Hegemonic Project Research Articles

It’s your world too, you can do what you want”: the role of subcultural activism in Stop The City protests (1983-1984) and its implications for political protest in Britain’

ABSTRACT This article explores the role of subcultural activism in the Stop the City Protests (STC), 1983-1984. It shows how protestors broke with the consensual approach of overarching political organisations, chiefly the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), using direct action tactics to shut down the City of London, which was emerging as a strategic centre for globalised capitalism. STC is shown to be on a continuum with the radicalism of the preceding decades, with bands, including Crass and Poison Girls bridging the gap to anarcho-punk. This article innovates by combining official evidence, in the form of police briefing notes, with ‘ground-up’ activist materials and fanzines, to evaluate the approach and ideology of the protestors and the police, thereby tracing the increasingly intolerant policing methods that were adopted during key political battles of the 1980s, including The Miners’ Strike and The Battle of the Beanfield. Questioning the extent to which Thatcherism was the hegemonic project of the 1980s, it demonstrates how STC was at odds with the contemporaneous corporatisation of political activism, and thereby provided a model for the road protests and Reclaim the Streets movement of the 1990s, and fed into the anti-globalisation and environmental movements of the 21st century.

The Capitulations Syndrome: Why Revisionist Powers Leverage Post-Colonial Sensibilities toward Post-Imperial Projects

AbstractThis article confronts a puzzle regarding revisionist powers: How to make sense of states whose behavior combines “post-colonial” critique of Western hegemony with “post-imperial” projects at home and in near abroads? Answers to this question are often informed by realist notions of great power competition that tend to read revisionist critique of the West as either epiphenomenal or due to intrinsic enmity.This piece proposes an alternative—the “capitulations syndrome”—which is developed via the Ottoman/Turkish experience and the literature on ontological insecurity. The syndrome combines “moral injury” at subordination to the West with attempts to elevate a state's status within Western-dominated international society. Anxieties produced by this paradox are managed via state narratives that celebrate select glories and traumas. This results in an exceptionalist sense of national “Self” that—when confronted—can lead to outrage at “Others” of the state story. The syndrome, I argue, both shapes broad imaginaries and is instrumentalized by policymakers. Thus, calls for global justice vis-à-vis Western hegemony can coexist with hegemonic projects nearer home.Identifying a series of family resemblances with China and Iran, I conclude by underscoring the article's main contributions: (1) its empirical study of the (post-)Ottoman experience as a case of revisionist former empires, (2) its analytical tool—the capitulations syndrome—with which to read comparative patterns, and (3) its epistemological corrective to international relations’ blindspot regarding actors with both “post-colonial” and “post-imperial” features. This hybrid condition enables revisionist former empires to invoke post-colonial solidarities in pursuit of post-imperial projects.

Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance

Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance

‘The sanctions are good for some people but not for someone like me who actually genuinely does their job search.’ British Jobseeker’s Allowance claimant views on punitive welfare reform: Hegemony in action?

This article shows that the unemployed are broadly supportive of welfare reforms which have led to increased poverty; exacerbated ill health; led some to engage in ‘survival crime’ or to disengage from the social security system. This support is predicated on the perceived need to discipline ‘undeserving’ groups; principally the feckless, those gaming the system and migrants. The authors argue that this reflects the success of a ‘two-nations’ hegemonic project that has sought to legitimise an ongoing phase of capitalist development characterised by the removal of social protections, widening inter-class inequalities and the implementation of punitive welfare reforms to submit the unemployed to insecure poverty labour. This article makes a significant original contribution to the field by demonstrating that the resonance of the ‘two-nations’ hegemonic project resides in both its relatability to lived experiences of the unemployed and its tendency to cast a stigmatising threat over their out-of-work status.

The Rise and Demise of Neoliberal Populism as a Hegemonic Project: Brazil, Thailand, and Turkey

Three countries—Turkey, Thailand, and Brazil—exemplify the rise of neoliberal populism as a response to the crisis created in peripheral social formations by their integration into global capitalism. This essay thus begins by examining the social dimensions of neoliberal populism: namely, the formation of its social base, its policies of economic inclusion, and its organic relations with revisionist capitalist groups. Since these countries have undergone political crises resulting in regime changes with different authoritarian patterns, the essay then deals with three domains of struggle in which the specific dynamics of each country and the strategies and capacities of neoliberal populist parties can be decisive: political struggles with and among intrastate actors, the strategies followed by segments of capital and neoliberal populist parties, and the capacity of such parties to hold broad class coalitions together.

Beyond the “War on Terror”: Mobilities and Regimes of Inequality; An Epistemological and Ethical Reflection

At the intersection of multipolar, multi-scalar sites of mutual exchange and tension, Afghanistan and Iraq conjure imaginaries of shadowy and risky geographies wired up to dispersed terrorist cells around the globe. These spaces constitute the sites where the “civilizing process” of the “War on Terror” takes place, “laboratories of globalization” where global hegemonic neoliberal projects of free market democratization and development get stranded. At the same time, they are spaces where global interconnections are accelerated, and where multiple mobilities, often contingent upon expectations about the successes and failures of reconstruction, are interwoven, producing networks that extend well beyond national borders.

Minimal hegemony in Sudan: exploring the rise and fall of the National Islamic Front

ABSTRACT This article adopts a Gramscian approach to exploring the political economy behind the rise and fall of the National Islamic Front (NIF) in Sudan. It traces the NIF’s rise from the 1960s, with particular attention to the class character of its hegemonic project and shifting ideology. Reading its reign through the lens of minimal hegemony, it critically explores how neoliberal restructuring produced a narrow but powerful ruling bloc at the expense and marginalisation of different social groups, and how shifts in international relations intertwined with social transformations across Sudan to reproduce new forms of dependency. Paying attention to the uneven nature of capitalist development and resulting antagonisms during this period, it explores why the NIF was unable to forge an integral hegemony, ending with the crisis of authority that overthrew Bashir and the emergence of social forces that continue to contest its cultural, political and economic project.

Battles forSocio‐SpatialHegemony in the Exilic Space of Exarcheia

AbstractThe neighbourhood of Exarcheia in Athens, Greece has long been recognised as the socio‐spatial epicentre of the Athenian anarchist and anti‐authoritarian milieu wherein several self‐organised spaces, groups, and initiatives have thrived. In this paper, I characterise Exarcheia as an exilic space within the capitalist world‐system. Exilic spaces are paradoxical spaces of relative and precarious autonomy grounded in the principles of self‐organisation, solidarity, and mutual aid. While I highlight Exarcheia’s exilic status, I also investigate significant internal problematics and tensions. Specifically, I investigate the construction and implementation of a hegemonic project at the exilic scale revolving around the perception that certain anti‐social actors were gaining ground in the neighbourhood whose behaviours constituted a direct threat to Exarcheia’s exilic status. I then problematise the hegemonic consensus and identify a counter‐hegemonic response consisting of marginalised voices opposed to the hegemonic project in both theory and practice, signalling a crisis of exilic hegemony.

Strengthening the strategic protection of Russia in conditions of external geopolitical challenges by means of settlement of the Russian space

Subject. The paper is devoted to the description of population and life support settlement of the Russian space as an internal strategic response to the external geopolitical challenge of the Pan-American geopolitical world. Objectives. The aim is to describe strategic and tactical aims of the Pan-American geopolitical world in the worldwide Pan-American hegemonic exploitation project, special aims of this project with respect to Russia, and to point out the way of necessary and possible Russian counteraction to the achievement of these aims. Methods. The study employs the population and space conception of strengthening the strategic protection of the State by means of population and life support settlement of the Russian space. Results. The paper describes the Pan-American hegemonic exploitation project, aimed at strategic retaining of the achieved USA-centered world order. Within this project, the Pan-American geopolitical world is forced to realize the strategic restraint of the European Union and China as its major geopolitical and geo-economic rivals. This strategic restraint is impossible without establishing a complete control over Russian natural resources and infrastructure by the Pan-American world. Conclusions. In conditions of the said external geopolitical challenge, Russia will not be able to ensure its strategic protection without its own population and life support settlement of the Russian space. The paper provides a theoretical substantiation of necessary economic and administrative measures directed to the said strategic settlement.

Racial formation and education: A critical analysis of the Sewell report

The article provides an analysis and critique of the education component of the 2021 Sewell Report on Race and Ethnic Disparities. It commences by providing a critical summary of the report focusing on its spurious claims to objectivity, the erasure of racism and the inadequacy of its recommendations. The second part of the article focuses on developing a contextualised analysis of the report. Omi and Winant’s ideas about racial formation are used to provide a lens through which to interpret the Sewell report as part of a wider hegemonic project of the right to redefine what it means to be British in the context of a deepening organic crises of capitalism. The article outlines the nature of the crisis. It locates the report within a consideration of three ‘racial projects’ that have shaped education policy, namely, the nationalist, multicultural and antiracist projects. Through advocating a ‘colourblind’ approach to education policy and the selective appropriation of multicultural discourse, it will be argued that the report needs to be understood as part of a wider effort to reconfigure the nationalist project in response to crisis. It is suggested, however, that despite its many flaws, the Sewell report poses challenges for those who have traditionally been aligned to multiculturalism and antiracism in education. The article concludes by setting out a vision for a new progressive project aimed at advancing racial and cultural justice that it is suggested, can begin to address these challenges.

Populist nationalism in the age of Trump

This paper builds upon the arguments advanced by Johnson and Frombgen in “Race and the Emergence of Populist Nationalism in the United States” (2009). Johnson and Frombgen made three central arguments: that the US is two nations, not one; that racial attitudes are central to each national identity, and that social movements of a populist character have critically shaped each national identity. They then offered a typology of left and right national identities, each of which had been shaped by populist social movements. This paper seeks to revisit the two nations thesis in the era of Donald Trump on the right and Bernie Sanders on the left. Following Johnson and Frombgen, it employs the Gramscian theory of hegemony to analyse both populisms, the overarching nationalisms associated with them, and the place of race within each national identity. It goes on to examine the tensions within both traditional and progressive nationalism between the mainstream and populist hegemonic projects regarding the American nation. Thus, a typology revising Johnson and Frombgen’s is also offered.

Phantom investments, hegemony and the chameleon of dispossession: tourism development at Cavo Sidero- Crete, Greece

ABSTRACT Questioning the prevailing discourse of multiple benefits surrounding tourism development, this paper examines the Itanos Gaia investment on Cavo Sidero peninsula, north-eastern Crete as a hegemonic project of dispossession. Drawing on David Harvey’s theorisation of accumulation by dispossession and Gramsci’s original work on hegemony, we describe and analyse the specificities and antinomies of the Itanos Gaia project, first to chart the modalities of dispossession in four interrelated strands operative in this case: nature, land, financial speculation and the institutionalisation of dispossession, and second, to analyse the interplay between hegemony and the imposition of dispossession, including its internalisation in the realm of (local) civil society as ‘common sense’, underpinned by the local and broader dynamics of a particular power bloc. Empirically, this inquiry is informed by a survey conducted among local residents to identify local perceptions/views about the investment.

Complicity and responsibility: after Arif Dirlik on the Asia-Pacific and China

ABSTRACT This essay pays tribute to Arif Dirlik’s critical approach to the Asia-Pacific in the 1990s and to China today. It uses the example of Dirlik’s writing as a model for reflecting on transformations that the region has undergone in the last thirty years, with a focus on the historical experience of the Philippines. It draws on Dirlik’s analysis of the continuing role of colonialism and anti-colonial nationalism and the legacy of the socialist revolution in China to understand the key features of the Duterte regime in the Philippines, which are both comparable and directly related to developments in China in the context of global capitalism. Finally, the essay follows Dirlik’s own moves in seeking what is overlooked and remains politically significant within these various hegemonic geopolitical projects, that is, older organizational systems and kinship networks understood as subaltern forces of both the global metropolitanist economy and authoritarian populism.

Fatherhood in Labour Zionist Children's Literature: Space, Masculinity and Hegemony in Mandate Palestine

AbstractThis article analyses the connection between gender and fatherhood in Labour Zionist children's literature during the formative years of the Zionist project which preceded the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Contrary to most similar social movements in the interwar period, Labour Zionism was leading a settler‐colonial project with the imperative to expand the Jewish presence throughout the country, making the category of space particularly relevant to the success of its hegemonic project. This article contributes to the understanding of the role of gender in the process of Zionist settlement and colonisation, and at the same time calls for more attention to the entanglement of gender and masculinity with space in the study of colonial history.

‘But Freebourne loved its steel’: American Great War poetry, modernity, and mobilization

ABSTRACT Considerable attention has been given to American writers, including poets, who in the 1920s expressed disillusionment with US participation in the war. As such, these writers participated in a Modernist critique of the ideologies that supported US efforts to use the war as a lever to propel the United States into pre-eminence in a global capitalist system. My article focuses, rather, upon the ways that some poets during the war were already satirizing or otherwise resisting the US world hegemonic project. This iconoclastic work appeared in two distinct forms. On the one hand, some poets often affiliated with marginal political groups, sought intentionally to expose the socio-economic and self-interested underpinnings of ideologies of family loyalty, social altruism, democracy, and the rule of law that were promulgated to justify US intervention. Most vociferous in these critiques were socialist poets, particularly Arturo Giovannitti and Ralph Chaplin, but other critics were affiliated with the most militant branches of the Woman’s Peace Party, such as Florence Tuttle and Bernice Evans. On the other hand, an implicit critique of the idealistic rhetoric justifying US intervention might also be found in certain poems honestly depicting the technologies of modern warfare, even if the poets in question sought a neutral or supportive stance towards the US war effort. Such work was produced both by soldier poets such as John Allan Wyeth and Baker Brownell and by civilians like John Curtis Underwood, a voluminous Whitmanian chronicler of the war. Exposing the hollowness of patriotic cant already during the war years, these poets stressed the cruel facts that the war would not be won by that side with the better principles or less hypocritical ideological formations, but by that side more successful in employing the killing potential of industrial tools and mass organization.

Hegemonic Project and the Protection of Migrant Workers in ASEAN

This article introduces hegemonic projects and the protection of migrant workers in ASEAN. We argue that the hegemonic project of the integration of ASEAN constituted through the protection of migrant workers. In this article, we evaluate how hegemonic discourse operated through the protection of migrant workers in ASEAN. The discourse on the protection of migrant workers in the ASEAN Consensus is thus instrumental to the operations and existence of the hegemonic project.

Land financialisation, planning informalisation and gentrification as statecraft in Antwerp

This article offers insight into the role of the state in land financialisation through a reading of urban hegemony. This offers the basis for a conjunctural analysis of the politics of planning within a context in which authoritarian neoliberalism is ascendant across Europe. I explore this through the case of Antwerp as it underwent a hegemonic shift in which the nationalist neoliberal party the New Flemish Alliance (Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie; N-VA) ended 70 years of Socialist Party rule and deregulated the city’s technocratic planning system. However, this unbridling of the free market has led to the creation of high-margin investment products rather than suitable housing for the middle classes, raising concerns about the city’s gentrification strategy. The consequent, politicisation of the city’s planning system led to controversy over clientelism which threatened to undermine the N-VA’s wider hegemonic project. In response, the city has sought to roll out a more formalised system of negotiated developer obligations, so embedding transactional, market-oriented informal governance networks at the centre of the planning system. This article highlights how the literature on land financialisation may incorporate conjunctural analysis, in the process situating recent trends towards the use of land value capture mechanisms within the contradictions and statecraft of contemporary neoliberal urbanism.

Frugal Innovation Hijacked: The Co-optive Power of Co-creation

In this paper we investigate how different discourses on frugal innovation are articulated, and how the dynamics between these different discourses have led to a certain dominant understanding of frugal innovation today. We analyse the dynamic interactions between three discourses on frugal innovation: (1) innovations for the poor, (2) grassroots innovations by the poor, and more recently (3) co-creating frugal innovations with the poor. We argue that this latter discourse is articulated as a hegemonic project as it is designed to accommodate demands from both business and poor communities. We draw on Laclau and Mouffe’s concepts of ‘chain of difference’, ‘empty signifier’ and ‘floating signifier’ to explain the advent of the hegemonic discourse on co-creating innovations with the poor. We show how a floating signifier with radical potential, frugal innovation, has been hijacked and co-opted in a hegemonic project that has leveraged powerful ambiguous signifiers, with co-creation acting as an empty signifier. To clarify what is problematic in this hegemonic intervention, we expose how contemporary frugal innovation discourse contributes to a project of governing and exploiting rather than helping the poor, in ways that benefit formal economic actors while further worsening global inequalities.

Global Capitalism and the Battle for Hegemony

Facing a crisis of legitimacy, the capitalist class is constructing new hegemonic projects to stabilize their global system. This article will examine competing fractions of the transnational capitalist class (TCC), how these fractions are confronting the crisis of global capitalism, and how TCC theory analyzes the current state of conflict. TCC theorists see the development of two hegemonic projects, one based on militarized accumulation and authoritarian politics and that of green capitalist reformism. But differences exist on the evaluation of the strength and formation of these emerging blocs. The article also pays attention to the relationship between the United States and China as a battleground between globalizing projects, rather than nations.

Hegemony and World Order: An Overview of the Concept “Hegemony as Complexity”

This article reviews the key topics and debates in Hegemony and World Order: Reimagining Power in Global Politics(Routledge, 2020), edited by P. Dutkiewicz, T. Casier, J. A. Scholte. The volume covers several issues related to hegemony in contemporary politics from neo-liberal, realist, constructivist, neo-Gramscian, world-systems and postcolonial theoretical perspectives. The concept of “complex hegemony,” briefly evaluated in this review, and the analysis of the recent stage of globalization presented in the volume offer meaningful contributions to the theoretical debates. From a more practical perspective, Hegemony and World Order dwells on the future of world order and the prospects for alternative hegemonic projects, including those sponsored by China and Russia. Additionally, the hegemony of non-state actors in global governance is studied in detail. The review considers the ability of the leading states to execute complex hegemony and discuss the demand for hegemony in the context of the transformation of world order.