How is Xi Jinping changing the course of China’s rise? Based on a Gramscian analytical framework inspired by Bob Jessop, this article provides an anatomy of Xiism (2012–) as an emergent hegemonic project, that is, a (fallible and contested) attempt by China’s party-based power bloc of altering global power balances in China’s favour while retaining domestic stability. Through juxtaposition with Maoism (1957–76) and Dengism (1978–2012), it is proposed that Xiism reformulates the power bloc’s strategy in three respects. First, the ideological vision of the ‘Chinese Dream’ negates Mao’s utopian-egalitarian universalism while readjusting Deng’s pro-market approach by emphasising ‘common prosperity’. Second, the economic accumulation strategy – built around the hyped Belt and Road Initiative – aims to reshape global trade and production patterns in a way that particularly benefits the state-owned sector, the Party leadership’s economic base. Third, Xi’s state project seeks to amalgamate Mao-style charismatic leadership and intra-party ‘self-rectification’ campaigns with both a Dengist commitment to political stability and traditional Chinese statecraft. The crucial issue for the coming decade is whether the Xi leadership will prove able to paper over the contradictions of this emergent ‘China Model’ and win support for it both at home and abroad.

In this article, I argue that Antonio Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution makes a foundational contribution to International Relations (IR), yet has been relatively under appreciated by the broader discipline. Within the Historical Sociology of International Relations, uneven and combined development has recently been postulated as a key trans-historical law that provides a social theory of the ‘international’. Drawing from, but moving beyond these debates, I will argue that passive revolution is a key conditioning factor of capitalist modernity. I will demonstrate how the concept of passive revolution is the element that explains the connection between the universal process of uneven development and the manner in which specific combinations occur within the capitalist era as geopolitical pressures, in tandem with domestic social forces become internalised into geographically specific state forms. It therefore offers a corrective to the frequently aspatial view that is found in much of the literature in IR regarding uneven and combined development. Additionally, passive revolution provides a more politicised understanding of the present as well as an important theoretical lesson in relation to what needs to be done to affect alternative trajectories of development.

Most books by or about Antonio Gramsci reproduce on their covers the same studio photograph dating from the early 1920s. It is a head and shoulders portrait showing Gramsci with longish hair, dark coat buttoned at the neck, unsmiling and looking into the camera through wire-rimmed glasses. This was also the image of him most commonly displayed in Communist Party branches all over Italy from the late 1940s to 1991. Yet if we compare it with other extant photographs of Gramsci, as well as with those of other revolutionary leaders adopted as iconic in the communist movement, we can see it differs from the former and resembles the latter in several ways. The most striking difference is the erasure of any sign of Gramsci’s bodily impairment: the curvature of the spine and short stature resulting from the spinal tuberculosis he had as a child. The article examines the history of this photograph and the way it became adopted as the approved image of Gramsci and considers what was at stake in removing from official memory a condition of disability that was central to his own personal and political identity.

This article draws upon a neo-Gramscian analysis of world order to critically assess the relationship between neo-liberal globalization and socioeconomic rights. It argues that, notwithstanding the well-documented discursive tensions that appear to exist between neo-liberalism and socioeconomic rights, the latter have been reconceptualized in a manner that is congruent with the hegemonic framework of the former in a number of international institutional settings. This has been achieved in part through three discursive framing devices which will be termed ‘socioeconomic rights as aspirations’, ‘socioeconomic rights as compensation’, and ‘socioeconomic rights as market outcomes’. The article will conclude by arguing that, despite such appropriation, there are still fruitful possibilities for counterhegemonic articulations of socioeconomic rights to contest neo-liberal globalization.

Gramsci's work continues to enjoy popularity amongst academics and activists. There is nonetheless a real question about the relevance of his central political ideas for the twenty-first century. This paper defends the thesis that Gramsci's humanism is part of a long tradition of political thought which dates back to Machiavelli, and that although this national-popular humanism is now outdated for reasons which are suggested in the writings and films of Pier Paolo Pasolini, there is also a sociological component to Gramsci's theorising that retains resonance today.

This paper examines relations between the state and capital in Argentina with respect to agricultural biotechnology. Argentina is one of the world's leading exporters of genetically modified (GM) crops and is a key player in the global politics of biotechnology. Whereas in other parts of the world, including other countries in Latin America, active civil societies and some governments have rejected the technology, Argentina has adopted it as a central accumulation strategy. The desirability of this strategy has been secured in material, institutional and discursive arenas of power, producing a particular expression of ‘bio-hegemony’. Looking at the role of business in the political economy of agricultural biotechnology is revealing both of the extent and forms of corporate power and contributes to an understanding of hegemony in practice.