If there is one concept that frames and informs debates in international politics, both in policy and academic circles, it is “hegemony.” Chinese President Xi Jinping is on record as claiming that the word should not be associated with China, declaring that the pursuit of hegemony is “not in China’s DNA.” We don’t know whether or not Russian President Vladimir Putin personally objects to the term, but foreign policy analysts point to how the war in Ukraine is an effort by Russia to seek “regional hegemony,” though one that may ironically undermine that effort.
But what is hegemony? In international relations, the word refers to the ability of an actor to shape the international system thanks to the overwhelming power it possesses. It is common to draw distinctions between benevolent and malevolent hegemony, with the former being associated with cooperative behavior, such as the U.S. playing a key role in forming the international institutions that underpin the liberal international order, and the latter associated with coercion, such as military action against so-called rogue states. Relatedly, it is at times treated as synonymous with leadership within alliance networks, but also with centralized imperial control within an empire.
This idea of a dominant world power has long been central to conceptual understandings of international politics. In “The European Anarchy”—published in 1916, but still one of the classics of modern IR scholarship—G. Lowes Dickenson traced the cause of what was then called “the Great War” and what we know as World War I to the “stereotyped” form of behavior between states, by which one state “will endeavor to acquire supremacy over the others.”