1 For an illustration of this within the wider area of Political Science, see both Ann Showstack-Sassoon edited collection, (ed.) Approaches to Gramsci (London: Readers and Writers, 1982) and her explanatory monograph, Gramsci's Politics (New York: St Martin's, 1980), and also Chantel Mouffe (ed.), Gramsci and Marxist Theory (London: Verso, 1979). For more specialist accounts on the role of culture in Gramsci's work see Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal (London: Verso, 1988) and Raymond William's Culture and Materialism (London: Verso, 1980).

2 Whilst there is a wide range of literature on hegemony and leadership in International Relations, perhaps the most renowned is Robert Keohane's After Hegemony (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), which may initially been conceived as a critique of the requirement of a hegemony, nevertheless provides a useful and thorough explanatory account of the notion of conventional hegemony. For a popular modern-day understanding, see Niall Ferguson, ‘Hegemony or Empire?’, Foreign Affairs, 5 (2003).

3 See Robert W. Cox, Approaches to World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Stephen Gill (ed.), Gramsci, historical materialism and international relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Stephen Gill, Power and Resistance in the New World Order (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003);. Mark Rupert, Producing Hegemony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) and Ideologies of Globalization (London: Routledge, 2000); Kees van der Pijl, The making of an Atlantic Ruling Class (London: Verso, 1984) and Transnational Classes and International Relations (London: Routledge, 1998); Craig Murphy and Roger Tooze (eds), The New International Political Economy (Boulder CO: Lynne Rienner, 1991).

4 Randall Germain and Michael Kenny, ‘'Engaging Gramsci: International Relations theory and the new Gramscians’, Review of International Studies, 24 (1998), pp. 3–21.

5 Peter Burnham, ‘Neo-Gramscian Hegemony and International Order’, Capital and Class, 45 (1991), pp. 73–95.

6 John Hobson, ‘Is Critical Theory Always For the White West and For Western Imperialism? Beyond Westphilian, Towards a Post-Racist, International Relations’, Review of International Studies, 33 (2007), pp. 91–116.

7 Stephen Gill, ‘Epistemology, Ontology and the ‘Italian School”’, in Gramsci, historical materialism and international relations, pp. 21–48.

8 Cox, Approaches to World Order, pp. 87–91.

9 Ibid., pp. 91–7; 102–4. Commonly referred to as ‘hegemonic stability’ theory, this position emerged from International Economics and in particular from Albert Hirschmann and was thus imported to IR, through its sub-discipline of International Politics Economics (IR), before becoming extended to studies on international security and defence following the end of the Cold War. Initial debates were carried in influential mainstream IR/IPE journals such as International Organizations and International Studies Quarterly, before recently moving to conservative journals such as National Interest and Foreign Affairs. Examples of earlier debates can be seen in Stephen Krasner (ed.), International Regimes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); Charles Kindleberger, ‘Dominance and Leadership in the International Economy’, International Studies Quarterly, 25 (1981), pp. 242–54 and Bruce Russett, ‘The Mysterious Case of Vanishing Hegemony: or is Mark Twain Really Dead?’, International Organization, 39 (1985), pp. 207–31; whilst John Ikenberry, ‘Illusions of Empire: Defining the New American Order’, Foreign Affairs, 5 (2004), and Niall Ferguson, ‘Hegemony or Empire’ can be seen as being supportive of the latter.

10 Ibid., pp. 135–40.

11 Kenneth Waltz's Theory of International Politics (Mass: Addison Wesley, 1979) was the most prominent text in the discipline at the time which argued that states should be regarded merely as ‘units’ in a structure (International system), with their relevant dependent upon the way they are ordered within that system.

12 Gill, ‘Epistemology, Ontology and the “Italian School”’, pp. 30–6.

13 Henk Overbeek, ‘Transnational historical materialism: theories of transnational class formation and world order’, in Ronen Palan (ed.), Global Political Economy (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 168–84.

14 See for example, Stephen Gill's case study on the formation of the Trilateral Commission, American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Craig Murphy's study on International Organizations, International Organizations and Industrial Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Mark Rupert's Ideologies of Globalization, that provides a focus on the hegemonic role of the World Trade Organization.

15 Owen Worth, ‘The Poverty and Potential of Gramscian Thought in International Relations’, International Politics, 45 (2008); Germain and Kenny, ‘Engaging Gramsci’; Burnham, ‘Neo-Gramscian Hegemony and International Order’; Hobson, ‘Is Critical Theory Always For the White West and For Western Imperialism?

16 Worth, Ibid.

17 Cox, Approaches to World Order, pp. 85–144; Robert W. Cox, Power, Production and World Order (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).

18 Williams, Culture and Materialism, p. 37.

19 Murphy, International Organizations and Industrial Change, pp. 49–80.

20 Stephen Gill, ‘Globalisation, Market Civilisation and Disciplinary Neoliberalism’, Millennium, 24 (1995), pp. 399–423.

21 Enrico Augelli and Craig Murphy, America's quest for supremacy and the Third World: A Gramscian analysis (London: Pinter, 1988); Pasha, Mustapha and James Mittelman, Out of Underdevelopment Revisited: Changing Global and the remaking of the Third World (New York: St. Martins Press, 1997).

22 Kelley Lee, ‘A neo-Gramscian Approach to international organisation: an expanded analysis of current reforms to UN development activities’, in James Macmillan and Andrew Linklater (eds), Boundaries in Question: New Directions in International Relations (London: Pinter, 1995), pp. 144–62; Owen Worth, ‘Health for All?’, in J. Abbott and O. Worth (eds), Critical Perspectives on International Political Economy (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 139–59.

23 Rupert, Ideologies of Globalization.

24 Andrew Gamble, ‘Regional Blocs, World Order and the New Medievalism’, in Mario Telo (ed.), European Union and the New Regionalism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), pp. 21–39; B. Hettne, ‘Regionalism and World Order’, in Mary Farrell, Bjorn Hettne and Luk van Langenhove (eds), Global Politics of Regionalism (London: Pluto, 2005), pp. 269–87; Gerard Strange, ‘The Left against Europe? A Critical Engagement with New Constitutionalism and Structural Dependency Theory, Government and Opposition, 41 (2006), pp. 197–229.

25 Kees van der Pijl, Transnational Classes and International Relations.

26 Henk Overbeek, ‘Transnational historical materialism: theories of transnational class formation and world order’, p. 175.

27 Kees van der Pijl, ‘Transnational Class Formation’, in S. Gill and J. Mittelman (eds), Innovation and Transformation in International Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 123–7.

28 van der Pijl, The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class.

29 Baastian van Apeldoorn, ‘Transnationalisation and the Restructuring of Europe's socio-Economic Order’, International Journal of Political Economy, 28 (1998), pp. 12–53; B. van Apeldoorn, J. Drahokoupil and L. Horn (eds), Contradictions and Limits of Neoliberal European Governance (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008).

30 This was one of the charges levelled by Germain and Kenny. Indeed much of van der Pijl's later claims made in Transnational Classes and International Relations demonstrate theseshortcomings even more. See Worth, Poverty and Potential of Gramscian Thought in International Relations.

31 This is demonstrated across Robinson's work and explored perhaps most precisely in William Robinson, ‘Social theory and globalization: The rise of a transnational state’, Theory and Society, 30 (2001), pp. 157–200.

32 These are perhaps best covered in Robinson's replies to various authors, including van der Pijl, see William Robinson, ‘Global Capitalism and the Nation-State centric thinking: What we don't see when we do see Nation States. Responses to Arrighi, Mann, Moore, van der Pijl and Went’, Science and Society, 65 (2002), pp. 500–08.

33 This is perhaps best explained and examined in Andreas Bieler and Adam Morton, ‘Globalisation, the state and class struggle: a ‘Critical Economy’ engagement with Open Marxism’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 5 (2003), pp. 467–99 and further developed and debated in Andreas Bieler, Werner Bonefeld, Peter Burnham and Adam Morton (eds), Global Restructuring, State, Capital and Labour: Contesting Neo-Gramscian Perspectives (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006).

34 E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory & other essays (London: Merlin Press, 1978).

35 Burnham, ‘Neo-Gramscian Hegemony and International Order’, pp. 77–9; Germain and Kenny, ‘Engaging Gramsci: International Relations theory and the new Gramscians’, pp. 10–12.

36 It should be explicitly stressed here that ‘open Marxism’ emerged not as a complementary form, but as a response to structural Marxism and in particular to the functional-structuralism of Althusser, whereby the latter is criticised for failing to stress that capitalism is built upon the sum of the relationship between the state, capital and labour, rather than on its institutional structural parts. Class struggle therefore becomes the dialectical engine for change. For an overview see John Roberts, ‘From reflections to refraction: opening up Open Marxism’, Capital and Class, 78 (2002), pp. 87–116.

37 Adam Morton, ‘The grimly comic riddle of hegemony in IPE: where is class struggle?’, Politics, 26 (2006), pp. 62–72.

38 Werner Bonefeld, Richard Gunn and Kosmas Psychopelis (eds), Open Marxism Volume 1 (London: Pluto Press, 1992). For a rounded Gramscian critique of the open Marxist position on this point, see Ian Bruff, ‘The Totalisation of Human Social Practice: Open Marxists and Capitalist Social Relations, Foucauldians and Power Relations’, British Journal of Politics and International Relation s, 11 (2009), pp. 332–51.

39 Bieler and Morton, ‘Globalisation, the state and class struggle’, pp. 489–91.

40 The best and most poignant example of this remains Cox's Power, Production and World Order.

41 Randall Germain, ‘“Critical” Political Economy, Historical Materialism and Adam Morton’, Politics, 27 (2007), p. 132.

42 See respectively, Augelli and Murphy America's quest for supremacy and the Third World and van der Pijl, Transnational Classes and International Relations.

43 Germain and Kenny, ‘Engaging Gramsci’.

44 Cox, Approaches to World Order, pp. 135–6.

45 Gill, Power and Resistance, p. 56.

46 Indeed in his monograph Power, Production and World Order, Cox, in line with orthodox accounts on the International Political Economy, argued that American-inspired hegemony had reached its end, although he did indicate a number of alternative world orders that would replace it. See Power, Production and World Order, pp. 273–391.

47 William Robinson, ‘Gramsci and Globalisation: From Nation-State Transnational Hegemony’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 8 (2005), pp. 559–60.

48 See for example, Thomas Ehrlich Reifer, Globalization, Hegemony & Power: Anti-systemic Movements and the Global System (Bolder: CO: Paradigm, 2004).

49 For example both Rupert and Cox make convincing textually-based arguments that any Gramscian involvement with International Politics must be seen only as an after-thought from the politics of the national. This follow Gramsci's oft. quoted remarks that ‘International Relations follows fundamental social relations, but the point of departure remains national in context’, see Cox, Approaches to World Order, p. 133 and Rupert, Producing Hegemony, pp. 22–34.

50 Robinson, ‘Gramsci and Globalisation’, pp, 561–2.

51 Leslie Sklair, The Transnational Capitalist Class (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).

52 The most recent accounts that illustrate this include (amongst many others) Andreas Bieler's The Struggle for a Social Europe: Trade Unions and EMU at Times of Global Restructuring (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005); Alan Cafruny and Magnus Ryner, Europe at Bay: In the Shadow of US Hegemony (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2007); Phoebe Moore, Globalisation and Labour Struggle in Asia: A neo-Gramscian critique of South Korea's Political Economy (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007); Nicola Short, The International Politics of Post-Conflict in Guatemala (London: Palgrave, 2008). From a variety of different geographical case-studies, each provide detailed empirical accounts of how states, regions and institutions have been cooperated into the US-led neoliberal project. Yet, these accounts largely focus on the construction of elites from the top, rather than on the various cultural practices and processes used and articulated within the subaltern classes in order to achieve this hegemonic consent.

53 See this emphasised across both edited selections of his Prison Notebooks. See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971) and Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1995).

54 Ibid.

55 Williams, Culture and Materialism, p. 38.

56 Jonathan Joseph, Hegemony: A realist analysis (London: Routledge, 2002); See also Jonathan Joseph, ‘Hegemony and the structure-agency problem in IR’, Review of International Studies, 34 (2008), pp. 109–28.

57 Joseph, ‘Hegemony and the structure-agency problem in IR’, p. 121.

58 For a wider introduction to Critical Realism see Andrew Brown, Steve Fleetwood and John Roberts (eds), Marxism and Critical Realism (London: Routledge, 2002).

59 Ernesto Laclau and Chantel Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985).

60 Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (London: New Left Books, 1977), p. 10.

61 Ernesto Laclau, The Making of Political Identities (London: Verso, 1994); Owen Worth and Carmen Kuhling, ‘Counter-hegemony, anti-globalisation and culture in International Political Economy’, Capital and Class, 84 (2004), pp. 31–42.

62 Hall will possibly be most remembered for his work in editing the highly influential journal Marxism Today with Martin Jacques.

63 Stuart Hall, ‘The Problem of Ideology: Marxism within Guarantees’, in D. Morley and K-H. Chen (eds), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 34–7.

64 Such an observation is perhaps best summed up through Hall's collection of essays on the hegemonic nature of Thatcherism in Britain in the 1980s. See Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal (London: Verso 1988).

65 Stuart Hall, ‘The Problem of Ideology’, p. 45.

66 Mark Rupert, Ideologies of Globalization; Owen Worth, Hegemony, International Political Economy and Post-Communist Russia (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 41–67.

67 As argued by Burnham in ‘Neo-Gramscian hegemony and International Order’, and also by Simon Clarke, ‘Overaccumulation, class struggle and the regulation approach’, Capital and Class, 42 (1990), pp. 59–93.

68 David Lockwood, ‘Review of Hegemony, International Political Economy and Post-Communist Russia’, Slavic Review, 65 (2006), 620–22.

69 Bieler and Morton, ‘Globalisation, the state and class struggle’, pp. 481–9.

70 In one of the many metaphorical references that cover the many translations of the Prison Notebooks, the term ‘Critical Economy’ is widely seen as reference to Marxist/Marx-inspired Economics, but was like many other concepts, given another name due to potential censoring. As such much of his writing on the economy was drawing up vague comparisons between ‘critical’ and orthodox economics and looking at building upon Marx's Capital – often referred to as the various volumes of the Critique of Political Economy.

71 Indeed, much of the sketchy material that Gramsci did write on ‘critical economy’ was often encouraged and enhanced by Piero Staffa, who felt that Gramsci needed to develop his understanding of ‘economic science’ so to provide a critical understanding that complemented his more developed work on civil society. For a general overview of Gramsci's material on Political Economy, see Antonio Gramsci, Further Selections of the Prison Notebook, pp. 161–278.

72 Ibid., pp. 230–60.

73 Robert Cox, Approaches to World Order, pp. 27–30.

74 Gill, ‘Epistemology, Ontology and the “Italian School”’, p. 22.

75 Jason P. Abbott and Owen Worth, ‘The many worlds of Critical International Political Economy’, in Jason P. Abbott and Owen Worth (eds), Critical Perspectives on International Political Economy (Basingstoke: Palgrave), p. 3.

76 Overbeek, ‘Transnational historical materialism’, pp. 168–9.

77 Richard Wyn Jones, ‘Introduction: Locating Critical International Relations Theory’, in R. Wyn Jones (ed.), Critical Theory & World Politics (Boulder CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001), pp 5–6.

78 Raymond Williams, Who Speaks for Wales? Nation, Culture, Identity (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), pp. 191–2.

79 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 331.

80 Stuart Hall, ‘Gramsci's relevance for the study of race and ethnicity’, in Morley and Chen (eds), Stuart Hall, pp. 411–40.

81 Ibid., pp. 435–40.

82 For the best representation of these, see David Campbell and D. Michael Dillon (eds), The Political Subject of Violence (Manchester: Manchester University Press); James der Derian (ed.), International Theory: Critical Investigations (Basingstoke: Palgrave); Jeffrey T. Checkel, ‘The Constructivist Turn in International Relations’, World Politics, 50 (1998), pp. 324–48; Nicholas Onuf, World of Our Making (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press).

83 See for example John Fulton, ‘Religion and Politics in Gramsci: An introduction’, in Sociological Analysis, 48 (1987), pp. 197–216 and Otto Maduro, Religion and Social Conflicts (New York: Orbis, 1981).

84 Gramsci, Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks, pp. 1–137.

85 Ibid., pp. 115–8.

86 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebook, pp. 131–4.

87 Mustapha Pasha, ‘Islam, ‘Soft’ Orientalism and Hegemony: A Gramscian Rereading’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 8 (2005), pp. 543–58.

88 Augelli and Murphy, America's quest for supremacy and the Third World.

89 For example, Morton has argued elsewhere that in order to apply Gramsci, one needs to engage with contrasting accounts of Gramsci within the social sciences and recommends the method employed by Hall which aims to ‘think in a Gramscian way’ rather than rely solely upon textual analysis. He does not however show how such a method can move us beyond current theoretical developments within Gramscian IPE, favouring instead on using it to defend such developments. See Adam Morton, ‘Historicizing Gramsci: situating ideas’, Review of International Political Economy, 10 (2003), pp. 134–40.

90 Susan Strange, ‘The Persistent Myth of Lost Hegemony’, International Organization. 41 (1987), pp. 551–74.

91 In response to Croce's question of how Marxism can account for ‘ethico-political history’, Gramsci simply replies, ‘It is an arbitrary and mechanical hypostasisation of the moment of ‘hegemony’. The Philosophy of Praxis does not exclude ethnic-political history. The opposition between Croce's historical doctrines and the philosophy of praxis lies in the speculative nature of Croce's conception. Gramsci, Further Selections of the Prison Notebooks, p. 330.

92 Adam Morton, ‘A double reading of Gramsci: beyond the logic of contingency’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 8 (2005), pp. 439–54.

93 Gramsci, Selection from the Prison Notebooks, p. 167.