory— a theorisation of the international and the domestic as one continuous ontological texture, wherein the former is causally significant towards processes taking place in the latter (Rosenberg 2006, 336). He, as well as many other UCD writers mentioned in the introduction, shows that unevenness, the whip of external necessity, the privilege of historic backwardness, and combined development can be observed across space and time in human history.
What kind of contributions is UCD making to IR? More frankly, what has been the point of reviving the theory? Rosenberg, right from his early writings (2006), has always been clear about what UCD means for the discipline: to resolve the problems of “internalism” (or “methodological nationalism”). Internalism is defined as the tendency to conceptualise societal processes and outcomes as isolated within a society, which ignores the consequences of interactive multi-societal co-existence (or, simply, the international) (Rosenberg 2013b, 1). Indeed, Rosenberg (2006, 308–9) argues that IR has for the most part perpetuated an artificial dichotomization of the international and the domestic, citing the biggest perpetrator of such an issue—neo-realism—as well as failed attempts to overcome it. Thus, UCD contributes to overcoming this gap by showing one important way in which the international is causally significant towards societal processes, theorising the international as ‘an emergent property of social development, rather than being an extraneous condition operating over and against it’ (Rosenberg 2013a, 195, emphasis original; for a recent reiteration of the fact that this is indeed necessary in IR, see: Rosenberg et al. 2023).
