ABSTRACT
The theory of group hegemony synthesizes and builds on the major schools of thought in international relations including neorealism, neoliberal institutionalism, and constructivism. The theory of group hegemony builds on and integrates the foundations of hegemonic stability and world-systems theories. Group hegemony takes as a starting point the three factors that promote cooperation under anarchy—small group size, mutual interests, and a shadow of the future. Group hegemony examines the global distribution of power among groups of states including the core, semi-periphery, and periphery. A historical process of core countries extracting primary commodities from the peripheral nations cultivated asymmetrical economic dependency. Group hegemony explains both the continued stability of the liberal economic order and the persistent economic gap between the economically developed countries and the developing countries. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
