Counter-hegemonic Strategies Research Articles

Privileged underdogs: the heterotopias and anti-political correctness of upper-class men in a Swedish digital space

ABSTRACT In this article, we focus on a Swedish upper class digital space called The Good Society, where texts, videos and discussions are published. In this digital space the elite comes out publicly as underdogs in relation to the supposed hegemony of political correctness and the Swedish welfare ideology. The upper class take the position of protectors against the feminization of society and the crisis of masculinity. We argue that this space can be understood in terms of what Foucault described as a heterotopia, a form of peculiar counter-space. Using multi-sited digital ethnography we discern a playful mimicking of the state, the public, the media and public conversation. The article concludes that it is important to acknowledge and critically examine such playful and peculiar heterotopias as counter hegemonic strategies, in order to understand how digital spaces are political and serve right-wing, masculinist populist mobilization.

Growth hegemony and post-growth futures: A complex hegemony approach

Abstract To date, the vast majority of post-growth thinking has been focused on explaining why a post-growth transition is needed and the policies this would entail. Less attention, in contrast, has been paid to the relations of power and structural mechanisms through which ‘growth hegemony’ is continuously reproduced, and even less to the mechanisms, counter-hegemonic strategies, and coalitions that could plausibly drive post-growth transitions in core states of the world-system. This article will explore these issues through the lens of Neo-Gramscian theory, particularly the ‘complex hegemony’ framework developed by Alex Williams. From this perspective, rather than reducing growth to capitalist relations of production (as Marxists typically do), we should instead frame it as an emergent hegemonic structure and process shaped by the reciprocally determining forces of political economy, ideology, and militarisation. I will argue that this approach provides more insight into the messiness of possible post-growth futures – which may confound neat binaries such as capitalism/socialism – as well as the mechanisms and struggles through which the world-system might be pushed in post-growth directions.

Post-nuclear worldmaking and counter-hegemony: Against catastrophic failures of imagination

Abstract Studies of nuclear politics and IR more widely have failed to seriously engage with what future nuclear-disarmed worlds would or should look like. I respond to this failure of imagination by advocating for a project of ‘post-nuclear worldmaking’. Counter-hegemonic political efforts around the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) are a useful first step to ‘connecting’ our nuclear-armed present to a disarmed future. However, they do not tell us much about the broader characteristics of this future. Moreover, they often fail to transcend conservative assumptions of plausibility and probability, which unnecessarily exclude what might be called ‘utopian’ visions of alternative futures. In the context of mounting uncertainty generated by threats to planetary security, post-nuclear worldmaking can assist in drawing strong connections between the present and radically different future worlds, which should not be discounted as improbable or impossible. This project enables a widening of the scope of nuclear futures and policy options which are considered thinkable, as well as contributing a future-facing, prefigurative element of politics which complements existing counter-hegemonic strategy. It highlights the unavoidable obligation for nuclear scholars to think in utopian terms.

Territorialising Local Food Systems for an Agroecological Transition in Latin America

An agroecological transition can enhance resilience by several means, e.g., managing ecological relationships through agroecosystems, enhancing farmers’ knowledge of natural resources, recycling those resources, maintaining biodiversity, and thus, flexibly adapting to environmental stresses. However, the hegemonic agri-food system has been continuing its capitalist transition, thereby undermining agroecological methods and deterritorialising social bonds. Facing this pervasive threat, an agroecological transition needs a greater convergence between agroecological production and a solidarity economy (economia solidaria or EcoSol in Latin America). Their convergence can be called EcoSol-agroecology, based on short food supply chains (called circuitos cortos there). These efforts develop territorial markets, generate more stable livelihoods, and thus keep producers on the land. In our study, each research team collaborated with an EcoSol-agroecology network to develop Participatory Action Research methods. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted their circuitos cortos, stimulating creative adaptations or alternatives, alongside demands for policy support measures. These networks have regionally territorialised local initiatives, while also confronting obstacles from the hegemonic system. Although socioecological resilience often means a system’s capacity to bounce back, here it has meant bouncing forwards through new opportunities for solidaristic livelihoods and bonds. EcoSol-agroecology networks, agri-extensionists, and researchers have jointly developed such counter-hegemonic strategies, as illustrated by the case studies here.

The Gramscian politics of Europe’s rule of law crisis

ABSTRACT The paper explores the long-term trajectory and the recent acceleration of the conflict over the rule of law in the EU. It focusses on the motivation of the two governments in Hungary and Poland to challenge European core values increasingly aggressively even directly at EU level despite the threat of significant material costs to both countries. Putting forward a Gramscian understanding, we argue that this radicalization is the result of a counter-hegemonic strategy that aims at replacing the liberal order with a new, nationalist, ultraconservative, Christian order on domestic and European levels. The paper traces core elements of this strategy which are either disputed or underestimated in existing literature, most importantly the pursuit of a core ideology and the massive and long-term investment into winning moral and cultural leadership through the penetration of civil society which precedes and complements electoral strategies and autocratic institution building.

Exploring Eurasian integration through the lenses of Carl Schmitt: The Eurasian Economic Union as an example of Schmittian “Great Space”

The Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) embodies Russia’s latest attempt to restore interconnections among former Soviet countries through economic means rather than military might. The literature on the EAEU views the initiative as a geopolitical tool, a post-imperial escamotage, a platform to enhance reforms, or a counterhegemonic strategy. This article wishes to understand the EAEU as an example of Carl Schmitt’s theorizations, especially in relation to the concept of Great Space. The EAEU resembles the Schmittian Great Space in four main respects: the existence of a regional hegemon with spheres of interest beyond its fixed borders, the expression of an “imperial” community of cultural and historical affinity, the overcome of the rigid Westphalian state model expressed by the jus publicum Europeaum in favor of a large space, and the manifestation of the nomos of the Earth, that is a telluric civilization within the Schmittian contraposition between Land and Sea. The application of the Schmittian Great Space paradigm to the EAEU—in tandem with the proliferation of other regional integration initiatives and organizations—confirms the ongoing global shift from rigid Westphalian nation-states to highly integrated political-economic blocs based on civilizational identity in the frame of a multipolar world.

Counter-hegemonic strategies for democratic alter- politics: critical notes on the experiences of 1990-2019

This article critically engages with the political strategies of the new social and political movements that emerged in Europe in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2007-8. It takes issue with discussions of contemporary alter-political practice and theory that overlook the crucial point that the creation of new social institutions and relations in the here and now - a central part of this politics - must itself be political: it argues for the need to tackle the whole question of the collective subject and agent of change. This leads into a discussion of the theory of hegemony put forward by Gramsci, and, later, Laclau and Mouffe, and, drawing on this, a new strategy is proposed, for the construction of powerful collective subjects. Taking its cue from recent social movements such as 15M (the Indignados) and new municipalism in Spain and Italy, it looks at new ways of configuring the strategy of hegemony, by making its concepts of leadership, unity and representation more participatory, bottom-up, accessible to ordinary people, plural and flexible. A historical transition to egalitarian democracies, solidary economies and environmental sustainability is dependent on a wider counter-hegemonic project and contest. This needs to be carried out in all social relations and fields. It must energise critical masses on the ground, and conjoin institutional interventions with new social invention and multiple assaults on the status quo. The object of a contemporary alter-political organisation should be to animate, bolster and help articulate the multi-faceted texture of current oppositional and constructive activities, re-instituting the social in all its far-reaching diversity and complexity.

Recognition as a counter hegemonic strategy

Building on the analyses of cultural hegemony in the works of Nancy Fraser and Wendy Brown, I argue in the paper that the historic bloc (order of cultural hegemony) of post-Fordist capitalism is characterized by a particular dynamic between several ?axes? of hegemony that gives rise to the ?paradox of engagement/disengagement?. The ?progressive-expertocratic? axis of hegemony creates a subject-position of the ?engaged self?, a figure embodying a certain promise of political agency that is simultaneously obstructed by other, depoliticizing axes of hegemony. This dynamic is conducive to the rise of contemporary right-wing authoritarianism, which purports to fulfill this promise of political agency through a series of displacements - the counterhegemonic left, I argue, has so far not formulated an effective alternative to this strategy. In the second part, I explore the potential of Axel Honneth?s theory of recognition, in particular his concept of ?interpersonal respect?, for grounding a left strategy of connecting (mutually articulating) the hegemonic figure of the ?engaged self? with a progressive politics of social transformation. To that end, I elaborate Honneth?s perspective by means of an argument about the role of trust in the context of societal crises that Igor Cvejic, Srdjan Prodanovic and I have recently formulated.

Ogaga Ifowodo’s Poetics of Dissent: Reflexive Subversions of Petro-Imperialism in The Oil Lamp

Poet Ogaga Ifowodo delivers scathing criticisms of oil hegemony in Nigeria in his 2005 book, The Oil Lamp, and these criticisms underscore the destabilizing threat that petro-politics pose to the nation itself. This essay examines Ifowodo’s indictments of petro-imperialism in Nigeria, and I also look closely at his self-aware subversions of the nation’s ruling order. Much of the scholarship on The Oil Lamp builds on developments in postcolonial ecocriticism, and scholars often praise the activist energies in Ifowodo’s poetry. However, these studies overlook how The Oil Lamp also conveys critical awareness of the constraints of creative expression as a force of political change. In this inquiry, I investigate the poet’s meditations on the possibilities and the limitations of writing as counter-hegemonic strategy. This study offers a close reading of the poems, which I argue is essential both to appreciating Ifowodo’s poetics and to grasping his claims about dissident writing.

Paris and the Parasite: Noise, Health, and Politics in the Media City by Macs Smith

Reviewed by: Paris and the Parasite: Noise, Health, and Politics in the Media City by Macs Smith Keith Moser Smith, Macs. Paris and the Parasite: Noise, Health, and Politics in the Media City. MIT, 2021. ISBN 978-0262045544. Pp. 296. In this insightful exploration of Paris as a mediatic space in which information incessantly flows in all directions through a plethora of divergent vectors, Smith exposes the ugly underbelly of the hegemonic forces undergirding the dominant social order in the city of lights. Building upon Serres's multifaceted theory of the parasite, Smith reveals how even the architectural structure of Paris evolved to expel unwanted biological, mediatic, and social parasites. Smith effortlessly weaves transdisciplinary connections between literature, philosophy, film, critical theory, media studies, architecture, cultural studies, environmental ethics, and popular culture to decry how those who have been labeled parasites by the integrated political and social elite have been effectively banished from the center of Paris and relegated to the impoverished banlieues where their undesirable noise cannot be heard. In addition to probing the efficacy and paradoxes of counterhegemonic strategies that disenfranchised and marginalized Parisians have conceived, including street art and the extreme sport of parkour, in an effort to resist oppression, Smith turns to Derrida's theories of hospitality in order to invite the reader to imagine how Paris and other postmodern metropolises could become more welcoming spaces in the future. Although Smith's interdisciplinary approach is compelling throughout the book, the passages in which he underscores the role of architecture and urban planning in the creation of a stifling anti-parasitic glass ceiling are especially thought-provoking. From a historical perspective, Smith pinpoints the "aftermath of the cholera epidemic" in the middle of the nineteenth century as the beginning of the concerted efforts of public officials working in tandem with architects to expel "invasive non-human pathogens" from the streets of Paris (28). Architects like Le Corbusier were soon called upon to deal with another kind of perceived menace: the social parasite. Smith explains how Le Corbusier was instrumental in the conception of a private space "where one can be sealed off from the parasites of the city" (36). Architecture became a hegemonic tool for shielding affluent Parisians from the parasitic noise emitted by those at the bottom of the social ladder. However, this approach to urban planning, intentionally designed to ensure that people had very little contact with each other, created isolation chambers "where anonymity reigns" (48). Delving into the theories of Guy Debord, Smith demonstrates how these attempts to eliminate the parasite atomized Parisian society. Nonetheless, Smith finds a glimmer of hope in Serres's hypothesis that the parasite can never be removed from the informational channels entirely. Specifically, Smith outlines how street artists like Blek le rat and Invader have (re-)appropriated the very walls or borders that were conceived to exclude them. Even if street art has now been commercialized to a certain extent, the counter-hegemonic discourse and culture jamming of social parasites cannot be [End Page 234] eradicated altogether. Without painting too rosy a picture of counter-hegemonic liberation techniques, Smith reveals that social parasites will continue to find ways to have their voices heard in Paris and all around the world. [End Page 235] Keith Moser Mississippi State University Copyright © 2022 American Association of Teachers of French

The Resilience Fix to Climate Disasters: Recursive and Contested Relations with Equity and Justice-Based Transformations in the Global South

This article engages with the taken-for-granted separation between resilience as stability and resilience as transformation after disasters. It examines whether strategies adopted after climate disasters are transforming cities in ways that foster egalitarian urbanism or reinforce capitalist urbanization. To address this question, I develop the notion of a resilience fix, returning to Harvey’s influential thesis on spatial fix that captures how capitalism overcomes its crises of overaccumulation by deepening its spread through the production of new spaces and the built environment. I combine this thesis with an interrogation of urban metabolism and the governance of urban life and spaces to show the recursive relations between resilience fixes and transformative resilience strategies. Focusing on a ten-year postdisaster development in Metro Manila, this study shows how resilience fixes act within and through political economy systems, land use planning, technology adoption, and risk management regimes to decenter those who experience the double violence of capitalist urbanization and disaster capitalism while naturalizing utopian development, citizen surveillance, and a class-based retreat from the city. By offering false solutions and translocating disasters, these fixes inextricably reproduced social inequalities that would stimulate resistance politics and counterhegemonic strategies aimed at partial transformation.

From War Studies to Peace Building and Social Transformation at the University of Zimbabwe in the Post-COVID-19 Era: New Directions

This paper uses a positive peace lens to examine the evolution of the War and Strategic Studies (WSS) degree curriculum, to the degree in Conflict, Peace Building, and Social Transformation (CPST) at the University of Zimbabwe in the year 2021, by considering the global pandemic and seeking new directions in the field. The paper addresses two questions: 1) What changes and factors provoked the change in direction, from the WSS curriculum to CPST, and 2) What are the potential benefits of repackaging the war and strategic studies degree programme? The paper argues that the paradigm shift accommodates pandemics like the COVID-19 which configured social, political, and economic patterns of life, and a new direction emerged, that is, a change of focus from negative to positive peace. Among the reasons for curriculum changes, from WSS to CPST, was the desire to give the programme a human face, and to align the degree so that it promotes the positive peace and sustainable development needed to address trajectories associated with emerging nonviolent threats to humanity – such as a global pandemics. Lastly, we see the new direction of the CPST as a counterhegemonic strategy to address confrontational and militaristic approaches to human conflict. COVID-19 has reminded us that confrontational politics are slowly becoming irrelevant for addressing the ambivalence of life, and in the struggle to contain global pandemics, which pose new threats to peace, security and development.

Images as Afro-positivist narratives and counter hegemonic strategy: A study of #TheAfricaTheMediaNeverShowsYou

To arrest the negative stereotypes of Africa in and outside the African continent, a number of civil society organizations and activists have launched various social media-assisted initiatives aimed at showcasing the positive facets of African cultures as well as the beautiful touristic attractions existing on the continent. One of such initiatives is the #TheAfricaTheMediaNeverShowsYou movement launched in 2015 to combat the negative and colonial stereotypes of Africa through the sharing of beautiful images and videos of Africa on Twitter. The movement encouraged Africans of all horizons to share attractive images of Africa, particularly the ones that are rarely or never shown on mainstream media. Six years after the project was launched, it is high time to evaluate its strength and know some of its merits and implications. In line with this aphorism, this paper uses secondary sources and a qualitative analysis of images and videos shared on Twitter to examine the contribution of the #TheAfricaTheMediaNeverShowsYou movement to the imperative of challenging colonial representations of Africa. It specifically discusses the genesis, trans-nationalization and promises of the project; and assesses the movement in the light of two philosophico-cultural currents/theories namely Afro-positivism and counter hegemony. The paper argues that the #TheAfricaTheMediaNeverShowsYou movement put to question the popular but problematic belief that Africa is all about negativisms. It started a visual-assisted conversation not only about the wonders found on African soil but also about some of the cultures which non-Africans have often viewed as problematic or controversial. Such a conversation is a proof that Afro-optimism is still much alive on the continent and that; Africans are conscious that the fight against colonial stereotypes is a perpetual battle which must be fought even with the help of new digital cultures such as digitalized image-based activism.

How Orbán won? Neoliberal disenchantment and the grand strategy of financial nationalism to reconstruct capitalism and regain autonomy

Abstract Disenchantment with global finance in Central-Eastern Europe enabled financial nationalism to emerge as a counter-hegemonic strategy. In Hungary, Prime Minister Orbán put forth his explicit aim to increase domestic ownership in banking to over 50% and legitimized the ensuing re-nationalization of the financial sector with resentment over neoliberal banking practices. The article describes how the financial crisis created an opportunity for Orbán and his allies to usher in a new era of financial ownership structures. It provides a critical political economy analysis of how the Orbán government selected economic sectors to target and how it used a network of associated private actors in its quest to re-nationalize and then re-privatize major banks to a newly created elite, the ‘national capitalists’. In this, financial nationalism constituted a grand strategy to reconstruct Hungarian capitalism in order to regain autonomy and assure long-term political survival within a liberal EU context.

Counter-Hegemonic Strategy from the Global South: A Pluri-scalar War of Position

Counter-Hegemonic Strategy from the Global South: A Pluri-scalar War of Position

I will follow? Authoritarian populism, past and present

ABSTRACT Scoones et al. [2018. “Emancipatory Rural Politics: Confronting Authoritarian Populism.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 45 (1): 1–20] suggests that the contemporary rural world can be characterized as having distinct forms of authoritarian populism. This article argues that key aspects of authoritarian populism are not seen across the breadth and depth of the contemporary rural world, and, as such, the use of authoritarian populism can be politically misleading. Nonetheless, it is argued, the way in which authoritarian populism in the 1980s fostered particular and specific forms of political responses are of use in developing contemporary intersectional counter-hegemonic strategies capable of challenging the regressive political character of the contemporary conjuncture.

Moving untouched: B. R. Ambedkar and the racialization of untouchability

ABSTRACT This paper analyses the complex nature of untouchability by examining its connections to space and racialization in Ambedkar’s political writings, including his experiences of using movement through space as a counter-hegemonic strategy. For Ambedkar, untouchability rested on a perpetual threat of violence which pushed Dalits to “self-racialize” or adopt bodily markers which gave away their caste status in specific places. This permitted the organization of caste hierarchies in space and its constant reproduction through time. Ambedkar became aware that places like the village facilitated the racialization of certain bodies as touchable or untouchable. Yet, the connections between space and racialization were not fixed. Ambedkar’s memories of untouchability were linked to “in-between spaces”, such as train stations or hotels, where the racialization of Dalits could not be assumed a priori. Such spatial indeterminacy allowed Ambedkar to challenge the behaviour Dalits were supposed to conform to in dominant caste spaces.

Counter-hegemonic struggle and the framing practices of the anti-nuclear platform in Turkey (2002–2018)

Since winning its first electoral victory in 2002, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) has promoted nuclear energy as crucial for satisfying rising energy needs, triggering economic development and increasing competitiveness of Turkey. This hegemonic discourse has been challenged by the anti-nuclear platform (ANP) that has framed nuclear energy as posing a threat to human life and the nature. Based on an engagement between the framing perspective and the Gramscian approach, this study considers the framing activities of the ANP as a counter-hegemonic strategy to challenge the hegemonic discourses articulated by AKP on nuclear energy over the past 15 years. Analyzing the data from primary sources, such as reports, bulletins, pamphlets, and press releases produced by the ANP and interviews with ANP representatives, this study reveals the ways the platform exercises power through their framing practices and counter-hegemonic discourses to delegitimize the official frame promoting nuclear energy in Turkey.

Gender, sexuality and medical education: experiences in a federal school that uses active learning methodologies

Abstract: Introduction: Sexuality is characterized as a device of power and Medicine plays a key role as one of the main action institutions. Medical education tends to ratify the heteronormative discourse and diagnose deviant patterns as a pathology. It is based on the binary categorization of individuals as an implication of their sexuality. The assessed medical course assumes the methodological proposal of the constructivist spiral, which seeks to guarantee the protagonism of the students, as well as the dialogue with their previous knowledge, using the concept of Meaningful Learning. Objective: To analyze the students’ experiences in the development of the competence profile related to gender and sexuality during medical school. Method: It is a qualitative research using focus groups with students attending the sixth year of the medical course. Result: The study indicates the students’ perception of the importance of active methodologies, as well as the early inclusion in the fields of practice. However, the thematic of gender and sexuality needs to be proposed in the list of triggers for the use of the constructivist spiral. Conclusion: The active teaching-learning methodologies can constitute a counter-hegemonic strategy in the face of the device of sexuality in guaranteeing biopower, as there is a reorientation of these contents in the curriculum.

Gender, sexuality and medical education: experiences in a federal school that uses active learning methodologies

Abstract: Introduction: Sexuality is characterized as a device of power and Medicine plays a key role as one of the main action institutions. Medical education tends to ratify the heteronormative discourse and diagnose deviant patterns as a pathology. It is based on the binary categorization of individuals as an implication of their sexuality. The assessed medical course assumes the methodological proposal of the constructivist spiral, which seeks to guarantee the protagonism of the students, as well as the dialogue with their previous knowledge, using the concept of Meaningful Learning. Objective: To analyze the students’ experiences in the development of the competence profile related to gender and sexuality during medical school. Method: It is a qualitative research using focus groups with students attending the sixth year of the medical course. Result: The study indicates the students’ perception of the importance of active methodologies, as well as the early inclusion in the fields of practice. However, the thematic of gender and sexuality needs to be proposed in the list of triggers for the use of the constructivist spiral. Conclusion: The active teaching-learning methodologies can constitute a counter-hegemonic strategy in the face of the device of sexuality in guaranteeing biopower, as there is a reorientation of these contents in the curriculum.