Constructing Hegemony in Global Politics. A Discourse–Theoretical Approach to Policy Analysis

Abstract

The article proposes a discourse-theoretical approach to policy analysis that explores how political relations are changed through and within a strategic, and interest-led process with a focus on conflictual struggles that attempt to establish, change, or consolidate specific interests and meanings as universalities. It suggests a conceptualization of hegemonic projects and discusses their relation to the common good. After elaborating on the term discourse formation as a middle-range concept and a more concrete approach to hegemony, the article suggests various clusters of (discursive) strategies to facilitate the evaluation of hegemonic processes within a policy field. Lastly, it introduces vectors of hegemony, proposing an analytical grid as a framework to facilitate reflection on hegemony. European austerity policies are examined to illustrate how some logics and strategies work to strengthen a specific governance approach to the eurozone crisis.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 105 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.