Gramsci Reconsidered: Hegemony in Global Law

Abstract

This article focuses on Antonio Gramsci's hegemony theory. Hegemony, for Gramsci, is a particular way of living and thinking, a Weltanschauung (world-view), on which the preferences, taste, morality, ethics, and philosophical principles of the majority are based. Social struggles are transformed into legal ones in the course of processes in which juridical intellectuals are organizing hegemony under the special conditions of the legal system. We try to use this concept to contrast it with the prevailing readings of hegemony in international relations and in international law. ‘Hegemonic law’, we argue, is not the law of any superpower, but an asymmetric consensus which relies on a climate of world-society-wide recognition. The concrete form of hegemonic law under particular social conditions depends on the ‘historical bloc’, in which it is coupled with other social praxes. In the post-Westphalian system the historical bloc is fragmented into transnational and colliding legal regimes and law-generating processes in civil society.

Analyzing the Anglo-American Hegemony in the Times Higher Education Rankings

“…For example, hegemony is examined through international media domination (Consalvo, 1998, pp.64-65;Gunn, 2006, pp. 559-576), political/military imperialism (Bill, 2001;Buckel & Fischer-Lescano, 2009;Kumar & Verma, 2009;Sementelli, 2005), cultural domination (Ashbolt, 2007;Jiang, 2011), and hegemony in comparative higher education (Collins and Rhoads, 2010;Mohrman 2008;Marginson, 2007;Olaniran & Agnello, 2008;Watson, 2009).…”

Opposition and dissidence: Two modes of resistance against international rule

“…What is beyond dispute here is that the rule exercised by these actors is illegitimate even when it is based on supposedly rational justifications and legal institutions. As “global juridical hegemony apparatuses,” the latter are part of the system of rule and thus of a structure of domination (Buckel and Fischer-Lescano, 2009: 449).…”

Global public–private partnerships and the new constitutionalism of the refugee regime

“…corporations and civil society). This approach has advanced GlobCon as a site of both hegemony and counter-hegemony, dominance or emancipation amongst competing social forces (Buckel and Fischer-Lescano 2009).…”

“…The complex between productive capacities and ideological legitimacy and authority – what constitutes the structure of the global political economy – is at the centre of this approach to explaining global relations of dominance and/or hegemony and to theorising potential avenues of political contestation and change. Buckel and Fischer-Lescano (2009), for example, extend the neo-Gramscian notion of hegemony – or, dominance by consent – to global law. They find that global constitutionalism provides a site and process of both hegemony and counter-hegemonic movements led by civil society actors (i.e.…”