Gramsci, Hegemony, and Global Governance

This chapter will develop a theoretical framework from which one can begin to conceptualize how developments at local or national scales can have real consequences on the institutional materiality of global governance institutions. This will be done by working through Gramsci’s concepts as well as reviewing the neo-Gramscian school of international relations theory. In so doing, this chapter will seek to resolve some important theoretical difficulties that have plagued attempts to apply Gramsci’s core concepts to a historical context that is very different from his own, with the emergence of global governance institutions accompanied by the expansion and deepening of capitalist social relations. One of the major contradictions surrounding the contemporary application of Gramsci’s concepts is the salience of the concepts of civil society and the state at geographical scales, situated beyond the national one. Specifically, there is controversy whether one can apply the concept of civil society to contemporary contexts without reference to a state. More to the point, authors such as Randall Germain and Michael Kenny questioned whether neo-Gramscian theory could speak of a global civil society in the absence of an equivalent global state while remaining faithful to the overall thrust of Gramsci’s work.1