ABSTRACT
This chapter links the neo-Gramscian treatment of culture to the limits of Western IR in general. The appropriation of Islam in IR reveals the general problem of difference and Islam's assumed resistance to an easy assimilation into a universalized modernity. In the IR field, neo-Gramscians do not make the question of otherness their principal object of analysis. The real problem emerges in the neo-Gramscian understanding of transnational hegemony, culture and resistance. Hegemony is seen as a projection of domestic hegemony on a transnational scale. The neo-Gramscian historical trajectory for the emergence and consolidation of hegemony follows a familiar Anglo-American pathway inscribed in the IR canon. Cox's observation that hegemony 'means dominance of a particular kind where the dominant state creates an order based ideologically on a broad measure of consent' initially opens up an alternative avenue of investigation. The focus on communication theory and its creative reception, furthermore, injects agency into the notion of transnational hegemony.
