Hegemonic Project Research Articles

Editorial: How Best to "Go On"? Prospects for a "Modern Synthesis" in the Sciences of Mind.

Editorial: How Best to "Go On"? Prospects for a "Modern Synthesis" in the Sciences of Mind.

Contested meanings, myths and hyperimages of the apocalypse: the Bakhtin Circle and the politicisation of catastrophism

ABSTRACTThis article considers the depoliticising effects of current images and myths of apocalyptic visions, such that the world faces a catastrophe whether this emerges from environmental degradation, mass migration, terrorism, or global financial collapse. In our digital media age, apocalyptic images are now also captured through the raw footage of actual disaster events. In the article we call such footage, “hyperimages”. The power of the hyperimage is not, as Baudrillard once said, that reality is “just like the movies”, rather, hyperimages demonstrate that the image captured and shown to others is all too real because they depict actual everyday disasters. Importantly, such is the power of hyperimages that they are often employed by the political right to help them construct a hegemonic project aiming to win state power and to influence state policies. Drawing on the Bakhtin Circle, however, we show that hyperimages are also mediated and circulated through a multitude of social groups and voices in society, which contain seeds of radical heteroglossic alternatives to that of the right. Following this, the article then examines how responses to apocalyptic hyperimages can be politicised in a progressive direction.

Development aid and disease discourse on display: the mutating techniques of neoliberalism

ABSTRACTThe objective of this essay is to explore the ascendency of discourse in the practice of international development and communication. Two cross-currents in the contemporary discourse of international development, namely development aid and the notoriously variegated concept of neoliberalism, have coalesced in a discourse crisis. This is due largely to competing understandings of neoliberalism – as either a hegemonic project, policy and program, a state form, or governmentality. I will argue that the complexity of development aid and the process of social change in general cannot be reduced to a single understanding of neoliberalism. However, considering neoliberalism as discourse provides a more encompassing framework. This frame has considerable advantages for understanding processes of social change and development aid. The paper will also show that the framework is attuned to the mutating techniques of neoliberalism and discuss the potential of this framework for guiding participation in international development.

Hypermasculinity as a Scenario of Power

The image of Russian President Vladimir Putin riding bare-chested in Siberia has attained mythic status among journalists and the public, both Russian and non-Russian. The current article analyzes the Russian leader's instrumental deployment of hypermasculinity as a strategy for creating not just legitimacy, but also power. Putin's public scripts and behaviors have, in different ways at different times, been overwhelmingly derived and embellished from a masculine menu that would be impermissible for Russian women. They also frequently demonstrate, in words and gestures, his active and absolute dominance over his interlocutors in ways that would be unacceptable for other, subordinated men. The creation of Putin's image, his scenario of power, thus becomes a “hegemonic project,” in the sense developed by Meghana Nayak and Jennifer Suchland, one that is deeply imbued with implied gender dominance and at times even gender violence. Ultimately, this work shows that studies of hypermasculinity and militarized masculinity cannot be limited to war settings, but rather must be extended to questions of political leadership and especially to ways that politics itself is undermined by leaders’ and their handlers’ excessive reliance on masculinity as a substitute for genuine political dialogue.

Knowledge Capitalism, Globalization, and Hegemony: Toward a Socio-Spatial Approach

Within a socio-spatial theoretical approach, Knowledge Capitalism is a new capitalist phase of development emerging in the eighties of the 20th century, in which knowledge valorization becomes the principal productive force of economic growth. Globalization is understood as an essentially spatial concept, which refers to the spatial dimension of Knowledge Capitalism, that takes place accordingly with a new socio-spatial tendency in which it is the (global) geography of capital, which molds the geography of national states, implying thus a new pattern of geographical uneven development. The discussion of Gramscian hegemony concept is introduced to analyze the two hegemonic projects actually struggling for a supranational supremacy: (1) the crisis of the neoliberal project, which implies its own geopolitical economy spatiality; and (2) China, the BRICS, and the Global South asymmetrical hegemonic project and its geopolitical economy spatiality. Thus, globalization is an open process, which is actually and will be the result of different forms of re-articulation and re-hierarchization of spatial scales, depending on the hegemonic projects that prevail in the actual global struggle.

Hidden Gender Violence in the War on Organized Crime in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico (2010-2011)

Militarization[1] in this country - Mexico - is a fundamental factor of political definition due to the loss of life[2] that it has represented, and the impact on public life stemming from the constant violation of the human rights of men, but especially for women, who have both seen their everyday life modified. This fight against organized crime, some have defined it as a war against the people, which pretends to be a war on drug trafficking. In Ciudad Juarez, we already know that the presence of the army and police on the streets does not increase safety, and instead, gender violence is exposed in deaths that occur constantly, so that militarization and impunity are the key to reading the new events as part of a hegemonic project, in which the bodies and humanity are no longer relevant.

Making Transnational Markets: The Institutional Politics Behind the TTIP

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) may or may not bear fruit in its current incarnation, but it certainly teaches us crucial lessons regarding the institutional dynamics of market integration beyond the state. I argue that the TTIP’s so called ‘regulatory cooperation’, in principle a mere mechanism for ‘discussion’ and ‘exchange’ between regulators, would have a profound impact on the regulatory culture across the Atlantic. I make this argument in three interrelated steps. First, building on insights from constitutional law and political science, I outline an analytical framework for the study of rule-making institutions beyond the state. Second, I analyze the TTIP through the lens of this framework, illustrating the mechanisms through which its model for regulatory cooperation could reform the regulatory culture in the EU. Third, I argue that this change in the EU regulatory culture would have been neither an accident, nor a result of a US-led hegemonic project. Instead, the TTIP’s regulatory cooperation is a part of the EU’s internal political struggle, intended ultimately to re-balance not only powers between the legislative and the executive in the EU, but also within the EU’s executive branch itself.

Spaces of Right-Wing Populism and Anti-Muslim Racism in Austria. Identitarian Movement, Civil Initiatives and the Fight against ‘Islamisation’

This article argues that the current right-wing social movements in Austria are taking part in a right-wing populist hegemonic project relying on anti-Muslim racism, anti-immigration sentiment and xeno-racism (Fekete 2001). Analysing texts and interviews of two right-wing populist social movements, the Identitarian Movement and the Civil initiatives against the building of mosques, with a critical frame analysis approach, the paper identifies their spaces of political action with the aim of under- standing their success. We argue that, rather than competing with the Austrian Freedom Party in the space of national (party) politics, these movements have established their own niches in the Austrian political space. This strategy not only enables them to co-exist with the main right-wing populist actor, the Freedom Party, in a mutually supportive environment, but it also broadens the right-wing populist discursive strategy of constructing a double antagonism between ‘us’ and ‘them’ (the Elite) and ‘the others’. Hence, while the Identitarian Movement is concerned with meta-politics on the level of the ‘supra-regional’ space which is understood to shape European culture and ‘ethnic identity’, the civil initiatives’ niche is located on the local level and is presented as the space where conflicts between ‘us’ and ‘the other’ are experienced. In our approach of analysing spaces of political action, we argue that recent right-wing populism is successful because it manages to ‘diversify’ spaces of action and to colonize all levels of social life with its idea of antagonistic politics.

The justice of neoliberalism: moral ideology and redistributive politics of public-sector retrenchment in Serbia

This article seeks to contribute to the anthropological analysis of neoliberalism as a hegemonic project of capitalist social transformation through a close examination of the ideological legitimation of austerity-driven public-sector retrenchment in Serbia. It shows how long-term continuities of political economy and public discourse create opportunities for market populist elites to sell neoliberalism as a moral project. Persistent structural conditions, especially scarcity of jobs, and an established popular discourse about the excessive and corrupt public sector provide a fertile soil for a moral ideology that justifies neoliberal policies as a redress to an immoral redistribution of societal resources.

Production of Hegemony and Production of Space in Nairobi

The high profile attributed to African urban economies in the global market, the promise of the evergreen ‘development project’ and the contradictions produced by the rapid urbanization process contribute to make African cities important domains for the affirmation and maintenance of hegemonic projects. The discourse about the city is a key terrain through which hegemony is fought.Nairobi is a point in case, where power and discourse have been interwoven with the production of the city. Since independence, the World Bank and United Nations have largely influenced urban policies. Nowadays, new players and interests are engaged in this battle for ideas.Four urban projects initiated in the last decade by actors operating at multiple political and geographic scales are analysed in the paper. The main objective is to reveal the imaginaries they embed and explain why they have become hegemonic.

Beyond Civilization and Barbarism: Culture and Politics in Postrevolutionary Argentina by Brendan Lanctot (review)

LANCTOT, BRENDAN. Beyond Civilization and Barbarism: Culture and Politics in Postrevolutionary Argentina. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2014. iii + 446 pp.Nineteenth-century Argentina has long been understood in terms of a binary opposition between tradition and modernity, incarnated in the forms of the ruling Federalista party and its opponents. Led by the caudilllo Juan Manuel de Rosas and having their base in the ranchers and mestizos of the countryside and the AfroArgentine population of Buenos Aires, the Federales defended and economic nationalism. Their opponents, meanwhile, consisted primarily of Buenos Aires's white commercial elite, which sought greater and economic ties between their country and Europe and the United States. The civil conflict that erupted between the two groups in the period between 1829 and 1852 would be immortalized in the pages of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's canonical Civilizacion y barbarie (1845), a work that lends its name to the polemic between modernity and tradition that continues to shape the field of Latin American studies to this day.As its title suggests, Brendan Lanctot's penetrating and original Beyond Civilization and Barbarism: Culture and Politics in Postrevolutionary Argentina seeks to loosen the hold of Sarmiento's foundational binary on Southern Cone studies. Inspired by Ricardo Piglia's (Notas sobre el Facundo. Punto de Vista 8 [1980]: 8-15), Julio Ramos's (Desencuentros de la modernidad en Latina: literatura y politica en el siglo XIX. 1989. Caracas: El Perro y la Rana, 2009), and Diana Sorensen's (Facundo and the Construction of Argentine Culture. Austin: U of Texas P, 1996) poststructuralist readings of Sarmiento's canonical text, Lanctot extends these authors' theoretical gaze beyond the work of the sanjuanino writer and towards archival sources, paying particular attention to little-studied pro-Rosas writers. Comparing the Rosistas to their opposition among the well-known intellectuals of the Generation of 1837, Lanctot problematizes the traditional dichotomy between the groups by mapping the shared discursive sphere in which they debated one another. The critical paradigm that such a reading proposes suggests] that politics in postrevolutionary Argentina consisted not of a clash between a vestigial colonial worldview and an ideology imported wholesale, if belatedly, from the metropolis. Rather, both sides engaged in a decidedly modern dispute over efforts to configure and control fledgling governing bodies and subjects (11).Thus, demonstrating a particular interest in the creation and interpellation of political subjects through cultural forms [which] imagined, elicited, and conditioned popular involvement in competing hegemonic projects throughout postindependence Latin America (12), Lanctot seeks to understand the place of the Argentine pueblo in the nineteenth-century sphere. The book argues that nation-state formation in the region consisted largely of the class's discursive efforts to interpellate the masses. Building on the recent interest that Latin Americanist historians have shown in the protagonism of the popular classes in nineteenth-century nation-building, Beyond offers a productive departure from the reigning paradigms of nineteenth-century Latin American literary studies, which have tended to focus on the foundational fictions, historical novels, and cronicas urbanas of the lettered elite, or the periodical culture of the middle classes.Chapter I, Writing, Affect, and the Portraiture of Power, focuses on the ways in which representations of Rosas were used to create the affective bonds needed to unite the masses and secure the Federalista regime's hegemony. Providing a rare look at descriptions of Rosas by Federalista authors, Lanctot analyzes two 1830 biographies of the caudillo: a poem by Luis Perez, written in popular dialect, and a more cultured essay by Pedro de Angelis. …

Hidden Gender Violence in the War on Organized Crime in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico (2010-2011)

Militarization[1] in this country Mexico is a fundamental factor of political definition due to the loss of life[2] that it has represented, and the impact on public life stemming from the constant violation of the human rights of men, but especially for women, who have both seen their everyday life modified. This fight against organized crime, some have defined it as a war against the people, which pretends to be a war on drug trafficking. In Ciudad Juarez, we already know that the presence of the army and police on the streets does not increase safety, and instead, gender violence is exposed in deaths that occur constantly, so that militarization and impunity are the key to reading the new events as part of a hegemonic project, in which the bodies and humanity are no longer relevant.
 
 

Greening the Economy or Economizing the Green Project? When Environmental Concerns Are Turned into a Means to Save the Market

The “green economy” is fast becoming the new alpha and omega for many policy makers, corporations, political actors, and NGOs who want to tackle both the environmental and economic crisis at once. Or would it be better to speak about “green capitalism?” Going green is not only important in the fight against environmental destruction, it also makes a country “stronger, healthier, safer, more innovative, competitive and respected,” argues Thomas Friedman, the well-known New York Times columnist. “Is there anything that is more patriotic, capitalist, and geostrategic than this?” Indeed, the rationale underlying the nascent project of the green economy is that if the market could become the instrument for tackling the environmental crisis, the fight against this crisis could be the royal road to solving the problems of the market. Focusing in particular on the green economy’s impact on climate change, this paper analyzes the green economy as a hegemonic project that tries to retranslate environmental concerns into a new jargon, and to turn environmental conflict into a new motor for economic development.

Rwanda: Progress or Powder Keg?

While post-genocide Rwanda’s decent technocratic governance has led to strong economic recovery and good public service provision, its political governance is deeply flawed and may destroy these achievements. The ruling RPF has solidly established hegemony by eliminating the political opposition and autonomous civil society, massively violating human rights, and killing well over hundred thousand of its own citizens, abusing the legal and justice systems, and deploying skillful information management. This article addresses the way in which this hegemonic project was conducted, how this relates to regime achievements in the economic sphere, and how tradeoffs between political and technocratic governance have kept the international community at bay.

The reconfiguration of the transnational power bloc in the crisis

The current political conjuncture is analysed as a crisis of hegemony in the transnational power bloc. The previous hegemonic crisis of the 1970s lasted about 10 years before the neoliberal hegemonic project was firmly established. This new regime evolved in two stages: the first marked by the hegemony of transnational industrial capital; the second marked by the hegemony of finance, ending with the global financial crisis. The next regime will mainly be shaped by struggles along three lines of conflict within the transnational power bloc: between finance and productive capital; between ‘green’ and ‘black’ capital; and between the old industrialized countries and the emerging economies. Using patterns of political contestation and policy development as indicators of change in power relations, it is concluded: that finance is still part of the power bloc but no longer hegemonic; that green capital is gaining momentum but facing strong opposition; and that there has been some strengthening of the new powers but the situation is still unsettled. Transition to a green growth model, where productive capital from the North is hegemonic but with strengthened Southern capital, is a possibility but not the only one in this still open situation.

Legal Dispossession: State Strategies and Selectivities in the Expansion of Indonesian Palm Oil and Agrofuel Production

ABSTRACTThis article examines the role of the state in the appropriation and control of land in Indonesian palm oil and agrofuel production. Drawing on political ecology and critical state and hegemony theory, it focuses particularly on the legal state strategies that support the hegemonic project of agro‐industrial and export‐oriented palm oil and agrofuel production. The article analyses the structural, strategic and spatial selectivities — the mechanisms of marginalization and privilege — that accompany the strategies the state employs. Three important strategies are discussed, namely the codification of land ownership, the concentration of land possession and the valorization of natural resources in the context of de‐ and recentralization. The article concludes that these legal state strategies represent an important means to organize and protect a large‐scale palm oil project as they succeed in universalizing dominant interests whilst at the same time (partially) integrating subaltern interests.

Explaining Organizational Paths through the Concept of Hegemony: Evidence from the Italian Car Industry

By analysing the Fiat case, we contextualize path-dependence processes within the relations of production and propose a neo-Gramscian interpretation of the agency-structure interplay within path-dependent phenomena based on the distinction between structural hegemony and hegemonic projects. Building upon recent developments in understanding institutional complexity, we treat agency as embedded within, yet separated from, self-reinforcements that are generated by multiple competing logics. The aim is to deepen our understanding of the relationship between collective agency and the emergence of meta-routines in the pre-formation phase of the path-dependence process, and their interaction with self-reinforcements in the formation and lock-in phases.

Types and Beauties: Evaluating and Exoticizing Women on the Midway Plaisance at the 1893 Columbian Exposition

ON THE MIDWAY PLAISANCE OF THE 1893 Columbian Exposition, outside parameters of White City and just a short jaunt from iconic Ferris Wheel, stood a theater patronized by old men and wicked youths who watched, in a bleary-eyed ecstasy, Oriental athletes of stage as they danced, toyed with cigarette, and by their smiles gave a Persian Parisian charm to anomalous entertainment.1 Colorful descriptions of Midway Plaisance heavily populated souvenir books commemorating Chicago Worlds Fair. Filled with photographic portrait types, landscape scenes, and ebullient commentary, souvenir books simultaneously reproduced and shaped experience of fairgoer (See Figure 1). As a cultural text constructed by and for a white, masculine American subject, souvenir book reveals objectives and weaknesses of hegemonic projects in United States during nineteenth century. In particular, representations of female bodies on Midway Plaisance illuminate intersecting discourses of race and gender.As a combination and juxtaposition of White City and foreign villages of Midway Plaisance, Columbian Exposition functioned as an expression of national identity. Hegemonic forces in Chicago and United States at end of nineteenth century shaped imagining of nation, and Exposition served as a powerful tool for their project.2 Robert Rydell asserts that Worlds fairs propagated ideas and values of country's political, financial, corporate, and intellectual leaders and offered these ideas as proper interpretation of social and political reality.3Alan Trachtenberg identifies powerful perpetuators of national as established, propertied, and wealthy elite who aimed to subsume subaltern under banner of 'peace, prosperity, progress and patriotism.'4 Indeed, Chicago business interests and financial leaders who lobbied to bring fair to city elected Exposition's board of directors. In turn, fair's administration used White City to showcase a grand vision of American and human progress.5While operating as mechanisms of hegemony, expressions of national unity like Columbian Exposition nevertheless belie internal contradictions. Lauren Berlant cautions that a national still inherits tensions that exist in national space. Although political legitimacy depends upon the cultural expression of national fantasy, narratives of national identity mask inherent conflict.6Indeed, numerous domestic tensions plagued last decade of nineteenth century. Lingering cultural and economic differences between North and South frustrated post-Reconstruction politics. Rural America engaged in widespread political mobilization as Populist movement gained ground. Meanwhile, labor skirmishes erupted in United States cities; Chicago itself would serve as site of infamous Pullman strike year following Fair. The social climate was further exacerbated by racial anxieties surrounding influx of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. To top it off, a severe economic depression overcame United States very year of Columbian Exposition.7 Economic instability, racial anxiety, and political uncertainty contributed to a contentious national environment.Frank Ninkovich contends that domestic issues and United States' uncertain role in international arena combined to create significant identity crisis during 1890s. The resulting anxiety took form of hyper-aggressive nationalist public opinion known as jingoism.8 Trachtenberg similarly argues that late nineteenth century elites in business, politics, and culture were working to win hegemony over dissident but divided voices of labor, farmers, immigrants, blacks and women.9 The ruling class during final years of nineteenth century, therefore, fashioned dominant narratives of national identity as a way of dealing with nation's internal tensions. …

Understanding and interrupting hegemonic projects in education: learning from Stuart Hall

Stuart Hall had a significant impact on critical analyses of rightist mobilizations in education. This is very visible in my own work, for example, in such volumes as Official Knowledge (2014) and Educating the ‘Right’ Way (2006). After describing an important series of lectures that Stuart Hall gave at the Havens Center for Social Structure and Social Change at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, I detail the nonessentialist position that served as the grounding of Hall's own discussion of race, ideology, and conjuncture, and how it affected so much of the critical examination of neoliberal and neoconservative reconstructions of education. In the context of laying out the tasks of the ‘critical scholar/activist in education,’ I then portray what we can learn from Hall about the role of the organic intellectual.

¿Qué hacer... con el desarrollo? Neodesarrollismos, buenvivir y alternativas populares

Desde la posguerra, la historia del desarrollo capitalista en la periferia estuvo signada por el proyecto desarrollista. Con su crisis en los años 1970 y hasta fines de los noventa, el proyecto hegemónico pasó de la industrialización sustitutiva a la reestructuración regre­siva neoliberal. La crisis neoliberal dio lugar en Sur América a un nuevo proceso marcado por la disputa entre el nuevo desarrollismo de matriz neoestructuralista y el proyecto societal del buenvivir. El presente artículo analiza las transformaciones que atravesaron esos proyectos en Sur América, concentrando la discusión en torno al debate (y lucha social) actual entre el buenvivir y el neodesarrollismo.