Overcoming methodological statism: new avenues for hegemony research

The course of contemporary international affairs has catapulted the scholarship on inter-state hegemony into an important period of progress and development. Forwarded as Hegemony Studies 3.0, a new and ambitious research program has consolidated these scholarly endeavors and emphasized the interconnectedness between hegemony and international order. In an attempt to advance this research agenda even further, I argue that Hegemony Studies 3.0 currently limits itself from realizing its full potential by conceptualizing hegemony too narrowly. Consequently, I find that hegemony research in its present form suffers from widespread methodological statism. This is evident in the way the analytical and methodological strategies of the scholarship equate the entirety of the domestic sphere of the hegemon with the state and its formal institutions. Moving onwards, I suggest a much broader conceptualization of hegemony and point toward avenues ahead for the scholarship which are inspired by the everyday turn in International Political Economy and the general (re)historicization of the field. These ways forward open up a myriad of new paths of research for hegemony scholars to explore.