Hegemonic Project Research Articles

Regular and irregular forces in conflict: nineteenth century insurgencies in South America

ABSTRACT In the decades following independence from Spain, ‘civil wars’ ravaged the newly established polities in South America. Former vice-regal capitals inherited a larger portion of the colonial administration and had larger economic resources and a hegemonic project they were able to have permanent and professional armed forces, capable of leading the offensive and giving battle following the European rules of military art. The central hypothesis of this work is that there is a necessary relationship between the shape of these asymmetrical conflicts, their outcome and the political territorial configuration of each country in post-revolutionary Spanish America. When permanent armies took over from local militias, the capital kept the integrity of its territories and there was a tendency towards political centralization. When this did not happen and the militias managed to find a way to defeat their centralizing enemies, the local powers had an opportunity to renegotiate their participation in the political body, and sought to maintain their independence, which was manifest in federal agreements, otherwise a process of territorial fragmentation began. More than a difference between regular and irregular forces there was one between intermittent, and permanent mobilization.

The potentials and challenges of left populism in Turkey: the case of the peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP)

ABSTRACTIn spring 2015, Turkey witnessed the unexpected rise of the HDP, founded by the Kurdish Liberation Movement together with the Turkish radical left, against President Erdoğan’s authoritarian rule. In this article, I will employ contemporary literature on left populism to explain the HDP’s rise as an alternative left hegemonic project against the neoliberal authoritarianism that Erdoğan represents. After discussing the historical context from which the HDP emerged and grew, I will evaluate its discourse and strategies based on a conceptualization of left-wing populism. Lastly, I will discuss the challenges that the HDP confronted after the June 2015 elections and the differences between the Turkish and Western European contexts for a left-wing populist strategy.

Looking east: (Re-)creating a social work ‘industry’ in the People’s Republic of China

The article furnishes a critical commentary on social work in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). It is maintained that it is important to contextualise this development by taking into account the restoration of capitalism and wider structures of governance. Although there is no perfect alignment, it is argued that the (re-)creation of social work occurred during the same period when a Chinese proletariat was (re-)created. Drawing on the work of Antonio Gramsci and resisting a reductively mechanistic interpretation of the profession’s evolution, it is maintained that social work’s new centrality in the PRC can be best understood if it is situated alongside the hegemonic project of the Communist Party of China (CPC) to construct, what is referred to as, the ‘harmonious society’. The article concludes by tentatively identifying the emerging contours of social work with distinctive Chinese traits.

Processes of Territorialization in Mexico

Current violence and insecurity have transformed many aspects of social life in Mexico. In this article, I will analyze how the different configurations of indigenous autonomous government in Cherán and Tlahuitoltepec are viable forms of social organization for providing local security through their relationship with communal territory. In the initial theoretic discussion, I define territorialization as a dynamic process that includes multiple actors, involves a collaborative claim over land and is grounded in violence. In the empiric part, I focus on the processes of territorialization that encompass the relation of indigenous autonomous government, violence, and comunalidad. The (violent) conflicts over hegemonic projects are compound in this study by the autonomous indigenous government and their linkages with the state apparatus of representative democracy.

Public policy and the digital deadline: The implementation of the Digital Addressable System (DAS) in West Bengal

The introduction of the mandatory Digital Addressable System (DAS) with strict, phase-wise deadlines for different provinces within India has compelled us to reconsider not only the television apparatus itself but also broadcast policies, television industry, content and reception. The introduction of DAS can be posited within a series of similar public policies starting from the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) project in 1975 to the more recent Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) or Aadhaar project and Digital India campaign, all folded into the developmental rhetoric of the welfare state. The rollout of DAS provides the site to explore the relationship between the government, neo-liberal market and digital technologies that underscores the contradictions which are constitutive of modernity, and invests in the study of the neo-liberal cultural sites of statist intervention. Within this conceptual framework, this article would focus on West Bengal as a case in point to read the implementation of mandatory DAS both as a site of hegemonic projects embodying promises of neo-liberal development and of the incongruities that are inherent in them. While the union government claimed that any cable television service provider who does not switch to digital signal within deadline can be penalized and the equipment confiscated, the state Government said that they would launch an agitation if analogue cable signals were blacked out after the deadline for cable digitalization and thus, the deadline was extended for several months. The confrontation over cable digitalization in West Bengal offers a site to explore in what way, contrary to its typical image of a fully automated digital ecosystem of governance, as the modern states would like to conceive, it is loaded with internal contradiction. My inquiry moves across a range of discursive locations and registers, aiming to explore in what way various local stakeholders negotiate in this policy implementation? How does DAS help theorization of a changing relationship between the market, digital technology and the developmental modern? While raising these questions, this article would try to explore in what way DAS can be located within the historical trajectory of techno-cultural rhetoric of public policy and how it invests in the shifting political economy of broadcasting in India.

The limits of post-Marxism: the (dis)function of political theory in film and cultural studies

This article first sets out the value of the political discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe. It argues that this work was central to the development of cultural studies, in its theorisation of social and cultural practices as being part of ‘political discourse’. This confers a dignity, status, value and political importance on cultural practices of all kinds. However, the article seeks to probe the limits of this approach to cultural politics, and it does so through a necessarily unusual exploration. First, it takes an example of something ostensibly trivial from the realms of film and popular culture and explores it in terms of Laclau and Mouffe's categories, in two different ways. The ‘trivial’/pop cultural example is Bruce Lee. Could Bruce Lee be regarded as ‘politically’ significant or consequential? He was certainly an enormously influential film and popular cultural icon of the 1970s, one who arguably ignited a global ‘kung fu craze’. Moreover, Bruce Lee also had his own ‘hegemonic project’, seeking to transform and unify martial arts practices. In this paper, Bruce Lee's own ‘project’ is first examined in the terms of Laclauian categories. These are shown to be extremely useful for grasping both the project and the reasons for its failure. Then the article moves into a wider consideration of the emergence of globally popular cultural discourses of martial arts. However, Laclau and Mouffe's approach is shown to be somewhat less than satisfactory for perceiving at least some of the ‘political’ dimensions entailed in the spread martial arts culture and practices, from contexts of the global south into affluent contexts such as Hollywood film and Euro-American cultural practices. The paper argues that this is because Laclau and Mouffe's approach is logocentric, which leads it to look for and to perceive a very limited range of factors: specifically, political identities formed through political demands. However, to more fully perceive the political dimensions of culture, the paper argues that different kinds of perspective, paradigms and analysis are required. Adopting or developing some of these would enrich the field of political studies.

From domination to emancipation and freedom: reading Ernesto Laclau’s post-Marxism in conjunction with Philip Pettit’s neo-republicanism

In this paper, I bring Ernesto Laclau's post-Marxist approach into conversation with the analytical thinker Philip Pettit, who has developed an influential neo-republican conception of freedom as ‘non-domination’. Both thinkers aim to reconfigure power and domination towards more democratic and egalitarian relations and I evaluate the political implications of their respective conceptions of domination/non-domination, emancipation and freedom. I show that despite these common points of reference, the two authors exhibit considerable differences which manifest in their respective conceptions of structure and agency. In the opening section, I compare Laclau's and Pettit's respective conceptions of ‘domination’ where I highlight the differences between them in two alternate readings of Henrik Ibsen's play A Doll's House. In the second section, I examine their respective understandings of ‘emancipation’ and ‘freedom’, and I demonstrate that Pettit does not model his conception of freedom as non-domination on the idea of emancipation. This stands in contrast to Laclau, for whom emancipation remains the focal point of political struggle, despite formal equality, and who maintains the idea of the possibility of a more radical transformation in the underlying structures of society. In the final section, I consider Laclau's and Pettit's alternative conceptions of politics where both thinkers place a premium on democratic contest in challenging and overturning arbitrary power. I show that for Pettit political freedom is a mode of contestability within the established institutions, while Laclau's notions of emancipation and freedom functions at the level of competing hegemonic projects, and this facilitates a form of political struggle that might transcend the existing regime to instantiate a new institutional order. I conclude by amalgamating the respective strengths of both thinkers to provide a multi-layered analysis of contemporary forms of domination to better aid our understanding about the kinds of struggle needed to contest them.

The historical-sociological matrix and ethos at the heart and strength of MPLA’s modern Angola

Abstract: Proximate to a Weberian perspective, this article argues that the resilience of the Angolan regime is mainly owed to an ethos structured on top of a specific socio-cultural historical matrix (minority at start), evolving since the 16th century. Such matrix was structured on a prevailing Weltanschauung (world and national vision), that has been progressively self-presented, self-assumed, imposed/assimilated as national and modern within a project of identity and power hegemony, even though still and constantly ridden by several internal contradictions and tensions. Dynamics of this process is central to understand the intricacies of the relationship between rulers and ruled, evolving identities as well as the still significant social support to the party in power after more than four decades in the government. The regime’s resilience lays on such ethos in support of hegemonic power and identity project, above and beyond the president and all his political management abilities, beyond the central instrumentality of the national oil company (SONANGOL), beyond the media spotlight on influential names surrounding the presidency, including the president’s men, generals, and beyond authoritarianism.

Estrategias en disputa: educación superior y poblaciones indígenas en la construcción de los Estados-nación latinoamericanos

El presente artículo da cuenta de las formas como las poblaciones indígenas en América Latina han sido excluidas/incluidas en los procesos de diseño e implementación de la educación superior como campo en permanente disputa desde donde se construye el proyecto hegemónico de Estado-nación en la modernidad. Para ello, el documento sitúa las relaciones entre modernidad, educación y Estado-nación en América Latina y explica en qué consiste la crisis contemporánea de la educación superior como puntos de partida para la reflexión. Posteriormente, el documento se concentra en analizar cómo se han ido transformando los modos a través de los cuáles pueblos y comunidades indígenas han participado en la disputa por el proyecto de educación nacional, colocando especial atención en la educación superior; en este marco, se profundiza en la comprensión del mestizaje homogenizador, el multiculturalismo neoliberal y la interculturalidad en construcción como tendencias históricas y dispositivos para administrar las diferencias en clave étnico-racial/étnico-cultural, modelos que han implicado el desarrollo de proyectos educativos entre el asimilacionismo, la inclusión y la construcción dialogada como promesa de transformación.

On the absent ground of transnational partnerships in education: A post-foundational intervention

ABSTRACTTransnational multi-stakeholder partnerships (MSPs) are proliferating in the domain of education and development. This paper intervenes in scholarly discussions on such partnerships by pondering what post-foundational political thought might add. It is argued that both liberal and critical literature, albeit from very different viewpoints, tend to foreground order and stability. Drawing on post-foundational political theory, and a case study of the Global Partnership for Education, the present paper explores transnational MSPs in education as incomplete hegemonic projects. By bringing attention to fissures and disruptions, the paper exposes how the absent ground of ‘the political’ ultimately haunts the stability of partnerships.

Xiism as a hegemonic project in the making: Sino-communist ideology and the political economy of China’s rise

AbstractHow is Xi Jinping changing the course of China’s rise? Based on a Gramscian analytical framework inspired by Bob Jessop, this article provides an anatomy of Xiism (2012–) as an emergent hegemonic project, that is, a (fallible and contested) attempt by China’s party-based power bloc of altering global power balances in China’s favour while retaining domestic stability. Through juxtaposition with Maoism (1957–76) and Dengism (1978–2012), it is proposed that Xiism reformulates the power bloc’s strategy in three respects. First, the ideological vision of the ‘Chinese Dream’ negates Mao’s utopian-egalitarian universalism while readjusting Deng’s pro-market approach by emphasising ‘common prosperity’. Second, the economic accumulation strategy – built around the hyped Belt and Road Initiative – aims to reshape global trade and production patterns in a way that particularly benefits the state-owned sector, the Party leadership’s economic base. Third, Xi’s state project seeks to amalgamate Mao-style charismatic leadership and intra-party ‘self-rectification’ campaigns with both a Dengist commitment to political stability and traditional Chinese statecraft. The crucial issue for the coming decade is whether the Xi leadership will prove able to paper over the contradictions of this emergent ‘China Model’ and win support for it both at home and abroad.

Bajo la mira: efectos de las políticas y mecanismos ambientales en las prácticas de cacería por habitantes de la Reserva de la Biósfera Montes Azules, Chiapas

The article seeks to explain the changes in hunting, capture, and even conservation of wildlife practices, by residents of ejido Emiliano Zapata and some neighboring agrarian locations, considering the transformations of environmental policies implemented in Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve. Initially, the text proposes a periodization of environmental policies deployed regionally: from an initial authoritarian sense to its current character, partially co-participative. In this regard, the main argument is that the combination of environmental policies, mechanisms, resources, discourses and subjects, currently shape a tenuous and disputed hegemonic project of environmental governance (Roseberry, 2002 [1994]); Foucault, 2006 [1978]; Trench, 2008). In relation to hunting, the article proposes a very elementary classification of the types and senses with which the inhabitants practice it: self-consumption, but also for the protection of the cattle —when they hunt wild felines—, the crops —when hunting a series of herbivores—, and themselves —for example, by killing snakes—. Analyzing the multiple ways in which increasing environmental interventions influence the senses and intensity of hunting practices, the article reviews cases of: erasure of regulations and simulation in their fulfillment; partial and strategic adoption by the subjects, of some of the precepts and narratives that restrict the practice —the idea that the decrease in hunting “will produce” more animals—; Interested and functional adaptation of the practice, to the current territorial configuration and definition —they do not hunt for being “part of what tourists want to see”—; The conditioning by inhabitants of not carrying out the hunt in exchange for a greater involvement in the projects, spaces and resources related to environmental care; Convergence and divergence on the arguments of environmental specialists and part of the population —as in the case of hunting jaguars that attack cattle, which for some inhabitants represent “nahuales”—. The conclusions point, not to the lack of environmental interventions that regulate hunting, but to the way in which multiple transformations of the practice seem to promote a greater degree of intensity in the environmental governance regime.

International Political Economy of Labour and Gramsci’s methodology of the subaltern

Gramscian International Political Economy scholarship has predominantly focused on studying capital’s power to subsume labour under different hegemonic projects. Various Autonomist Marxists have recently sought to fill such gap by proposing a disruption-oriented International Political Economy. However, the article argues that it mirrors domination-oriented International Political Economy approaches for overemphasising labour’s disruptive potentiality and for paying little attention to the limitations that labour faces in its own empowerment. To escape from the unilateralism of these two mutually exclusive perspectives, the article reviews Gramsci’s ‘Methodology of the Subaltern’ in order to propose a Gramscian or strategic International Political Economy of Labour. Hence, the article shows that it is possible for International Political Economy scholars to study uneven capitalist development as the result of the agency of (dis)organised labour as well as to account better for the emancipatory potentiality of working-class strategies in specific contexts.

Federalización de la enseñanza y del magisterio en Zacatecas, 1922-1933

Esta investigación explica la configuración del subsistema educativo rural en Zacatecas de 1922 a 1933, periodo en el que la federalización de la enseñanza se convirtió en la política nacional para articular el proyecto hegemónico del sistema educativo mexicano. Este proceso hundió sus raíces en el federalismo clásico en el que se da la unión de varias entidades políticas que se asocian por intereses comunes y estas delegan ciertas actividades a un gobierno central. La federalización de la enseñanza trajo consigo una nueva versión de la educación popular que incluyó a un sector mayoritario de la población que estaba al margen de la instrucción elemental y rudimentaria, el campesinado. En términos metodológicos se optó por problematizar la federalización educativa desde fuentes primarias y secundarias que describen, en un primer momento, el preludio de la centralización de la educación que emanó de la Secretaría de Instrucción Primaria y Bellas Artes y se discutió en la convocatoria del Congreso Nacional de Educación de 1911. Tras un compás de espera y la declaración en 1918 de la incapacidad económica y política de los ayuntamientos para participar en el proyecto posrevolucionario del sistema de educación nacional, se abrió el camino para la firma de convenios entre las entidades y el gobierno federal para estructurar y centralizar el servicio educativo. La federalización de 1922 a 1933 en Zacatecas se implementó con la apertura de los institutos sociales y de las Normales Rurales; los primeros responden al proyecto civilizatorio de José Vasconcelos y las segundas a la novedad del modelo educativo de la acción; ambos se nutren del proceso confederalista de las corporaciones obreras, campesinas y de la enseñanza, y la creación de órganos pedagógicos de difusión oficial como El Surco y El Niño Laborista, que mostraban una visión apologética de la transformación cultural del campesinado y contribuyeron a la expansión sostenida del modelo educativo rural de instrucción primaria y normalista.

The new left, Jeremy Corbyn and the war of position: a new coherence or further fragmentation?

ABSTRACTThis article assesses the emergence of the new groups, organizations and protests that have emerged since the financial crisis and asks whether we can understand these as a fresh development where diverse movements fashioned through different ideological departure points have moved towards a form of convergence in which a wider hegemonic project can be fashioned, or whether in fact such proclamations are effectively another form of ‘wishing thinking’ in terms of left-wing renewal is concerned. In line with recently argued work, it suggests that for the left to look to overcome the ideological obstacles that plagued its twentieth century development, it needs to provide a wide/open set of principles that look to contest dominant norms of the neoliberal order that exist at the many levels of civil society. In this way a ‘war of position’ (to borrow from Gramsci) needs to be forged that looks to avoid charges of ‘elitism’ and ‘fragmentation’ that had seen the left to fail as a coherent alternative since the cold war. Whilst the new left has forged forms of contestation at the civil level (for example Occupy and the ESF) and more recently at the Political level (with Sanders, Corbyn and Syriza/Podermos), it has yet to form a consistent and coherent war of position to neoliberal capitalism.

International Political Economy of Labour and Gramsci’s methodology of the subaltern

Gramscian International Political Economy scholarship has predominantly focused on studying capital’s power to subsume labour under different hegemonic projects. Various autonomist Marxists have recently sought to ‘voice labour’ by proposing a disruption-oriented International Political Economy. However, this article argues that such an approach mirrors domination-oriented International Political Economy approaches by overemphasising labour’s disruptive potentiality and by paying little attention to the historical limitations that labour faces in its own empowerment. To escape from the unilateralism of these two mutually exclusive perspectives, Gramsci’s ‘Methodology of the Subaltern’ is reviewed in order to propose a Gramscian or strategic International Political Economy of Labour. Hence, this article shows that it is possible for International Political Economy scholars to study uneven capitalist development as the result of the agency of (dis)organised labour and thereby to better account for the emancipatory potentiality of working-class strategies in specific contexts.

Treading the Path of the Shari�a: Indonesian Feminism at the Crossroads of Western Modernity and Islamism

The downfall of Suhartos New Order in 1998 has opened up a new era of political freedom and participation for activists and for groups that try to promote emancipatory agendas as well as for political Islamists keen on introducing tougher conservative, religious measures to society. Womens activism and participation in different sectors has flourished, and their voices have had much stronger echoes in the political dynamics of the country. However, the new era has also given rise to Islamic radicalism that is also hostile to feminist causes and perceives feminism as part of the Western hegemonic project. In such a slippery political terrain, womens movements in Indonesia have to remake the image of feminism in Indonesian terms so that it cannot be dismissed as an ideology imported from the West and, simultaneously, they must develop a home-grown counter-discourse against the mainstream interpretation of sacred texts by using the same sources of knowledge that the Islamists employ. To what extent women activists have succeeded or failed in their struggles to free Indonesian Muslim women from the shackles of the male-dominated reading of Islamic dogma, and what the future trajectories of their struggles might be, are the primary concerns of this essay.

Antagonistic governance in South African fruit global production networks: a neo‐Gramscian perspective

AbstractGovernance is a core focus of the global value chain (GVC) and global production network (GPN) literatures. Recent research claims ‘complementary’ or ‘synergistic’ governance, achieved through the confluence of private, public and civil society actors, is required for sustainable social gains. While moving beyond a narrow focus on economic coordination, such analysis lacks a sufficiently nuanced examination of power relations. In this article, I draw on neo‐Gramscian perspectives to account for ongoing contestation, positing that governance needs to be understood in the context of a broader hegemonic project. ‘Antagonistic governance’ is proposed to conceptualize contestation within and across diverse initiatives, which forge, challenge and transform hegemonic stability in GVC/GPNs. I explore this through the South African fruit sector, in particular, a labour crisis in 2012/13. I argue that we need to move beyond apolitical readings of governance to account for the material and discursive practices through which contestation gets played out, compromises are forged, and hegemonic order is maintained.

A tale of two publics? Online politics in Ethiopia’s elections

ABSTRACTThis article examines two apparently contradictory uses of digital media during elections: in 2005, when still nascent digital tools were employed by Ethiopians to contest power in ways that pre-configured tactics later adopted by protesters elsewhere in Africa and globally; and in 2015, when digital publics displayed disenchantment towards an election with a foregone outcome. Relying on a mixed-methods approach, combining interviews with some of the very actors that shaped Ethiopia’s information society and the analysis of more than 3,000 statements posted on Facebook 3 months before and 1 month after Ethiopia’s elections on 24 May, the article offers an empirical examination of this contradiction, and how an authoritarian state has sought to influence online public discursive spaces. The findings suggest interpreting the effervescence of 2005 and the apathy of 2015 not as disjointed examples of active and passive uses of digital media. Especially when read against the background of the protests that erupted in the years following the elections, when digital media were embraced again as tools for mass mobilization, we propose reading the “digital apathy” of 2015 rather as a critique moved towards the fictitious apparatus for political participation erected in 2015, one that concurrently challenges the EPRDF’s hegemonic project, and the obsession of the international community towards elections as a tool for political change.

Constructing Hegemony in Global Politics. A Discourse–Theoretical Approach to Policy Analysis

The article proposes a discourse–theoretical approach to policy analysis that explores how political relations are changed through and within a strategic and interest-led process with a focus on conflictual struggles that attempt to establish, change, or consolidate specific interests and meanings as universalities. It suggests a conceptualization of hegemonic projects and discusses their relation to the common good. After elaborating on the term discourse formation as a middle-range concept and a more concrete approach to hegemony, the article suggests various clusters of (discursive) strategies to facilitate the evaluation of hegemonic processes within a policy field. Lastly, it introduces vectors of hegemony, proposing an analytical grid as a framework to facilitate reflection on hegemony. European austerity policies are examined to illustrate how some logics and strategies work to strengthen a specific governance approach to the eurozone crisis.