The Renewed Promise of Hegemony

Abstract

Contemporary world order exhibits interdependence without a single state able to impose ordering principles unilaterally and without the hegemonic war often presumed to clear the slate. Scholarship conflates dominant power with the order it sponsors, so criticism of the liberal international order (LIO) is read as an attack on primacy. This article theorises hegemony, in Gramscian terms, as a relational ordering structure that fuses coercion, political economy, and ideas, and that endures through absorption and co-option of dissent. Challenges are incorporated through selective concessions and institutional redesign, diluting their transformative content while reiterating core principles. Our argument decouples power transition from order transition, moving debate beyond collapse versus persistence by advancing an analytically tractable account of adaptive endurance that shows how hegemonic orders renew themselves through the managed incorporation of critique into institutional reform.

Keywords
Hegemony; World Order; Power Transition; International Relations; Theory; International Liberal Order

Introduction

Over the past thirty-five years, the architecture of world order has been repeatedly revised without a general war amongst the major powers of the day. Change has proceeded through institutional adaptation and competitive rulemaking: Alliances have expanded and been repurposed, economic governance has deepened and been selectively weaponised, and new standard-setting fora have proliferated alongside the post-1945 settlement. The result is reordering through accumulation, which layers new practices and constraints onto existing rules rather than dismantling them in a single act of reconstruction. This pattern sits uneasily with the canonical expectation that durable world order change follows from the breakdown of an existing arrangement and an aspiring hegemon’s willingness to bear the costs of founding a successor order (Gilpin 1981; Ikenberry 2001; Kennedy 1989; Organski 1958; Organski and Kugler 1980).

The problem at hand is thus twofold. Empirically, the contemporary world order displays features that have no obvious precedent and that existing scholarship has struggled fully to capture. A truly interdependent global environment has emerged without a single state powerful enough to unilaterally impose its ordering principles, and—more importantly—without the catalytic force usually required to clear the slate for a new system. Furthermore, much of the existing literature has tended to conflate the role of the dominant power with the order it establishes. The implicit assumption is that to question or criticise specific elements of the liberal international order (LIO) is, by definition, to challenge the American primacy itself and thereby to undermine the very foundations of that order. This should come as no surprise given that International Relations (IR) is in its origins, as Hoffmann (1977) put it, an American Social Science and most of its theorisations have intended to legitimise the US hegemonic role (see also, Guilhot 2011; Parmar 2012).

Our central questions arise from the deadlock between narratives of inevitable collapse and institutional persistence. First, challenging the ‘collapse’ hypothesis, why has the redistribution of power in the twenty-first century unfolded without the hegemonic war that materialist theories predict? Second, interrogating the ‘persistence’ narrative, why do the core ordering principles of the LIO endure even as the specific material dominance of the United States wanes? On a more fundamental level, how might the relationship between power and order be theorised in a way that avoids their habitual conflation, enabling instead a more differentiated understanding of their interaction within the dynamics of contemporary world order?

Gramsci’s (1992; 1957) theorisation of hegemony is particularly relevant for rethinking how we study the construction and transformation of world orders. The precision in conceptualisation found in Gramsci’s works enables us to sidestep the usual reduction of hegemony to mere coercion or power, overlooking its more nuanced relational dimension. His approach avoids the common simplification of the concept, refraining from conflating hegemony with either dominance or coercion, nor treating it as an intrinsic characteristic of the primary actor in the system (the hegemon). Furthermore, such a perspective change allows us to move beyond the prevailing focus in IR scholarship on “organic crisis” and disorder (for a review see Pass 2024), directing attention instead to the mechanisms by which hegemonies are constructed and endure.

We argue that due to the pervasive nature of hegemony—an ordering structure that fuses economics, coercive power, and ideas, yet is neither pure dominance nor coercion, nor an inherent trait of the hegemon—efforts designed to subvert or supplant it are neutralised through processes of co-option and absorption. Such a process of appropriation achieves multiple objectives: it confines other actors’ behaviours within the ordering boundaries set by the hegemon, reinforces the hegemony through its adaptability and capacity for inclusion, and undermines the momentum of movements striving to establish an alternative order. Far from being accidental, this is a fundamental aspect of why hegemonies persist. Setting the parameters within which people are able to think and imagine ensures that any attempt to conceive of an alternative sociopolitical order is already constrained and absorbed within the established framework. Furthermore, when new ideas or movements arise with the potential to disrupt the status quo, actors—particularly in the absence of a hegemon—often incorporate aspects of these challenges into the existing order, effectively diluting their transformative potential and reiterating the core values of the established hegemony. For substantive change to happen to a well-structured hegemony, a challenger must emerge with the capacity to control several crucial dimensions of structural power (Strange 1987; 1994; 1999), giving it the capacity to erect a new world order. So far there is no evidence that any actor has amassed such power in the current historical conditions; by definition, previous hegemonies were not as well-rounded as the one the US has established in the aftermath of the World War II.

We contribute to research on world order by specifying a mechanism that sustains the current phase of the LIO and may inform its near future. We recast hegemony as a structure of absorption and co-option rather than as dominance or passive consensus, which moves the debate beyond a binary between inevitable collapse (e.g., Mearsheimer 1994; 2019) and persistence through institutional developments (e.g., Ikenberry 2018). The former misses the system’s ability to metabolise challenges, the latter uncritically accepts the presence of consent, failing to see it as the manufactured result of hegemonic co-option. The framework we advance instead shows that the LIO endures through the systematic neutralisation of opposition as challengers are incorporated in ways that dilute their transformative potential within the structures they seek to overturn.

Following this introduction, we critically review the literature on the causes and conditions for collapse and persistence in world orders. Section two outlines our theoretical approach to hegemony as an ordering mechanism before turning to a discussion of the implications of our argument for the future of the world order.

The collapse and persistence of world orders

Scholars across various theoretical branches have long debated how power shifts impact the stability of world order. The debate is often organised around a stark alternative: one tradition treats redistribution as a pathway to violent rupture and systemic breakdown, whereas another treats institutional resilience as evidence that world order can persist through consent and rule-governed cooperation. This collapse-persistence framing captures important tendencies, yet it also narrows the analytical field by obscuring mechanisms through which orders can endure, adapt, and consolidate (or perhaps, even harden) in the absence of systemic war.

The risk of inevitable collapse of world orders is at the core of Realist research. Scholars in this camp emphasise the distribution of capabilities and portray world order as a contingent equilibrium sustained through self-help and balancing (Mearsheimer 2001; 2018; Paul 2016; Schweller 2008; Waltz 1979). Stability remains precarious in this view because strategic interaction is vulnerable to misperception and miscalculation (Lebow and Valentino 2009). Power Transition Theory (Gilpin 1981; Organski 1958; Organski and Kugler 1980) and Hegemonic Stability Theory (Kindleberger 1973; Keohane 1984) refine the emphasis on capabilities by linking order to the presence of a predominant power (the hegemon) able to underwrite rules and supply collective goods. As the gap narrows between a dominant status quo power and a rising challenger, these approaches anticipate escalating instability and, ultimately, conflict. The fundamental limitation of Realist perspectives is their inability to explain the current historical moment: Realism predicts a systemic breakdown that has not occurred, overlooking the possibility that an order might persist even after the material dominance of its founder has waned.

Against the expectation of conflict and inevitable destruction of world orders, Liberal and Constructivist accounts explain resilience by emphasising institutional density and normative depth. Liberal institutionalists characterise the LIO as a quasi-constitutional arrangement in which rules and organisations constrain power, including the hegemon’s, and generate durable cooperation through credible commitments and predictable governance (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998; Ikenberry 2001; Ikenberry and Kupchan 1990; Keohane 1984; 1989). Constructivists extend this argument through socialisation and legitimacy, suggesting that shared norms encourage actors to internalise rules as appropriate and fair (Johnston 2001; 2007; Wendt 1992; 1999). These perspectives clarify why institutions can outlive moments of initial creation, yet they also often risk overstating consent. A focus on constitutionalism (e.g., Ikenberry 2001), for instance, can underplay coercive bargaining, asymmetric dependence, and the patterned ways powerful states circumvent institutional constraints when strategic incentives change. Similarly, the absence of war is too readily treated as evidence of universal legitimacy.

Marginal in the IR theoretical canon, but not unimportant, Marxist-inspired approaches reject both the Realist fixation on anarchy and the Liberal-Constructivist tendency towards benign institutionalism¹. These arguments locate the persistence of ordering arrangement in structural inequality rather than mutual gains, portraying world order as an economic and political hierarchy that reproduces core-periphery relations (Cardoso and Faletto 1979; Prebisch 1950). Persistence of the system follows from the constraints imposed by global production and exchange, which limit the developmental and strategic options available to peripheral states. Dependency Theory correctly identifies the structural inequalities that Liberals ignore, yet it often reduces international dynamics to a rigid economic determinism. Viewing the periphery primarily as victims of external terms of trade risks underestimating the political agency of peripheral elites and the adaptability of the system itself (Robinson 2004). Where Dependentistas struggle is in explaining why so many actors in the peripheries actively participate in and reproduce the order’s institutions without constant military enforcement (Chagas-Bastos 2024).

The deadlock

The limits of these approaches are most evident in the recent chapter of the collapse-persistence debate as the US influence seems to decline and challenges to its leadership abound. Mearsheimer (2019; 2021) anticipates the collapse of the LIO, arguing that China’s rise and the return of great power rivalry hollow out its institutions. The claim turns on a predominantly coercive conception of power: once the US no longer commands an overwhelming material margin, the institutional overarching ordering structure loses its anchorage and shatters. Ikenberry (2018; 2024), in contrast, reads persistence into the world order’s design. The LIO persists, on this view, because it is capacious and integrative, offering rising powers² a “safe landing” through rules and institutions that convert rivalry into managed adjustment. Recent Constructivist interventions have attempted to move away from this binary opposition by shifting the focus to social hierarchical aspects of world politics. Adler-Nissen and Zarakol (2021) argue that the LIO is being “hollowed out from within” not by power shifts, but by a crisis of recognition. In this view, the order is failing because it functions as a status hierarchy that systematically misrecognises both those in the peripheries and populist voters in the Western core. Similarly, Adler-Nissen (2024) suggests that the order persists only through a pathological “normalization of deviance”, where elites rationalise contradictions until they become blind to the system’s impending failure. Others, like Kustermans et al. (2023), deconstruct the very concept of “revisionism”, arguing that what mainstream theories label as a threat is often merely a struggle over “legitimate ends and means” within a socially stratified order.

Mearsheimer cannot explain why an order deemed “bound to fail” continues to organise core domains of cooperation and to accommodate extensive Chinese economic integration without systemic war. Ikenberry cannot explain why an order said to rest on mutual gains increasingly relies on coercive leverage, including financial and legal weaponisation, to police boundaries and discipline dissent. The Constructivists, while correctly diagnosing the grievances, often underestimate the system’s capacity to incorporate those very grievances into renewed hegemonic power. All tether the fate of the LIO too tightly to the conduct and relative position of its principal sponsor. The result is a choice between demise as US primacy wanes and persistence as consent endures.

Gramsci’s hegemony as a sociopolitical ordering mechanism

Gramsci himself was preoccupied with problems of domestic power and revolution rather than world politics (see for discussions, Bieler et al. 2015; Ramos 2020). Effectively applying Gramsci’s insights to world politics requires, first, a thorough presentation of the fundamental ideas of his political theory of power and hegemony.

Hegemony, to Gramsci (1957; 1992), is a sociopolitical ordering mechanism that blends material and ideational resources, delimiting what is desired and what is possible by reprogramming what can be imagined by society; it operates and persists beyond the mere application of coercion to secure obedience and conformity (Femia 1981; Forgacs 2000; Hoare & Smith 1971). Achieving and maintaining the consent of those encompassed by the hegemony is predicated on moral and intellectual leadership. When subordinate groups act as the hegemon would wish, going so far as self-policing adherence to the hegemony without any need for oversight or even threat of sanction, we find true hegemony. The subordinate groups then self-regulate to bolster the hegemony instituted by the dominant, perceiving it as an independent expression of their own desires. Fontana (1993, 5), 5) provides what is perhaps the most accurate summary definition capturing the subtlety of Gramsci’s approach: “the unity of knowledge and action, ethics and politics, where such a unity, through its proliferation and concretization throughout society, becomes the way of life and the practice of the popular masses”.

Hegemony draws its real strength from the inclusive, participatory maintenance of social structure that presents subordinates with a credible prospect of opportunity. The critical characteristic is, in Gramsci’s (1957, 160-161) words, “a consciously planned struggle to win ‘understanding’ of the requirements of the economic position of the masses”. The ideational underpinnings of the existing order are adapted to incorporate the concerns and aspirations of the subaltern in a manner that does not threaten to fundamentally supplant the core values and priorities of the hegemon. These principles are embedded within institutional structures that moderate, redirect, and absorb challenges to the prevailing order. This allows the dominant group, through a steady accumulation of regulatory decisions and strategic—often covert—endorsement of select actors, to gradually infuse its hegemony into the social fabric and everyday experience of subordinate groups. Through transformismo, a process of active engagement, potentially dangerous ideas in subaltern groups are assimilated and, through intellectual exchange, adjusted so that they reinforce rather than challenge the policies and objectives of the dominant group (Gramsci 1992). Institutions, their purview, and their rules are thus established by the hegemon at the height of its influence and designed to ensure the core principles remain undisputed and become so entrenched in and pervasive to social life that they achieve an unconscious grounding for all encompassed by the project.

An ostensible separation persists between the spaces occupied by the dominant and the subaltern groups under hegemony, yet potential challengers are effectively circumscribed by laws and regulations formulated through the very institutions that include them (Femia 1981). Discussion of how the social order should operate and adapt is never closed. Arguably debate can never be closed because creating a full hegemony is an unachievable goal (Martin 2015); the ongoing nature of this debate also suggests that the hegemony will continue so long as there is at least a modicum of leadership from one or a handful of influential actors, and the other encompassed actors continue to view compliance as more beneficial than defection. How these principles and values are applied remains open to debate. The institutional framework itself provides a forum in which the requirements arising from the economic position of the masses can be articulated, and perhaps co-opted or redirected. The space for dissent appears to remain in place, but the ability to conceptualize truly counter-hegemonic programs declines because the ambitions of the subaltern have become a de facto expression of the will of the dominant. To put it differently, dialogue and negotiation directed towards the formation and maintenance of hegemony results in an environment where dissenting ideas are not so much suppressed as absorbed and subsumed. The instruments of hegemony are thus strengthened and supported by debate and dissent because they become an expression not only of the power of the dominant social group, but also of the goals and aspirations of the subordinate social groups.

The resilience of hegemony according to Gramsci (1957, 154-55) thus stems from the deliberate inclusion of the priorities of the subordinate; there will be no appetite for revolutionary change if the hegemony provides the minimum requisite benefits and feedback loops for including substantive consideration—which may or may not be included in the order—of the goals and priorities of the subordinate actors. Hegemony exists when the subordinate acts autonomously to perpetuate the order; they see it as being to the advancement of their interests because they are only able to conceptualize their interests in terms that maintain, sustain, and reinvent the existing order.

Yet the possibility of coercion is not discarded, but held as the last resort (Gramsci 1957, 160-161). If violence must be used to achieve compliance, then the relationship is one of domination, not hegemony—reliance upon domination is, in fact, a sign that a hegemony is not in place and that leadership is likely fragile. The differentiation between the idea of hegemony as the expression of a consensual system and hegemony as an expression of domineering power is captured by Cox (1983, 127), who notes that power is like a centaur, “half man, half beast, a necessary combination of consent and coercion”. A hegemon’s aversion to the use of direct domination is grounded in a view that sees power as being at its most effective when its instruments are well hidden from sight (Payne 1994: 153). When coercion is brought to bear by the hegemon, its application is often masked, veiled behind altruistic statements that the interests of all must be protected (Augelli and Murphy 1993). Simply ordering and forcing compliance is not enough; although imposition and domination certainly do give an actor power over others, it is also exceptionally difficult to maintain given the need for constant monitoring and policing.

How hegemonies are erected in world politics: The four faces of structural power

Treating concepts developed for national settings as readily portable to the international risks oversimplification, conceptual stretching, and, in the end, conceptual creep (Sartori 1970; 1991; Haslam 2016). Transposing Gramsci’s ideas on hegemony to the study of world order is not straightforward. A substantial body of scholarship reads Gramsci’s work much like a ‘doxa’³, often overemphasising a persistent state of “organic crisis” (or multiple and simultaneous crises) and disorder in world politics (e.g., Babic 2020). As Pass (2024) points out, a key weakness in the neo-Gramscian literature is consideration of how hegemony is formed and operates in a transnationalised context; although he, too, focuses on the element of crisis and a possible interregnum rather than why and how the existing hegemony might prevail. Morton (2003; 2007) opens a space for thinking more about what the concept of hegemony means internationally with his discussion of social cohesion between states, albeit with a heavy focus on changes in the means of production and the implications for internal ordering within different countries. Absent from all of these discussions is the question of why so many states subscribe and continue to advance the existing hegemony guiding world order.

If we move beyond the focus on multiple crises and accept hegemony as an ordering structure for world politics, the specific characteristics of this social order may refine and expand upon its original theorisation. Gramsci offered relatively limited detail regarding the internal structure of hegemony. The danger, once again, is that the complexity of hegemony in world politics is reduced to a two-dimensional politico-economic ordering mechanism or either a mechanism that is a synonym of coercion and dominance that will lead to systemic stability, or perhaps worse, a fusion between the hegemon and the order itself. What we need is a framework for unpacking the interacting components of hegemony.

Susan Strange (1987; 1994; 1999) provides us with a detailed account of what she labels structural power. She identified different dimension of power that must be held if a state is to have the sort of comprehensive, rule-setting power attributed to a hegemon. Although scarcely addressed directly in his writings about the ‘forces’ ordering societies, it is clear that the nature of hegemony as discussed by Gramsci closely parallels what Strange labelled structural power: the ability to restrict the scope of possible actions by establishing the ‘rules’ of the system in such a way that actions contrary to the core interests of the main actors in the order become largely inconceivable. Where an integration of Strange’s concept of structural power with a Gramscian view on hegemony proves particular useful is through the provision of a clear framework for identifying the inner architecture of hegemony left vague by Gramsci.

As Strange explains, in order to possess structural power a state must have mastery over its four core, interdependent component areas. Security refers to the ability to physically protect a space, project force, and repel attack. Finance encompasses the ability to access credit, control a country’s macroeconomic reality, and interact with markets on at least an even footing. Production focuses on a country’s ability to make things and ensure that it has access to the products and materials necessary to drive its economy and ensure security. Finally, ideas/knowledge emphasize a country’s ability to innovate, generate its own cultural context, and influence how the rest of the world thinks. Although each of these dimensions are notionally independent, they are also reliant on their counterparts for strength and resilience. For example, how can a country be strong in the security dimension if it is unable to finance extraction of critical minerals and their processing into innovative offensive and defensive systems? Strange graphically represents the interrelated and mutually dependent nature of these dimensions by describing structural power as a pyramid where all facets are equal and rely upon the other to remain in place—i.e., maintaining power and capability on one side of the pyramid requires capacity across the other three.

The rise of a state with Strange’s structural power is a rare occurrence. Gaining mastery of any single element of structural power, let alone all four, is far from obvious in any historical point (Heather and Rapley 2023). If we take Strange’s framework as a disaggregation of the dimensions that bestow hegemonic power in world politics it becomes clear that the establishment of a hegemony happens in a very narrow window of time where one state can rewrite the rules of the entire system such that its interests remain entrenched until another state attains the level of structural power necessary to recast the system and its rules. In part, the resilience of structural power comes from the degree to which the ideational dimension is central to the building and maintenance of hegemony. Ruggie (1982), for instance, argues that the liberal ideas underpinning the LIO are so deeply embedded in people’s thinking that genuine alternatives become difficult to imagine. This is precisely the phenomena we saw in play when both the rise of Japan in the 1980s and the emergence of a more unified Europe in the 1990s failed to result in anything approximating a real challenge to the existing hegemony. Indeed, the last instance where one actor overwhelmingly dominated all four dimensions of hegemony was the 1945-1954 post-World War II period when the US was able to take over the British foundations and deepen the LIO. The early 1990s after the end of the Cold War were similar, but disparities between the US, Japan, and Europe across all four dimensions of hegemony were neither as absolute, nor as important given the shared ideational basis and intermeshed finance and security frameworks.

The key point we derive from the cross-pollination of Gramsci and Strange is that in the absence of a new actor with enough capacity in all four dimensions of hegemony, the existing world order will persist and continue to define how and what can be done. Fundamental change in a hegemony would require one of two conditions: either the mobilisation of sufficient resources to establish a credible and independent alternative order, or a significant systemic crisis that, at the same time, delegitimises the existing framework and prompts its broad rejection. In the absence of these conditions, the co-option and adaptability of the LIO remain its most defining features—neither coercion nor dominance.

Hegemony and change in the global liberal order

Turning back to the questions that animate this article: why has the redistribution of power in the twenty-first century unfolded without the hegemonic war that materialist theories predict? And why do the core ordering principles of the LIO endure even as the specific material dominance of the US wanes? The answers lie in the specific nature of the current hegemony, which functions not as a rigid wall that faces a binary choice between collapse or persistence, but as an absorptive structure that neutralises and integrates resistance.

Gramsci used war strategies as metaphors to explain the challenges faced by any group seeking to overturn an existing hegemony. His war of movement, can be likened to a a guerrilla campaign, with those seeking a new order constantly assaulting and eroding the structures supporting and perpetuating hegemony. He observed that a war of movement was destined to fail in most Western countries because the structures of power embodied in political society had become the expression of civil society, meaning that attempts to recruit the kind of popular support central to a successful ‘guerrilla’ campaign are simply going to fail because subordinate actors are too vested in the way things are.⁴ In these circumstances, a war of position is required—one that involves building and developing an alternative social order capable of remaining independent, and thus isolated from the co-optive nature of hegemony until it has the strength to confront the existing hegemony on equal footing (Donoghue 2018; Hoare and Smith 1971, 231-243).

Scholarship focusing on the collapse of the LIO fails to predict the absence of war because it operates on the logic of a Gramscian war of movement. In the current phase of the LIO, such a strategy is rendered obsolete by two factors. First, the downstream costs of military confrontation in a system of complex interdependence are prohibitively high. Second, and more importantly, the diffusion of structural power means there is no single centre of gravity for mainstream IR theorists to storm. Power is not located solely in Washington’s military capability, but is dispersed through the global structures of production, finance, and knowledge (Strange 1994). As a result, revisionist powers are structurally compelled to abandon the strategy of direct confrontation in favour of a war of position—i.e., a long-term strategy of struggle within the institutions of the existing order.

This sort of war of position takes time, and given the globalized nature of the LIO, the longer the process takes the more opportunity there is for the hegemony to subsume and absorb dissent (Ikenberry and Kupchan 1990). Cox (1983) offers important insight into why this is the case, arguing that the problem with a premature attack on the hegemony, as in a war of movement, is that it exposes the immature nature of the revolutionary project, leaving it open to an effective counterattack and co-option by the dominant class. Sticking with the military jargon, losing the short-term ‘battle’ over world order may be an essential part of winning the long-term ‘war’ to reform the global system and the relative positioning of actors within it.

The reality of a reimposition of the dominant order is not necessarily a resort to coercion, but a willingness of the institutions supporting hegemony to actively engage in dialogue with dissenting elements in order to strengthen bridges between the dissenting and the dominant class. The image Cox (1983, 173) evokes is of hegemony as a pillow: “[i]t absorbs blows and sooner or later the would-be assailant will find it comfortable to rest upon”. Hitting a pillow will not destroy it or change its shape (its fundamentals), but it does leave an imprint, the size and permanence of the impression being dictated by a combination of the force of the blow and the material composition of the pillow. Similarly, an assault mirroring Gramsci’s war of movement will have an impact on the hegemony. The basic nature of the hegemony will not be overturned—as noted above, the core values and ideas sustaining hegemony are not open for discussion. Nevertheless, as with the pillow metaphor, a sustained assault on the hegemony can lead to a revision of how parts of the order are managed and how it acts to incorporate subordinate elements. This ‘assault on the pillow’ is similar to attempts at reshaping the position of a given actor within global hierarchies such that a country is able to influence the interpretation and reinvention of existing rules and norms (e.g., Chagas-Bastos, 2024; Miller 2020).

The alternative that both Gramsci and Cox point to is the need for a war of position to overturn a well-established and deeply entrenched hegemony. This strategic shift explains the persistence of the order. In a war of position, the challenger attempts to build a counter-hegemony parallel to the existing system. The unique feature of the LIO, however, is its capacity for transformismo—the co-option of potential leaders of subaltern groups. To wage a war of position effectively, challengers like China must engage with the very structures they seek to displace: they must accumulate capital through the global trading system, settle accounts in the dominant financial infrastructure, and utilise established scientific networks.

Although a war of position as envisioned by Gramsci is theoretically conceivable, the lesson from the Soviet Union’s failure suggests that in practical terms it is unlikely to be successful in an era of globalised complex interdependence. The USSR failed because it attempted to build a separate, autarkic order that mirrored Western institutions but lacked the necessary global linkages to survive. Despite appearances of a war of position the Comecon (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance) was more like a mirror of the sort of liberal trading regimes emerging in the West, albeit with extensive top-down control of production and trade. It also had significant interaction with the LIO and, indeed, needed such linkages to survive. For instance, grain imports from the US were critical for avoiding starvation in the USSR and Western technology—legally acquired or stolen—was essential for industrial maintenance and development (Jentleson 1986; Lorenzini 2014; Radchenko 2024; Wadekin 1982).

In other words, the challenge to scholarship defending a benign persistence of the LIO comes from the fact that the order’s principles endure because a war of movement leads to absorption and a war of position traps challengers in a linguistic and structural paradox: the grammar of hegemony. To wage a war of position effectively, a revisionist state must adopt the operational logic of the system it seeks to displace. To challenge global financial hierarchies, for instance, a state must master the language of capital adequacy and liquidity; to contest trade rules, it must utilise the legalistic procedures of the WTO. All of this transmutes the putative war of position into one of movement where engagement acts as a mechanism of structural absorption. The very act of challenging the order forces the revisionist to validate its underlying principles. A state cannot contest the IMF’s conditionality, for instance, without accepting the premise that financial crises require technical management rather than political redistribution. By the time a challenger accumulates sufficient influence to contest the hegemony, it has already internalised the logic of the system. Resistance is thus channelled into demands for reform (e.g., reinforcing the underlying principles of open markets and multilateralism) rather than a revolutionary break. The order persists not because the US enforces it, or the norms it sponsored guarantee an inertial path, but because the grammar of power allows for no other intelligible way to speak.

Two points follow from this. First, even in the absence of a clear hegemon, the system can persist as long as it effectively balances and constrains competing ambitions. Second, and building on the first, this does not imply that the nature of the system remains static. What remains unchanged is that the establishment of a new set of rules will not be possible until an actor emerges with enough capability across Strange’s four dimensions to erect a new hegemony. More importantly and diverging from much neo-Gramscian writing on the ‘interregnum’ between the LIO and the next ordering arrangement, in the interim the existing hegemony will remain. With no hegemon in place to enforce and underwrite the perpetuation of the hegemony, space necessarily must be opened to other voices to maintain and extend the system. Attempts to outright dismantle and replace the hegemony are avoided because everyone gains too much from the current world order, and no one wants to take on the costs of imposing a new ordering reality.

Does this imply that, in the absence of a hegemon, the existing hegemony could persist through a process of states muddling through? For a hegemony to continue to exist even without the leadership of a hegemon it must offer a bare minimum of interest satisfaction to all parties encompassed by it—or in Hirschman’s (1970) language, both “loyalty” to the system and the deliberate exercise of “voice” to feed the evolutionary process of the hegemony. This imperative was central to how US policymakers planned the LIO from at least the early stages leading to the Bretton Woods conference, which along with the formation of the United Nations was instrumental in providing the ‘voice’ necessary to attract and retain ‘loyalty’ to the new hegemonic project (Helleiner 2016).

The potential for hegemony to persist without a clear leader thus depends on how much demand for change there is, how fast that demand arises, and how substantial the demands for change will be. Some may argue that increases in the numbers of actors seeking major change over time will result in a marked jump in the pressure on the system, potentially stressing the order to a rupture point—and the consequent power transition. Inertial persistence of a world order requires first and foremost a method of stretching out the time over which demands for change are presented and deliberated such that the co-optive and absorptive characteristics of hegemony have an opportunity to work. Indeed, for much of the eighty years since the conclusion of World War II the US has focused on building institutions that effectively increase the length of the time it takes for change to be demanded (Ikenberry 2024). Dissent is channelled into extended discussion, which in turn decreases the impact of resistance to the hegemony by creating opportunities for accommodation and deflection. In other words, the existing hegemony will persist because it continues to offer the most benefits of any available options to the encompassed states.

Once hegemony is understood not as a settled architecture but as a shifting ensemble of socio-political and economic relations, it becomes clear that actors on the periphery possess meaningful—if constrained—scope for agency through resistance, contestation, and strategic accommodation. The central question moves to not whether the order endures, but on what terms it does so: who underwrites its maintenance, how adjustment burdens are allocated, and where the marginal gains of continued rule are channelled. These distributive struggles shape both the design and the trajectory of the institutions that sustain and extend hegemonic governance. They may also prompt the proliferation of parallel bodies that reproduce familiar principles yet rearticulate them in a distinctive institutional grammar.

Conclusion

Drawing on Gramsci’s conception of hegemony, we argued in this article that the resilience of the LIO stems from adaptation: the capacity to absorb, neutralise, and reconfigure emerging challenges. Far from heralding imminent collapse, contemporary redistributions of power point toward incremental evolution within the general liberal, rules-based framework. This is particularly true if we consider that for the first time in history, unlike previous turning points in 1648, 1713, 1815, 1919, and 1945, a power redistribution has unfolded without a major systemic shock, and within the context of a truly interdependent and global economy.

Gramsci’s theorisation of hegemony, coupled with Strange’s disaggregation of structural power demonstrates that world orders endure by accommodating dissent, co-opting challenges and reframing oppositional ideas as complementary to the system. This logic helps explain the resilience of the LIO and why it is likely to persist—albeit with a less distinctly American imprint than over the past eighty years—through ongoing incorporation and recalibration rather than rupture.

For substantive change to occur within a robust hegemonic structure, a challenger must align multiple dimensions of structural power—economic, technological, military and ideational—to construct a credible alternative order. Under current historical conditions, no actor, including China, has demonstrated such alignment. Interdependence, institutional entrenchment, and ideational saturation together raise the threshold for systemic transformation beyond what any prospective challenger has yet achieved, underscoring both the staying power of existing hegemonic mechanisms and the absence of a viable systemic alternative.

Much Western scholarship has argued that hegemony, while a mechanism of order-making, can ignite crisis and disorder when a hegemon falters or when hegemonic structures crack under contestation. Existing frameworks also tend to privilege material capacities and great power rivalry at the expense of narratives, meta-narratives and cultural identities that shape the horizons of order. This narrow emphasis can flatten agency and risks self-fulfilling prophecies—most notably in stylised accounts of the “Thucydides Trap” (Allison 2017)—by reading transitions as imminent and instability as inevitable. Our approach challenges alarmist predictions of a Sino-American war by arguing that the post-World War II, US-led order—anchored in dense institutions for conflict resolution and cooperation—remains more likely to evolve than to collapse. The oft-touted “crises” of the liberal order, including claims of an approaching major war between the United States and China, are frequently overstated and amplified by politically charged narratives (see Rogelja and Tsimonis 2020; Pennanen 2025).

What remains open to contestation is not whether the order survives, but how its institutions distribute costs and benefits, and which actors shape its next phase of adaptation. Rather than fixating on the pieces—capabilities, dyadic interactions, or conflict scenarios—analysis should aim for the board: hegemony as an ordering mechanism that structures what options are thinkable, legitimate, and actionable.

Acknowledgements

This article was generously funded by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Grant #430-2023-00726). The authors would like to acknowledge the research assistance of Faisal Ibn Saud al-Qit and Kali L. Kennedy. We also thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors for their constructive comments and suggestions.

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Footnotes

• 1
  Scholarship on world order has gradually opened to non-Western approaches, incorporating a wider range of perspectives into debates on the LIO. Loh et al. (2025) provide a comprehensive review.
• 2
  Even though his view on the periphery belittles any degree of agency, defining the Global South as “an amorphous grouping of non-western developing states, led by India, Brazil and others”, or just a grouping of “swing states”—much like in the US political landscape (Ikenberry 2024, 131-2). A similar implicit notion runs across IR theories, particularly within the English School, in which to gain recognition as legitimate members of the world order, states must align with Western standards of civilization. For example, states considered ‘rising powers’ meet specific civilizational criteria and are granted status by hierarchical gatekeepers. In contrast, others are either marginalized or assigned the ambiguous designation of ‘emerging powers’. See for a discussion, Chagas-Bastos (2024), and Kristensen and Chagas-Bastos (2026).
• 3
  The rich IR scholarship drawing on Gramsci’s ideas is much larger than the space we have in this article. For a recent, apt, and comprehensive review, see Pass (2024).
• 4
  For a detailed discussion of the political economy of this process see Robinson (1996) and Cammack (1998).
• Data Availability Statement:
  There is no data associated with this article.

• Associate Editor:
  Haroldo Ramanzini Junior ( https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7105-6237)
  Wilton Dias ( https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9623-0526).

• Scientific Editor:
  Haroldo Ramanzini Junior ( https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7105-6237)
  Wilton Dias ( https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9623-0526).

Data availability

There is no data associated with this article.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  03 Apr 2026
• Date of issue
  Mar 2026

History

• Received
  20 Oct 2025
• Accepted
  21 Jan 2026