ABSTRACT
For nearly 30 years, the work and ideas of Antonio Gramsci have been used to understand the practices and workings of international politics and, in recent years, have become increasingly prominent as a critical paradigm within the discipline of International Relations (IR). Indeed, the growth of work that borrows from Gramsci has risen to a level whereby dissertations and scholarly papers are produced annually that all seek to propel Gramscian concepts such as ‘hegemony’, ‘passive revolution’ to the larger spatial sphere of the international arena. <HWWKLVWXUQWR*UDPVFLKDVDSSHDUHGLQDGLVWLQFWZD\DQGLQDVSHFL¿FIRUP which largely originated from the work of Robert Cox, before being developed by pioneers such as Stephen Gill and Kees van der Pijl through their respective concepts of ‘world order’ and the ‘transnational capitalist class’ (Cox 1987, 1996; Gill 1990, 1993b, 2003; van der Pijl, 1984, 1998). Scholars and students alike have found great use in taking these concepts and applying them to the contemporary processes of globalisation and global governance, but have often not recognised the distinct, unique and contested way that Gramscian concepts are employed within them (Germain and Kenny 1998; Worth 2008).
