ABSTRACT
Given a growing awareness for ‘global power shifts’ in the international system and the ‘Western’-centrism of the discipline of International Relations, this chapter re-conceptualizes the phenomena that are subsumed under these two labels as a shift of representational power that contests the ‘Western’ hegemony in the political and academic domain. By understanding ‘global power shifts’ and world order as discursive phenomena, the chapter argues that discourses materialize their attributes or effects by fixing particular meanings and identities and thus establishing a field of intelligibility. The shift in representational power symbolizes a hegemonic struggle over meanings and identities by dislocating existing identities, exposing tensions in the prevalent world order concept and enabling ‘new’ agents to assert particular representations of the world as universal. Drawing on the theory of discursive hegemony devised by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in particular, the chapter develops an analytical framework for conceptualizing the evolution and implications of this shift in representational power.
