How do hegemons respond to relative decline? The existing literature suggests that declining hegemons either cling to the status quo through preventive war and other expansionist measures or retrench. This article argues that hegemonic decline produces incentives for both forms of action. More specifically, I provide a variegated framework that distinguishes between mild and acute decline as two distinct situations through which declining hegemons may pass. Mild hegemonic decline, defined as the diffusion of new technologies from the hegemon to other great powers, incentivises an expansionist strategy by heightening economic competition and strategic vulnerability. However, acute hegemonic decline, defined as a hegemon’s inability to lead a new round of innovative technologies, leads to grand strategic contraction by reducing the scope of the hegemon’s interests and its material capacity to sustain them. The variegated framework is elaborated and tested by analysing Great Britain’s grand strategy from 1880 to 1939.

This article argues that there is no fully non-Eurocentric standpoint available after colonialism. The Western symbolic order – institutional, epistemic, juridical, and political-economic – has become globally hegemonic, structuring not only liberal international institutions but also the grammar of their critique. Postcolonial and decolonial scholarship has powerfully exposed the violence of Eurocentrism, yet the desire for an uncontaminated ‘outside’ risks reproducing the very logic it opposes. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, I argue that the fantasy of epistemic purity functions as an inverted mirror of colonial universality. The problem is not merely ideological error but also libidinal investment in wholeness, authenticity, and moral innocence. Engaging debates in International Relations theory on hegemony, sovereignty, and global order, the article contends that Eurocentrism persists not only discursively but through the political economy of global capitalism and international law. Decolonization, therefore, cannot mean epistemic exit; it must instead involve traversing ambivalence, contradiction, and complicity from within a shared symbolic terrain.

Having established the existence and significance of international hierarchies as a feature of international society, second-generation debates have disagreed on their material or social origins, their likely durability, and whether they are exploitative or mutually beneficial. Rather than competing, these accounts are snapshots of different stages in a unified but dynamic process of change – the ‘hierarchy life cycle’. Liberal models of international hierarchy have been built around examinations of stable superordinates at the height of their power, whereas critical models have instead focused on aspiring or declining superordinates. Bringing these approaches together allows us to understand hierarchy creation as deriving from combinations of two basic strategies: attaining a preponderance of fungible goods, and the provision of nonfungible goods to subordinates. We demonstrate these dynamics through the application of our life cycle model to two cases – Saudi Arabia’s aspiring regional superordination strategies over the Arabian Peninsula, and contemporary changes in the US’ superordination over Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. In doing so, we speak to ongoing academic and policy debates around hegemonic transition and US foreign policy, and recent interest in the distinct regional hierarchies of superordinate secondary states.

This article examines the limits of hegemonic power through an analysis of Vladimir Putin’s discourse on Ukraine. It argues that Russia’s effort to transform narratives of ‘shared history’, ‘fraternity’, and ‘one people’ into consent-oriented influence encountered important limits because Ukrainians increasingly interpreted these narratives through the lens of sovereign political agency and independent political choice rather than through the hierarchical political meanings embedded within Russian imperial discourse. Integrating Michel Foucault’s enunciative function with Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and common sense, the study develops the concept of contextual resonance to assess how hegemonic projects depend upon the compatibility between political discourse and the political self-understanding of their intended audience. Drawing on qualitative discourse analysis of Putin’s speeches, interviews, essays, and public statements between 2001 and 2022, alongside longitudinal survey data from the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology and the Levada Center, the article traces the evolution of Russian discourse from soft-hegemonic appeals to increasingly securitised and coercive narratives. It argues that Russia’s growing reliance on coercion after 2014 progressively exposed the limits of the contextual resonance of Russian imperial discourse within Ukraine as the subordinating political order embedded within Putin’s discourse became increasingly incompatible with Ukraine’s evolving sovereign trajectory.

Current explanations of Sino–American relations are dominated by realist and liberal understandings of world politics, neglecting crucial transnational actors that complexify Sino–American relations. In contrast and drawing from internationally informed Gramscian hegemony theory, and on extensive archival work, we offer an alternative complex multidimensional transnational account. By researching the Ford Foundation’s activities in China and the United States, specifically its contribution to the development of the international relations (IR) discipline in China, we break new ground and show that Ford was key in profoundly shaping Sino–American relations, especially by developing transnational knowledge networks. These transnational elite networks simultaneously integrated China into the LIO and had unintended consequences, particularly in encouraging Chinese counter-hegemonic dynamics that challenge the LIO from within. Our approach indicates a richer complexity of Sino–US relations than extant theories, suggesting that the future trajectories of this strategic relationship are uncertain and do not fall neatly into an inevitable war or peaceful interdependence binary.

Civil society in Gramscian conception is an arena of hegemonic contestations and therefore essentially political. Development is also a political process inasmuch as it involves power in the allocation of resources and values. Yet, some African states as elsewhere globally, attempt to create and reproduce a legal–policy environment that favours an ‘apolitical’ ‘development’-oriented civil society while disabling those perceived ‘political’. This article argues the state–civil society relationship ambivalence is a product of competing visions of what constitutes ‘politics’ and ‘development’ and their governmentalities. Drawing on existing literature, primary interviews and media articles, the paper attempts to bring into conversation discourses on the political and development roles of civil society and how these have shaped state–civil society relationships from colonial period to the present day Kenya. Reflecting on manifestations of assumed role dichotomy and implications for state–civil society relations, the paper argues that the dual roles are complimentary and mutually reinforcing. The dual roles have also resulted in multiple relationships between state and civil society.

This article addresses the problem of unclear usage of “coercion” and “repression” in literature concerning protest and repression in democratic and nondemocratic states. It questions the bases and conclusions of domestic democratic peace theory and discusses its consequences. The article proposes expanding definitions of coercion and repression in terms of timing, agency, and perceptiveness. Using vocabulary of poststructuralist discourse theory and the “logics” approach to analyzing social phenomena, it introduces the notion of hegemonic coercion and repression and describes their functioning. It argues that contemporary liberal democracies are not free from coercion and repression, but that the hegemony embodied in the state is able to sustain itself by means of hegemonic coercion with little use of direct violence. Consequently, the absence of state violence is not a criterion of a mature democracy, but can also be a characteristic of a totalitarian regime where ideological deviations are strictly and preemptively controlled.

At a time when representative democracies are in deep crisis, this article examines the debate over representation as it appears in contemporary Marxist and poststructuralist political thought. The article discusses, more specifically, Ernesto Laclau’s defense of political representation and pits this against Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s vision of an “absolute democracy” beyond representation, in order to chart a path between and beyond both contrasting positions. The crux of the argument is that in participatory democracies political governance becomes a common affair: a public good accessible to all members of a community on the basis of equality. Such a democratic regime contrasts with both representative democracies, where the assembled demos is excluded from any effective participation in the everyday exercise of major political power, as well as direct democracy, where the collective sovereign would be fully present to itself, total and undivided. Common political representation is open to all, inclusive, participatory, and accountable.

This study offers a first empirical test at a truly global level of two contradictory models of global civil society in the global governance system that are put forth by neo-Gramscian thought. The first model posits that global civil society is coopted by hegemonic capitalist and political elites, and promotes hegemonic interests by distributing neoliberal values and providing a façade of opposition. The second model views global civil society as the infrastructure from which counter-hegemonic resistance, and ultimately a counter-hegemonic historic bloc will evolve and challenge neoliberal hegemony. The predictions that these two views make as to the structure of global civil society networks are tested through network analysis of a matrix of links between 10,001 international NGOs in a purposive sample of INGOs extracted from the database of the Union of International Associations. The findings provide partial support to the predictions of both models, and lead to the conclusion that at present global civil society is in a transitional phase, but that the current infrastructure provided by the global INGOs network is conducive to the development of a counter-hegemonic historic bloc in the future, providing the northern bias in network is decreased. Strategic steps needed to achieve this are presented.

In this Review Symposium on Simon Reich and Richard Ned Lebow’s Good-Bye Hegemony! Power and Influence in the Global System, Daniel Warner and John Mueller challenge Reich and Lebow on some of the key insights of their book. Reich and Lebow then reply to their criticisms. ‘Hegemony’ is one of those buzz words used by policymakers, commentators and scholars to characterise international relations. Whether used critically or uncritically, the concept is often used in ways that are at best vague, at worst misleading. Reich and Lebow’s Good-Bye Hegemony! is an attempt to clarify some of the confusions surrounding the concept of hegemony. However, it is more than that, and they argue how the way that policymakers, commentators and scholars use the concept of hegemony to characterise US foreign policy not only occludes how the global system really works, but also leaves these communities unable to adequately respond to changes in the global system.

Thomas Schelling’s 1966 classic, Arms and Influence, became one of the major strategic works of the Cold War, and it remains the clearest argument for the implicit logic of American and Russian coercive forms of diplomacy. Schelling is incisive about the credibility of deterrence, but the credibility of leadership is reduced to the Cold War assumption that power is decisive. While the rise of China and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine have rekindled interest in Schelling’s approach, the diffusion of agency and the interrelationship of issues in the current multinodal era have undermined the efficacy of hegemonic coercion. Rather than restoring Cold War bipolarity, the rise of China has created an asymmetric parity with the United States in which overlapping interdependencies inhibit the formation of camps. In the new era, the pursuit of strategic advantage by any state, large or small, must aim at securing its multidimensional welfare in a complex and unpredictable environment. The global powers are not hegemonic contenders, but rather the largest powers in a multinodal matrix of autonomous states in which each confronts uncertainty. A strategy based on coercion is likely to be less effective against its targets and more costly in its collateral effects. In a post-hegemonic era, Schelling’s premise that arms are the primary path to influence must be reexamined.