ABSTRACT
Influenced by the work of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, a body of scholarship emerged in the 1980s to challenge conventional International Relations approaches that privileged states and interactions between national entities as the analytical starting point. Situated within a historical materialist methodological framework, these perspectives share ontological assumptions that derive from a critical understanding of hegemony and focus on the social forces that arise from changes in the social relations of production. Hegemony, rather than simply being established by the military and economic power exercised by states, is instead understood as constituted by the dialectical relationship between the social relations of production, forms of state, and world orders, with analysis focusing on the ideas, material capabilities, and institutions underpinning these structures. Building on this theoretical framework, diverse yet related neo-Gramscian perspectives center on debates over the ascendance of a transnational capitalist class and its efforts to transform the structures of global authority following the abandonment of the Bretton Woods system of fixed currencies in the 1970s and the deterritorialization of political and economic relationships that followed. This chapter surveys these critical debates, with a particular focus on the global capitalism thesis.
