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Hegemony and international relations

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Abstract

The paper interrogates the current state of the art in hegemony analysis in international relations (IR). First, I discuss the limitations of using IR theories as a point of departure for analysing the phenomenon of hegemony in world politics. Second, I identify the ‘agent-structure problematique’ and ‘critical realism’ as two different waves of hegemony theorising and examine their contributions and limitations. Then I offer an outline of how we can move beyond the current state of the art, in order to develop a more comprehensive framework of analysing hegemony. Focusing on the multiple movements of power within a hegemonic order, the paper advances a conceptualisation of hegemony as a complex power ecology—a dynamic order that draws on multiple and conflicting social forces and temporalities, which, in the final analysis, denote an existential battle for determining desire and the meaning of life.

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Notes

  1. For a concise overview of historical hegemonies from ancient Greece to the present day see Worth (2015, 19–40).

  2. I owe this point to an anonymous reviewer.

  3. Some authors have argued that this is not an exclusive characteristic of hegemony. For instance Ferguson (2003: 160) argues that ‘“empire” has never exclusively meant direct rule over foreign territories without any political representation of their inhabitants’. This however does not contest the IR consensus on the key property of the concept of hegemony, i.e. consent.

  4. Moreover, much of the post-9/11 discussion in mainstream IR about the US hegemony employed this conventional approach (see for instance Mearsheimer 2001; Ignatieff 2003; Kagan 2003; for elaborated discussions on this approach and its limitations in the US case, see also Cox 2001, 2004; Mann 2003; Ferguson 2008; Jervis 2006; Buzan 2008).

  5. For a thoughtful critique of Cox’s reading of Gramscian commonsense, see Hopf (2013).

  6. Neo-Gramscian IR scholarship has extended this analysis in different ways (see for instance Gill and Mittelman 2001; Morton 2007; for an overview Bieler and Morton 2003).

  7. Joseph’s analysis focuses on domestic rather than world politics.

  8. The ‘depth ontology’ in critical realism’s lexicon (McAnulla 2005, 31).

  9. Adopting a different angle of critique, McCarthy criticises the very understanding of materiality in neo-Gramscian IR (McCarthy 2011). He argues that the almost exclusive definition of materiality in terms of (social) relations of productions, constraint the capacity of these approaches to account for the different way materiality impacts on different social formations and in general social change.

  10. This classification is fully developed in Antoniades (2008a).

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  1. Department of International Relations, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9SN, UK

    Andreas Antoniades

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Antoniades, A. Hegemony and international relations. Int Polit 55, 595–611 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-017-0090-4

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