‘Hell Is the Other’: Conceptualising Hegemony and Identity through Discourse Theory

Abstract

The concept of hegemony has regained attention from various theoretical perspectives in International Relations. This article argues that IR-poststructuralism can offer an independent perspective on the production of hegemonies in international politics. Based on IR-poststructuralism and poststructuralist discourse theory, it develops a conceptual framework and an associated methodological approach for the analysis of international hegemonies in concrete discourses. Thereby, the article conceptualises international hegemonies as the creation of a specific type of collective identity while arguing that for hegemonies to emerge, both the creation of an antagonistic Other and a vision of the opposed Self are necessary. The workings of the conceptual framework are illustrated with a comparative reconstruction of United Nations discourses on international terrorism and drug prohibition from 1961 to 2011.

Bringing agency back in: the missing link between identity, knowledge, and mediated discourse

“…Though it originally featured in the title of Laclau and Mouffe's magnum opus and PDT's foundational text 'Hegemony and Socialist Strategy', for decades, the notion had all but disappeared from Discourse Theory's conceptual apparatus. Only recently has it started to be reappraised again (Herschinger 2012;Jacobs 2018;Nonhoff 2019). This long repudiation can be explained by the view that strategy is too suggestive of the intentionalist conception of agency in which a sovereign and voluntarist subject is unconstrained and free to do as he or she sees fitstrongly rejected by Discourse Theory (Howarth 2013, pp.…”

“…158-159, 184). However, as Herschinger (2012) has shown, strategy need not imply voluntarism, but to avoid this pitfall, intricate definitional and conceptual work is necessary -work that is often all too easily sidestepped in favour of the use of a different concept that is less associated with "decisionism" (Howarth 2013, p. 176).…”

The Dislocated Universe of Laclau and Mouffe: An Introduction to Post-Structuralist Discourse Theory

“…Such middle-range theories attempt to equip PSDT with tools and concepts that can connect its ontological framework with concrete case studies in a systematic and coherent manner. The most popular amongst them is the "logics" framework proposed by Jason Glynos and David Howarth (2007;Howarth, Glynos, and Griggs, 2016); others revolve around "discourses" (Marttila 2015), "hegemonic strategies" (Nonhoff [2006(Nonhoff [ ] 2018Herschinger 2012), "metaphors" (Biegon 2017), "ideas" (Carstensen 2011;Larsson 2015), and concepts borrowed from pragmatics (Zienkowski 2017).…”

The drug dispositif: Ambivalent materiality and the addiction of the global drug prohibition regime

“…Thus, the largest part of the existing literature on drugs remains firmly within a state-centric universe of rational, powerful actors, with only a minor part focusing on the relevance of norms or epistemic communities while still locating their effects in a state-centric world (see Nadelmann, 1990; Friman, 1996, 2009; Bewley-Taylor, 1999; Bewley-Taylor and Jelsma, 2012; Levine, 2003; Andreas and Nadelmann, 2006; Friesendorf, 2007; Howell, 2010). Writings from a critical security perspective are scarce (for exceptions, see Grayson, 2008; Herschinger, 2011, 2012; Crick, 2012) and – to my knowledge – there is no study from an international relations or security studies perspective analysing the global drug prohibition regime using the concept of the dispositif and focusing on the materiality of the thing called ‘drugs’. 6 While critical security studies writings used the framework of the dispositif to address questions of security and/or materiality, Claudia Aradau (2010: 492) summarized that this literature ‘has been less interested in the role that objects played in the definition of the security dispositif ’.…”