Evolutional Analysis of the Concept of Hegemony within the Perspective of International Political Economy Theories

Abstract

Over the past few decades, the international political economy has attained itself particular independence within the wider discipline of international relations step by step. The endeavors to figure out the determiners of the radical changes taking place in the world economy since the early 1970s have placed several special theoretical concepts in the focus of interest which directly associates with the international political economy. The concept of hegemony is one of them. Today, hegemony is one of the most discussed subject matters. Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist intellectual, theoretician and politician who developed the concept of hegemony in the Prison Notebooks. Gramsci's writings made incontrovertible contributions to the understanding of hegemony within the context of Marxist thought and philosophy. However, in the historical process, lots of views and theories have been put forward regarding the concept of hegemony. Thus, the application of the concept in international political economy is widely contested and necessitates disambiguation. From this point of view, we have tried to analyze how the concept was handled by theorists belonging to different schools of thought in the international political economy literature. In all these respects, this article takes its point of departure in the multiplicity of characterizations of the concept of hegemony and fastens on elucidating a certain strand of conceptualising hegemony more closely.