Cambridge Review of International Affairs

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Global power shifts and world order: the

contestation of ‘western’ discursive hegemony

Thorsten Wojczewski

To cite this article: Thorsten Wojczewski (2018) Global power shifts and world order: the
contestation of ‘western’ discursive hegemony, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 31:1,
33-52, DOI: 10.1080/09557571.2018.1476464

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Published online: 16 May 2018.

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Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 2018
Vol. 31, No. 1, 33–52, https://doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2018.1476464

Global power shifts and world order: the contestation of

‘western’ discursive hegemony

Thorsten Wojczewski
King’s India Institute, King's College London

Abstract  Given growing awareness for ‘global power shifts’ and the ‘Western’-centrism
of International Relations (IR), this article re-conceptualizes the phenomena subsumed
under these two labels. By understanding ‘global power shifts’ and ‘world order’ as
discursive phenomena, the article argues that discourses by fixing particular meanings
and identities constitute the objects and subjects of which they speak. The discourses on
‘Global power shifts’ and ‘Post-Western IR’ are an expression of a hegemonic struggle over
meanings and identities, resulting from the dislocation of existing meaning-systems and
identities and enabling ‘new’ agents to assert particular representations of the world as
universal. Drawing on the notion of discursive hegemony, developed by Ernesto Laclau
and Chantal Mouffe, the article develops an analytical framework for conceptualizing the
evolution and implications of this shift in representational power in the field of IR.

Introduction
Scholars and practitioners of international relations today have a strong sense that
the twenty-first century will bring profound shifts in the global configuration of
power and a crisis of the ‘Western’-liberal world order. These ongoing challenges
and transformations are frequently linked to the rise of ‘non-Western’ powers such
as China and the recent surge in populism and nationalism in the US and Europe
(see Ikenberry 2011; Sørensen 2011; Layne 2012; Niblett 2017). The current crisis of
world order comes only two decades after the euphoria the US and its allies expe-
rienced after their victory over the Soviet Union and communism. It disrupts the
widespread conviction that the world’s great ideological and geopolitical strug-
gles were over and that the triumphant twin-model of liberal democracy and free
market economy would gradually spread across the world.1
At the same time, the International Relations (IR) discipline has increasingly
come under attack for its underlying ethnocentrism and parochialism, which cel-
ebrates, promotes and defends the ‘West’ as the privileged, proactive agent of and
highest normative reference point in world politics. As a result, there are calls for
‘re-writing’ IR by de-centring the ‘West’ and moving to a ‘Post-Western IR’ (see
Tickner 2003; Hobson 2012; Tickner and Blaney 2012).

I would like to thank the editors and the three anonymous reviewers for their very helpful
comments on earlier versions of this article.
  1 This notion was most prominently articulated by Francis Fukuyama (1992), who coined ‘the end
of history’ thesis.

© 2018 Department of Politics and International Studies

34  Thorsten Wojczewski

Drawing on the concept of discursive hegemony devised by Ernesto Laclau

and Chantal Mouffe (1985), this article re-conceptualizes the phenomena sub-
sumed under the labels of ‘global power shifts’ and ‘Post-Western IR.’ It portrays
the emergence of both labels as a shift in representational power that dislocates
and contests ‘Western’ discursive hegemony in the political and academic domain
of international relations. Hegemony is here understood as a discursive struggle
over the fixation of meanings and identities. The article seeks, on the one hand, to
broaden the ‘global power shifts’ literature, which predominantly features a deter-
ministic and materialistic orientation. Instead of treating ‘global power shifts’ and
‘world order’ as purely objective, brute material facts, this article understands
them as discursive phenomena and enquires into how discourses attribute mean-
ing to the objects and subjects of which they speak. On the other hand, the arti-
cle conceptualizes the notion of hegemony in the context of the ‘Post-Western
IR’ debate, which often uses—but rarely discusses and theorizes—the concept of
hegemony (see Smith 2002; Tickner 2013). This twofold approach enables this arti-
cle to explore the inter-linkages between the discourses on global power shifts and
Post-Western IR and their roles in the struggle for discursive hegemony.
The article makes three arguments: first, it argues that the discourses of global
power shifts and Post-Western IR constitute a hegemonic struggle over meanings
and identities triggered by the dislocation of the existent discursive order. This
dislocation exposes tensions, or a ‘lack’, in the prevalent discursive symbolization
of world order and enables ‘new’ agents to assert particular representations of the
world as universal. Second, it argues that this dislocation has undermined ‘West-
ern’ discursive hegemony in both the political and academic domain of interna-
tional relations. This discursive hegemony meant that a particular representation
of world politics became the ‘natural’ perspective and acquired a seemingly uni-
versal significance, thus representing ‘reality’ in accordance with the particular
experiences of the ‘West’. This discourse has now become dislocated and thus
increasingly unable to fix meanings and identities whereby its contingency and
particularity have been exposed. Finally, this article argues that this struggle for
discursive hegemony between different proponents in both the political and aca-
demic domain will result in a modification of existing representations of world
order rather than a radically new hegemonic project. This limitation is linked
to the difficulties involved in the construction of a coherent, inclusive counter-
hegemonic project, which creates a collective identity and meaning-system by
placing different demands and actors into opposition to a common ‘other’. It is
further impeded by the hybrid character of today’s world order. In this context,
hybridity refers to this order’s production via peaceful and violent encounters
between different states, cultures and civilizations—each of which was consti-
tuted and re-produced through these encounters. This hybridity thus features
ideas, practices and principles that often emerged from and were shaped by these
encounters rather than having a sole origin (for example Europe). Though the
emergence of a radically different hegemonic order is unlikely, the article suggests
that there is an intensified struggle for interpretative dominance and thus for the
exact ‘content’ of signifiers such as sovereignty or democracy.
The article is structured as follows: the first section elaborates the concept of
discursive hegemony. The second discusses the interrelation between discursive
hegemony and world order. The third re-conceptualizes the discourse of global
 Global power shifts and world order  35

power shifts through the concept of discursive hegemony as a shift of representa-

tional power, in the process elaborating a framework to grasp its implications.

The concept of discursive hegemony

In contrast to the largely materialist and deterministic understandings of hegem-
ony put forward by realist, liberal or Marxist approaches (see Gilpin 1981;
Wallerstein 2004; Ikenberry 2011), Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) poststructuralist
reformulation of the concept underscores the discursive character of the social
world. It further radicalizes the Gramscian model of hegemony (see Cox 1983) by
removing its remaining essentialisms, namely its implicit belief in a fundamental
social class as the driving force of social change and the economic mode of pro-
duction as the prime object of political struggle and element of the ideological
superstructure.
Laclau and Mouffe (1985, 105) understand discourse as a ‘structured totality of
articulatory practices’ that constitutes meanings and identities by relating differ-
ences: something is what it is only through its differential relations to something
else. These articulations take place in a discursive field, described by Howarth and
Stavrakakis (2000, 3) as the ‘theoretical horizon within which the being of objects
is constituted’; hence, ‘all objects are objects of discourse’. In this sense, Laclau
and Mouffe overcome the common distinction between a discursive and non-dis-
cursive realm and postulate that all aspects of social reality become meaningful
through discourses (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 107f.).
Accordingly, this article understands hegemony as a discursive struggle for
the fixation of particular meanings and identities. Unlike the prevalent under-
standing of hegemony in IR, it does not equate hegemony with the materialist
dominance of a particular state or group of states and their coercive capacities.
Instead, hegemony refers to a discourse that elevates a particular representa-
tion or understanding of world politics to a hegemonic and seemingly universal
status. If a certain particularity (of interests, demands or subjects) is represented
as the universal in that it is naturalized and reflected in the discursive practices
of all relevant actors, then a hegemonic constellation has emerged (Nabers 2015,
142–143). Hegemony thus constitutes and institutionalizes a dominant ‘horizon of
intelligibility’ (Norval 1996, 4) that endows the objects of international relations
(for example military power or states) with a particular meaning and delineates
what potentials and constraints exist in world politics, what can be said or done,
and what kind of positions may legitimately be taken. In short, a hegemonic dis-
course becomes ‘common sense’ and coterminous with reality. Thus, this concep-
tualization does not equate power with particular ‘material capabilities’ but rather
understands it as the ability to hegemonize the discursive process through which
particular meanings and identities are constituted.
A discourse constitutes meanings and identities in relation to a common other
or constitutive outside. For example, a state has no objective essence or stable
identity, but is ‘constructed by the discursive practices of those who speak about,
write about, and act on its behalf’ (Doty 1993, 310). A state is thus in permanent
need of re-production. By demarcating ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, ‘national’ and ‘inter-
national’, and ‘self’ and ‘others’, foreign policy discourse plays a crucial role in the
(re-)production of state identities (Campbell 1998).
36  Thorsten Wojczewski

To better understand the formation, contestation and transformation of

hegemonic discourses, Laclau and Mouffe introduced the logics of equivalence
and difference: the logic of equivalence structures the loose elements (demands,
interests, subjects etc.) within a discursive field along a single chain of significance
by linking them together in opposition to an (antagonistic) other, a common nega-
tion. This presupposes the creation of a privileged signifier—a discursive nodal
point—which is ideally an empty signifier that can hold a chain of signification
together. A widely known yet broad concept, such as freedom, can provide an
equivalent identification for different social forces. The other, simultaneously,
ensures the identity of the self (for example the nation) and prevents the full con-
stitution of this identity, because it can only be established in relation to the other.
The logic of difference, by contrast, is the process whereby political frontiers are
(re-)constructed by breaking up chains of equivalence and exposing the plural-
ity and differences between constitutive entities. For example, an authoritarian
regime is confronted with a counter-hegemonic movement, which consists of var-
ious social forces with different demands and interests such as freedom, privat-
ization, democracy, socialism, etc., and then embraces certain demands such as
privatization in order to weaken and disunite the counter-hegemonic forces. Thus,
the logic of difference can challenge existing hegemonic orders, but also constrain
the formation of counter-hegemonic discourses (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 125ff.;
Laclau 1996, 28/38).
Given the absence of any stable foundations (for example reason or God) on
which meanings and identities could be based and the exclusion of alternative
potential articulations, every discourse is vulnerable to a ‘discursive exterior’ that
threatens to subvert or dislocate it (Laclau 2000, 39). Dislocatory moments signify,
in the terms of Lacanian psychoanalysis (see Žižek 1999), the presence of ‘the real’
in a symbolic order, thereby exposing the contingency of all social relations. ‘The
real’ however may not be conflated with ‘reality’, but rather refers to the impos-
sibility of any discourse to fully grasp the materiality of objects/subjects. In this
view, all social relations and identities are characterized by a fundamental ‘lack’
that can never be fully overcome. It results from the paradox that subjects/objects
can only be constituted as meaningful within an alien discursive structure of sig-
nificant differences that never grasps their ‘true essence’, but remains partial and
temporary (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 115; Glynos and Howarth 2007, 131/142f.). In
other words, in a dislocatory moment, the subject realizes that what it viewed as
reality was only a particular discourse which is now confronted with a phenome-
non that it cannot represent or explain. The dislocation of a discourse opens up the
possibility and necessity of agency (Laclau 1990, 39–41). If a discourse becomes
dislocated, subjects need to re-establish meaning and identity by identifying with
and shaping new discourses which ‘re-negotiate’ the relationship between the self
and its others.

Hegemony and world order

This article perceives world order as the outcome of a struggle for discursive
hegemony. Different discourses, shaped by the representational practices of a
range of different actors such as policymakers, scholars, journalists, etc., seek
to establish and re-produce a particular representation of world politics as the
 Global power shifts and world order  37

‘normal’ or ‘commonsensical’ perspective. A hegemonic discourse has managed

to impose a particular order on the world through the fixation of meanings and
identities. It integrates different actors into a common political project by present-
ing their identities and interests as equivalent, thereby constituting a collective
meaning-system and a hegemonic subject with seemingly universal experiences,
values and interests. This equivalence is established by pitting these actors against
a common other that is excluded or marginalized in the hegemonic discourse.
World order is an empty signifier which embodies the absent (and unreach-
able) closure, fullness or universality of any discursive system by ‘emptying’
discursive difference to an extent that the discursive system can provisionally
symbolize the identity of the discourse2 and integrating humanity into a com-
mon overarching framework that transcends chaos, instability, irregularity, vio-
lence and difference. It is an ‘umbrella term’ for numerous different and partially
contradictory meanings, thereby providing a common nodal point for different
positions or meanings, but also making its content almost indeterminable (Laclau
2000, 58). An empty signifier is thus never completely empty but has an indeter-
minable signified in that it can have various competing meanings and thus serve
as a surface of inscription for various political articulations (Laclau 1996, 36ff.). As
Laclau (1996, 44) explicates:
“Order” as such has no content, because it only exists in the various forms in which
it is actually realized, but in a situation of radical disorder “order” is present as
that which is absent; it becomes an empty signifier, as the signifier of that absence.
In this sense, various political forces can compete in their efforts to present their
particular objectives as those which carry out the filling of that lack. To hegemonize
something is exactly to carry out this filling function.

The emptiness of the signifier ‘order’ becomes apparent in the significance world
order is endowed with in the international relations discourse: though world order
is a key concept in IR, the notion of order itself is often not discussed.3 Instead,
scholars and policy-makers alike tend to take its meaning as self-evident and
regard world order as natural, desirable or necessary. Georg Sørensen (2006, 344),
for example, argues that world order is ‘about realizing the good life for man-
kind as a whole’, thus suggesting that it serves some kind of common universal
interest. In contrast to this normative understanding of world order, Hedley Bull
(2002 [1977], 3) writes from an English School perspective that the constituents
(for example states) of order ‘are related to one another according to some pattern,
that their relationship is not purely haphazard but contains some discernible prin-
ciple’. This reading suggests that world order is a politically and morally neutral
concept that serves purely analytical purposes.
However, world order, whether used in a descriptive-empirical or normative
way, cannot be simply treated as something ‘out there’ waiting to be observed
and discovered. Rather, it is a discursive formation endowed with meaning
through systems of significant differences. It gains its significance only through a

  2 In other words, empty signifiers detach a signifier from its particular content, thereby allowing
different social forces to identify with the discourse. In the Brexit discourse, for instance, sovereignty
became an empty signifier that could represent this discourse, and the different demands articulated
therein such as democracy, housing, immigration, healthcare or fishery, as a whole: as soon as the
United Kingdom ‘gains back control’ all these problems can be addressed and solved.
  3 Notable exceptions include: Rengger 2000 and Chaturvedi and Painter 2007.
38  Thorsten Wojczewski

common other that symbolizes a threat to this order and thus embodies disorder.
The discursive formation of a world order always involves a process of order-
ing—a process of hierarchical identity formations that demarcates ‘us’ from ‘them’
and orders the social in the context of radical contingency through the institution
of social antagonisms and thus the exclusion of alternate possibilities, actors, inter-
ests or demands. A hegemonic (discursive) order has managed to create a ‘com-
mon sense’ through establishing a range of empty signifiers and a broad chain of
equivalence between different demands, interests and subjects by placing them
into opposition to a common other. This universal political community, however,
can never be truly universal, because this would imply the inclusion of the forces
of ‘disorder’ as well.
In political and academic discourse of international relations, the ‘West’ has
obtained discursive hegemony in that a particular representation of world poli-
tics is naturalised and has acquired a seemingly universal significance. It repre-
sents ‘reality’ in accordance with the particular experiences and interests of the
‘West’. The ‘West’ is here not understood as a geographical entity, but rather as
a political community. It is formed when ‘a particular social force assumes the
representation of a totality that is radically incommensurable with it. Such a form
of ‘hegemonic universality’ is the only one that a political community can reach’
(Laclau and Mouffe 1985, x). The constitution and maintenance of this ‘Western’
subjectivity4 is premised upon various, changing antagonistic others, serving as
common negation that helps to establish a chain of equivalence between different
subjects, demands and interests. Thus, the ‘West’ continues to exist as a subjectiv-
ity and agent, because there are communities and actors in the world which are
explicitly—and often even violently—constituted as ‘non-Western’. Through this
process of ‘othering’, an ‘exclusive collectivity of societies’ is constructed, as Bahar
Rumelili (2013, 70) argues, with a
distinct and shared historical and cultural trajectory. This shared trajectory is
loosely defined in terms of Antiquity, Renaissance, Enlightenment and Modernity,
wherein the now universal values of humanism, secularism and rationalism have
originated. The fact that those values have originated in the unique historical tra-
jectory of the West sets the West apart from those societies whose experiences with
them are only second-hand.

What Rumelili describes here is the myth of the ‘West’s’ founding history, which
represents the ‘West’ as a pioneering agent that ‘self-generate[d] through its own
endogenous ‘logic of immanence’, before projecting its global will-to-power
outwards through a one-way diffusionism so as to remake the world in its own
image’ (Hobson 2007, 93f.). This mythical narrative obscures the role of agency
beyond the ‘West’ and how it shaped the ‘West’s’ trajectory. Hence, the story of
‘Western’ hegemony does not exist outside of discursive practices in that the claim
of hegemony is based on and reified by a particular, Western-centric representa-
tion of history.5
The emergence of the ‘West’ as a subject of world history and international
political community is insuperably intertwined with its encounter with and
colonial imposition on ‘non-Western’ communities. In this process of colonial

  4 See for a broader discussion of the concept of the ‘West’: Browning and Lethi 2010.
  5 I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this issue.
 Global power shifts and world order  39

othering, as postcolonial scholars have shown, the identities of both colonizers

and the colonized were co-constituted by establishing cultural and civilizational
difference (Bhabha 1994, 199ff.). The violent and unequal integration of the col-
onies into the ‘Western’ international political community paved the way for
the current world order. Though the encounter with the ‘West’ was a traumatic
experience of domination, this encounter also created a desire among postcolonial
and other semi-peripheral actors such as Russia or Turkey to partially emulate
the ‘West’—a desire that resulted, as Ayşe Zarakol (2011) argues, from a stigma-
tisation as different, inferior, and backward. While such negative ‘othering’ was
‘imposed from the outside’, it also rested on an ‘internalization of a particular
normative standard that defines one’s own attributes as discreditable’ (Zarakol
2011, 3–4). At the same time, the ‘West’ served as the other against which these
actors constituted and re-produced their identities or, in the case of the anti-colo-
nial movements, asserted their right to self-determination. Through this assertion,
these movements brought, at least formally, an end to the hierarchical conception
of the international system and contributed to the global diffusion of the norm of
state sovereignty.
The ‘West’ itself is an empty signifier, whose geopolitical essence and scope
is highly ambiguous, complex and contingent. ‘Western’ discursive hegemony
means, on the one hand, that the ‘West’ is the discourse’s nodal point in that the
‘West’ serves as a reference point for all actors—both in a positive and negative
sense—as the privileged signifier in a chain of significance that binds together
various elements, which are similarly empty signifiers (freedom, democracy, lib-
eralism, civilization, modernity, Europe, America, globalization, free world, etc.).
This chain makes up the fuzzy and hybrid identity of the ‘West’.6 On the other
hand, ‘Western’ discursive hegemony implies that the ‘West’ is elevated to a posi-
tion from where it can represent the universal and claim to fill the ‘lack’ of world
order, because it has allegedly found the only legitimate and feasible solution to
political-economic order on the national and international level.
Given the ‘emptiness’ of the signifiers world order and ‘West’, mainstream IR
discourse affirms the hegemonic position of the ‘West’, but disagrees on the exact
nature of the contemporary world order, which it represents as either ‘liberal’,
‘American’ or ‘Western’ (see Sørensen 2006; Ikenberry 2011; Kagan 2012). How-
ever, the universal significance of ‘Western’ actors and their contribution to world
order remains undisputed in this discursive representation in that the ‘West’ sym-
bolizes modernity and the standard of civilization. According to this discourse,
with the peace of Westphalia in 1648, the ‘West’ allegedly laid the foundation for
the modern international system with the norm of sovereignty and then projected
itself outwards by building overseas empires. Fuelled by the Industrial Revolu-
tion, the ‘West’ under British leadership established a globalized, capitalist world
economy. After World War II, the US ‘took over’ the role of global leadership and
constructed a liberal order by insisting on the dismantling of European empires,

  6 This implies that the hegemonic subject itself is no closed, stable and homogenous entity, but its
identity is exposed to discursive struggles and must be constantly reproduced. This also means that the
actors (states, policy-makers or scholars) which comprise the ‘West’ do not represent a homogenous
group, but rather draw on and shape different discourses which seek to fix the meaning of the ‘West’
and thus also its relation with the ‘non-West’.
40  Thorsten Wojczewski

defending free trade, building international institutions and spreading democracy

(Kupchan 2014, 3).
The ‘Western’ hegemonic control over the signifier world order is reflected in
what scholars have coined the ‘Western’-centrism of IR. Though ‘Post-Western
IR’ discourse often speaks about ‘Western’ hegemony in international relations
and questions the universality of ‘Western’ knowledge and practices, it remains
unclear what hegemony means, how this hegemony is constituted, how it oper-
ates, and why a growing awareness of the ‘Western’-centrism in IR has emerged.
Many IR scholars understand hegemony in a rather conventional sense, as the
materialist dominance of a particular state (or group of states) in the international
system. Referring to the relationship between the United States and IR, Steve
Smith (2002) suggests, for instance, a correlation between the ‘Hegemonic Coun-
try’ and the ‘Hegemonic Discipline’, while Arlene Tickner (2013, 633) writes about
‘US hegemony and domination over both academic production and political prac-
tice’ without discussing the concept of hegemony itself.
This is puzzling, since most scholars who engage with the ‘Post-Western IR’
discourse draw on post-positivist and critical theories which usually oppose such
materialistic and deterministic reading of world politics. Moreover, this reading
suggests that a shift in the economic, political and military configuration of power
has triggered the ‘Post-Western IR’ discourse, leading scholars from the Global
South to challenge ‘Western’ hegemony. However, these accounts cannot explain
why so many IR scholars based in the ‘core’ rather than the ‘periphery’ take such
a great interest in ‘Post-Western’ debates.
As this article demonstrates, the concept of discursive hegemony can enrich
our understanding of the phenomena subsumed under the labels ‘global power
shifts’ and ‘Post-Western IR’ by offering a non-materialistic and non-deterministic
understanding of hegemony.

The contestation of world order: ‘global power shifts’ and counter-hegemonic

discourses
According to the global power shifts discourse, the rise and fall of great powers
is an enduring pattern of world politics attributed to shifts in relative economic
growth rates, technological advances, demography and military developments
(see Kennedy 1989; Tammen et al. 2000; Mearsheimer 2001; Ikenberry 2011). In
contrast to this materialistic and deterministic narrative, which typically imposes
a causal relationship onto numerous and heterogeneous independent variables
(demographics, economic growth, military expenditure, etc.) with unspecific and
highly contested dependent variables (power, influence, international responsibil-
ity, world order, etc.), this article does not accept ‘power transitions’ as an objec-
tive fact. Instead, it treats these ‘power transitions’ as a discursive phenomenon,
continuously (re-)constructed through discourses which endow them with par-
ticular meanings.
This section deconstructs the global power shifts discourse and re-concep-
tualizes it as a shift in representational power that involves shifting identities
and contests the ‘Western’ hegemony in the political and academic discourses of
international relations. In other words, the hegemonic discourse is increasingly
 Global power shifts and world order  41

struggling to fix meanings and identities and thus to re-produce a particular rep-
resentation of world order because of a shift in self-other relationships.
Two caveats are in order: first, this article’s focus on representational power
does not imply that economic or military power do not matter. Rather, a dis-
course-theoretical approach argues that material capabilities or events do not
determine their own effects but are endowed with meaning by discourses which
delineate, for example, the significance of military power for the status of states
or its role in providing order in world politics. Military power thus remains sig-
nificant as long as discourses re-produce it as such, but its meaning is ultimately
contingent and thus open to political contestation. In addition, discourses are
themselves configurations of power that place actors into a hierarchical web of
relations by allocating these actors more or less privileged subject positions and
different capacities to influence the discursive struggle for hegemony. In the polit-
ical and academic discourses of international relations, for instance, politicians
and scholars, respectively, are constituted as the prime actors who are given the
authority to participate in and shape relevant discourses. However, their particu-
lar capacities for discursive representation—located in government ministries,
universities, and think tanks—differ. By increasing the size and quality of its for-
eign service, investing in its universities or founding new think tanks, China, for
example, has more financial and human capacities compared to other developing
countries.7
Second, though political and academic discourses of world politics are closely
intertwined (they are both world-making practices), they belong to different gen-
res and thus play different roles in the discursive struggle for hegemony. Both
political discourses and academic discourses construct and re-produce the prob-
lems, subjects and objects of world politics. However, political discourses are more
concerned with formulating policies to address them (Hansen 2006, 19) and try
to succeed in the struggle for political power. As policymakers have the political
authority to implement these policies, the representation of the rise of China as a
security threat in the US foreign policy discourse, for instance, has different impli-
cations than such a representation in academic discourse. Yet, official political dis-
courses are situated in a wider discursive field—they are informed, shaped or
contested by representations articulated in academia or the media and vice versa.
The concept of intertextuality captures this interrelationship (Kristeva 1980),
demonstrating how different genres of foreign policy writings are interlinked and
how they establish authority by drawing upon one another, while also adopting
different forms of knowledge and following different conventions (Hansen 2006,
7/57). For example, academic texts, which seek to understand, explain or critique
the practices of international relations, are generally expected to address a particu-
lar issue as truthfully as possible and refer to theories and methods to substantiate
their arguments.
Against this backdrop, this article now turns to the shift in representational
power in the political and academic domains, as well as the related contestation
of the ‘Western’ discursive hegemony, which can be conceptualized as a three-
stage process: (1)dislocation, (2)discursive struggle, (3)re-hegemonization of the
discursive space:

  7 I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this issue.
42  Thorsten Wojczewski

(1) In the first stage, the hegemonic discourse becomes dislocated. This rupture
in a seemingly stable order exposes not only the contingency and ultimately the
particularity of the discourse, but also throws the identities of actors into crisis, as
they can no longer fully identify with previous subject positions. The articulation
of a crisis of the liberal world order embodies this dislocation—as does the grow-
ing awareness of the ‘Western’-centrism of IR. Among IR scholars, there is talk of
‘The End of American World Order’ (Acharya 2014), a ‘Post-Western World’ (Stu-
enkel 2016), ‘The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order’
(Jacques 2009), ‘A Liberal World Order in Crisis’ (Sørensen 2011) or a ‘No one’s
World’ (Kupchan 2014). While some of these texts see this crisis as an opportunity
for building a more balanced, multipolar order, the prevalent view in the hegem-
onic discourse is that the relative shifts in economic and military capabilities from
the ‘West’ to ‘non-Western’ rising powers, such as China or Russia, is a challenge
or threat.
The notion of dislocation, by contrast, suggests that this crisis is not merely the
result of a shift in the material distribution of power but rather symbolizes a shift
in the self-other relationships that have underpinned the construction of meanings
and identities in the hegemonic political and academic discourse of international
relations. This discourse draws a hierarchical dichotomy between a privileged,
superior self (‘West’) and an inferior, passive or threatening other (‘non-West’),
thereby justifying the hegemonic position towards the other and largely negating
its agency in world politics. Deudney and Ikenberry (2009, 93) summarize the
policy implications of this discursive representation: ‘The foreign policy of the
liberal states should continue to be based on the broad assumption that there is
ultimately one path to modernity—and that it is essentially liberal in character.’
The hegemonic discourse is currently struggling to re-produce this representa-
tion of world politics and thus to articulate particular interests and experiences as
universal ones. The antagonist others that serve(d) as common negation for the
formation and maintenance of the ‘Western’ identity and its claim to universality
are undermining this very identity by (partially) deviating from the ‘Western’ path
to modernity or outperforming the ‘West’. In other words, the hierarchical identity
formation that constructs the ‘West’ as superior and leading agent is contested,
plunging the ‘West’ into an identity crisis. For example, China has generated high
economic growth despite authoritarian rule and stabilized its authoritarian sys-
tem of government in spite of economic liberalization, which should, according to
the ‘Western’ modernization theory, lead to a gradual political liberalization. This
questions the core of the ‘Western’ hegemonic project: the apparent natural link
between capitalism/market economy and liberal democracy and the belief in the
superiority and universality of this particular social order.
For example, US President George W. Bush (1999) declared in a campaign
speech: ‘Economic freedom creates habits of liberty. And habits of liberty create
expectations of democracy. […] Trade freely with China, and time is on our side’.
However, US Congressman Dana Rohrabacher lamented ten years later:
[T]here has been no political liberalization at all in China. We’ve let them profit from
one-way trade that has drained our financial resources and destroyed our manu-
facturing base even as we built their manufacturing base […] It’s not a partner for
peace nor is it a partner for world stability. […] China is already a deadly economic
competitor of our people and is openly hostile to the basic values which make us
Americans (Congressional Record 2009, H11104).
 Global power shifts and world order  43

A dislocatory moment thus signifies the ‘real’ in the discourse and destabilizes the
hegemonic project, because there is something that exceeds discursive representa-
tion and thereby exposes the contingency and particularity of this discourse. What
actors took for granted and conceived as ‘reality’ suddenly appears questionable
and uncertain, making ‘Western’ scholars realize the particularistic nature of IR
theories. The ‘West’ could only be constituted and re-produced as a pioneering,
superior agent by drawing a political boundary between a privileged self and a set
of inferior, backward and passive others. The hegemonic discourse constructed the
‘Western’ international community as a zone of ‘order’ by placing it in opposition
to a zone of ‘disorder’ characterized by underdevelopment, turmoil, irrationality,
violence or authoritarian and failing states. This discursive order is now partially
reversed. On the one hand, the ‘others’, such as China or India, are now gradually
shedding their status as mere subalterns and are becoming rivals. They are acquir-
ing the characteristics the hegemonic discourse of international relations presup-
poses for power and influence in global politics and are (partially) deviating from,
or contesting, the ‘Western’ development model. On the other hand, the ‘West’
itself has partially become a zone of turmoil, with economic crises and the rise of
populism and nationalism challenging the discursive representation of the liberal
‘West’ as a space of progress, rationality, stability and prosperity, and of liberal
democracy and market economy as the social order that embodies these qualities.
(2) In the second stage, alternative discourses compete for establishing an
interpretative framework through which the dislocated discursive structure can
be ‘re-sutured’. This may involve attempts to overcome the ‘Western’-centrism
of IR or to make sense of the ‘rise’ of China and India. In other words, these dis-
courses establish or re-negotiate the relationship between the self and its others
and thereby delineate the appropriate means for dealing with the other.
For dealing with the other, the hegemonic international relations discourse
generally conceives only two alternatives: conflict/disciplining or conversion/
accommodation.8 The first perspective understands the current ‘power shift’ pri-
marily against the backdrop of ‘[t]he near-simultaneous emergence of the United
States, Germany, and Japan as great powers in the later nineteenth and early twen-
tieth centuries [that] triggered two world wars’ (Layne 2012, 206) and will poten-
tially follow similar patterns, thus requiring counter-balancing or containment to
discipline and curtail the other. As the US National Intelligence Council (2004, 9)
predicts in its report Mapping the Global Future: ‘The likely emergence of China
and India, as well as others, as new major global players—similar to the advent of
a united Germany in the nineteenth century and a powerful United States in the
early twentieth century—will transform the geopolitical landscape, with impacts
potentially as dramatic as those in the previous two centuries.’ Explaining the
dangers of ‘power transitions’, Aaron Friedberg (2005, 19–20) notes:
As they seek to assert themselves, rising powers are often drawn to challenge ter-
ritorial boundaries, international institutional arrangements, and hierarchies of
prestige that were put in place when they were relatively weak. […] As was true of
Adolf Hitler’s Germany, for example, a rising power may have ambitions that are
so extensive as to be impossible for the status quo powers to satisfy without effec-
tively committing suicide.

  8 In IR theory, these two perspectives largely correspond to realism and liberalism.
44  Thorsten Wojczewski

This representation of global power shifts not only denies the current ‘emerging
powers’ any substantial or positive agency which would enable them to follow a
different path than previous ‘emerging powers’, but also discards the particular
domestic and international contexts in which Germany, Japan or the US ‘emerged’.
Hence, it utilizes a particular narrative about the ‘rise and fall of great powers’ to
make the intentions and practices of contemporary ‘emerging powers’ meaning-
ful. This narrative suggests that material characteristics determine behaviour and
equates material power capabilities with influence. As this narrative is primarily
constructed around the rise of Germany, Japan and the United States and links
this rise to two world wars, the contemporary ‘power transition’ automatically
becomes a challenge or threat to world order and peace. For example, China’s
territorial claims in the South China Sea are represented as a sign for the growing
assertiveness of a ‘rising power’, indicating that ‘China has no intention of con-
tenting itself with a secondary role in global affairs, nor will it accept the current
degree of US influence in Asia and the territorial status quo there’ (Mead 2014,
74). This article does not suggest that the contemporary ‘power shifts’ will neces-
sarily be peaceful, but rather emphasizes the social construction of knowledge. It
problematizes how discourses construct narratives which merely offer a particular
interpretative framework to make sense of events and phenomena. Since these
narratives often predetermine the behaviour of actors without contextualizing
their motivations and practices, they can easily become self-fulfilling prophecies
if policy-makers and scholars treat them as self-evident.
The conversion/accommodation perspective, by contrast, assumes the possi-
bility of integrating the rising powers into the existing order, believing either in
the ultimate evolution of a homogenous global polity, in the conversion of the ris-
ing powers along the ‘Western’ development model, or at least in their willingness
to adapt to the liberal world order (see Lardy 2002; Ikenberry 2011). Ikenberry
(2008, 29/33) explains:
unlike the imperial systems of the past, the Western order is built around rules and
norms of nondiscrimination and market openness, creating conditions for rising
states to advance their expanding economic and political goals within it. Across his-
tory, international orders have varied widely in terms of whether the material ben-
efits that are generated accrue disproportionately to the leading state or are widely
shared. In the Western system, the barriers to economic participation are low, and
the potential benefits are high. […] The Western order has the potential to turn the
coming power shift into a peaceful change on terms favorable to the United States.

This representation of the world order and global power shifts embodies not only
‘Western’ discursive hegemony by equating particular interests and concerns with
the interests and concerns of mankind. It also seeks to persevere this hegemony
by discarding the possibility that the ‘rising states’ will promote different rules
and norms and the fact that every political order involves a process of ordering
through which particular actors, interests and demands are privileged, while oth-
ers are marginalized or discriminated against.
Interestingly, even India, a liberal democracy and market economy, does not
endorse this representation of the liberal world order. Rather, India’s foreign
policy discourse represents it as ‘a highly discriminatory, exclusive and pre-
scriptive international order inherited from the last century’s wars’ (Sinha 2003,
191). It asserts that India does not want to be ‘simply co-opted into the existing
 Global power shifts and world order  45

international order that is controlled by the west [sic]. It must find its due place
in it in its own right and be in a position to change the rules rather than simply
adhere to existing ones’ (Sibal 2012).
Though the second narrative tends to offer a more optimistic account of the
‘power shifts’, it also emphasizes the different regime types of the ‘rising powers’
and fears that non-democratic states such as China and Russia might turn out to
be revisionist powers that seek to alter the international status quo. Articulating
this concern, George W. Bush (1999) said:
the conduct of China’s government can be alarming abroad, and appalling at home.
Beijing has been investing its growing wealth in strategic nuclear weapons, new
ballistic missile, a blue-water navy and a long-range airforce. It is an espionage
threat to our country. Meanwhile, the State Department has reported that ‘all public
dissent against the party and government [has been] effectively silenced’—–a tragic
achievement in a nation of 1.2 billion people. China’s government is an enemy of
religious freedom and a sponsor of forced abortion—–policies without reason and
without mercy. […] China is a competitor, not a strategic partner. We must deal with
China without ill-will—–but without illusions.

The drawing of a political frontier between democratic and authoritarian regimes

can be interpreted as a response to the dislocated ‘Western’ identity and an attempt
to preserve its discursive hegemony in world politics. Accordingly, China and
Russia are constructed as antagonistic others that threaten, challenge or under-
mine the ‘Western’ identity and are blamed for the dislocation of the discourse.
Democratic rising powers such as India and Brazil, on the other hand, are repre-
sented as successful examples of the superiority and universality of the ‘Western’
political and economic model. For example, US President Donald Trump (2016)
repeatedly blamed China for its ‘economic assault on American jobs and wealth’
and thus projected the US’ domestic problems onto the external Chinese other. By
promising to ‘make America great again’, he attempts to re-assert the US’ identity
as the global leading power and the superiority and universality of its political
and economic model.
India’s rise, by contrast, is welcomed and represented as a ‘strategic opportu-
nity’ for the United States (Burns 2007), with the US Government promising ‘to
help India become a major power in the 21st century’ (US Department of State
2005). Likewise, US policy-makers and advisers have called for the establishment
of ‘a worldwide League of Democracies’ and suggested making the G-8 ‘a club
of leading market democracies: it should include Brazil and India but exclude
Russia’ (McCain 2007, 25/27). Unlike realist accounts, which would explain such
moves as a policy of balancing against (re-)emerging Russia and China, this arti-
cle draws attention to a different dimension and understands them as part of a
discursive strategy that aims to re-constitute dislocated ‘Western’ identity and
defend its discursive hegemony. However, this attempt to expand the chain of
equivalence and integrate India and Brazil into the ‘Western’ discursive project by
placing them into a common opposition to the non-democratic Chinese or Russian
other is undermined by the logic of difference. This logic exposes the differences
between the post-colonial, developing democracies and the industrialized ‘West-
ern’ democracies whose affluence and dominance in the world cannot be sepa-
rated from their colonial and imperialist past. Indian policymakers, for instance,
desire recognition of India by the ‘West’ and seek closer relations with ‘Western’
46  Thorsten Wojczewski

democracies. But they simultaneously seek to assert India’s sovereignty, cultural

distinctiveness and independent agency in world politics. After all, India’s iden-
tity was partially constituted against the European colonial other. Maintaining
this difference is crucial for the re-production of India’s identity. As a result, India is
reluctant to join the ‘Western’ community and become a principal stakeholder of
the ‘Western’-led liberal order (Wojczewski 2018).
While the hegemonic international relations discourse predominantly repre-
sents the ‘power transition’ as a challenge or threat, counter-hegemonic discourses
generally represent it as an opportunity to overcome, for instance, the ethnocen-
trism, parochialism and racism of IR theory, as suggested by the ‘Post-Western IR’
discourse. Likewise, BRICS countries (Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa)
postulate a more ‘equitable and democratic world order’ (BRIC 2010) in their dis-
course of multipolarity, which associates a post-Western, multipolar world with
stability, justice, plurality and representativeness. Following the dislocation of the
hegemonic political and academic discourse of international relations, these coun-
ter-hegemonic discourses signify an intensified discursive struggle over meanings
and identities. Counter-hegemonic discourses seek to reverse existing self-other
relationships through the creation of new subject positions, which provide certain
actors with a higher degree of agency in world politics, and inscribe the empty sig-
nifier ‘world order’ and related concepts such as ‘peace’, ‘democracy’, or ‘justice’
with different meanings.
However, this is not to suggest that these academic and political counter-he-
gemonic discourses contribute to the challenge of the ‘Western’ hegemony in the
same way. ‘Post-Western IR’ scholars primarily seek to diversify the IR discipline
by drawing attention to ‘non-Western’ knowledge, experiences and agency. The
BRICS, by contrast, seek to modify or alter the international political order by
reforming international institutions and norms or creating new ones. At the same
time, certain intertextual linkages between these two discourses exist. For exam-
ple, many ‘Post-Western IR’ scholars suggest that ‘non-Western’ knowledge and
practices are not only different but also superior to ‘Western’ ones (see Tickner
2003). They thereby implicitly construct the ‘West’ as the other that blocks the
full realization of a global IR and a just and peaceful world order. In the official
foreign policy discourses of some BRICS countries, there is a similar tendency to
represent, for instance, China and India as ‘different’ powers, whose rise will con-
tribute to building a more peaceful and just world. BRICS politicians frequently
use ‘indigenous’ knowledge or values to substantiate such claims. Similar to the
‘Western’ hegemonic discourse, these discursive representations of China and
India assert that their particular identities and experiences have universal signifi-
cance. Ultimately, these accounts run the risk of merely replacing a ‘Western’-cen-
tric conception of world politics with Sino-centric or Indo-centric ones.
For example, Chinese scholars and policymakers underscore that ‘Western’
theories are insufficient for understanding China’s rise and that China will be an
example for a ‘peaceful rise’ or ‘peaceful development’, striving to build a ‘har-
monious world’ (Hu 2005, Zheng 2005). A common intertextual reference point
is the ancient Chinese concept of ‘Tianxia’ (All under heaven) which emphasizes
inclusiveness and diversity, allegedly providing the foundation for a ‘truly coher-
ent world society governed by a universally-accepted political institution’ and
domestic, international and global harmony (Zhao 2009, 6ff.).
 Global power shifts and world order  47

Likewise, India’s foreign policy discourse constitutes India as a ‘bridging

power’ that can forge close relations with almost all countries in the world and
serve as a true symbol of peaceful co-existence. In the words of the former Indian
prime minister Manmohan Singh (2007):
The success of a secular democracy in a nation of a billion people with such diver-
sity is viewed with admiration. This great idea of India as a symbol of unity in
diversity is increasingly viewed with respect and regard. [...] India wants to have
good relations with all the countries of the world. Big and small. Countries of the
East and the West, the North and the South. Today, we enjoy good relations with all
major powers and all developing countries. We have emerged as a bridge between
the many extremes of the world. Our composite culture is living proof of the pos-
sibility of a confluence of civilizations. India will always be a nation bridging the
many global divides.

This alleged ability to ‘bridge the global divides’ is often derived from India’s
Hinduist heritage. Not only the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party of Prime
Minister Narendra Modi draws this link, but also ‘Post-Western IR’ scholars such
as Arlene Tickner who cites ‘Hindu culture’ as an example of a successful ‘juxta-
position of numerous religious and cultural identities that constitute a singular
family in which each enjoys the same respect, importance and tolerance’ (Tickner
2003, 304).
Though this shift in representational power leads to an intensified discursive
struggle over interpretative dominance and thus the content of ‘world order’, cur-
rently hardly any indicators exist of an inchoate comprehensive counter-hegem-
onic project that seeks to overthrow the existing global order. Yet, the BRICS group,
which is often seen as the prime contenders for hegemony, features some elements
of a counter-hegemonic coalition. According to de Coning, Mandrup and Odgaard
(2015, 6), the BRICS promote the notion of ‘coexistence’ as an ordering-princi-
ple and thus ‘the co-management of global order by states that may subscribe
to different world views, different political systems and different approaches to
economic and development policies’. While this conception of world order rec-
ognizes the principles of sovereignty, peaceful conflict resolution and multilateral
diplomacy—cornerstones of the existing global order—it also contains a coun-
ter-hegemonic dimension. The BRICS representation of world order challenges
the existence of a single modernity and seeks to detach ‘Western’ hegemonic signi-
fiers, such as democracy, sovereignty or globalization, from their ‘Western’-centric
origins. If successful, this discourse would reverse the status hierarchy between
‘Western’ powers and the BRICS (and other ‘non-Western’ actors) and override
the normative dichotomy between a ‘Western’ universality and ‘non-Western’
particularities in world politics. In fact, in the BRICS counter-hegemonic project,
the ‘Western’ other is constructed as the obstacle that prevents the creation of a
true world order. The BRICS, on the other hand, serve as the alleged symbol of
‘coexistence’, elevated to a position from which they can fill the lack of world
order and represent the universal—a global political community that can despite
all its differences live in peaceful co-existence. As mentioned above, the creation
of a collective identity and understanding of world order presupposes that there
is a common other through which, in this case, the internal differences among
the BRICS can be cancelled out and their interests, preferences and demands
can be represented as equivalent. This counter-hegemonic project is, however,
48  Thorsten Wojczewski

undermined by the BRICS countries themselves—in particular China and India—

which have failed to realize the ideal of co-existence in their bilateral relations
with one another. This suggests that the ‘Western’ other, as a common enemy, can-
not override the internal differences among the BRICS and help construct a strong
collective identity (cf. Panda 2017; Wojczewski 2018).
The formation of a counter-hegemonic project which promotes a radically dif-
ferent vision of world order is also complicated by the hybrid character of con-
temporary global politics. While the ‘Western’ hegemonic discourse represents
this order and its major pillars, such as sovereignty, human rights, globalization
or democracy, as largely ‘Western’ creations, it obscures the multi-directional dif-
fusion of knowledge, technologies and practices. The discourse thereby obscures
the extent to which such ideas and developments result from cross-cultural inter-
actions, built on one another, with multiple origins. For example, notions of par-
ticular religious rights emerged in many places, ‘non-Western’ actors dominated
the world economy before the rise of the ‘West’ and paved the way for economic
globalization, and the norm of state sovereignty cannot be understood in isolation
from anti-colonial struggles (Hobson 2004; Stuenkel 2016, 3ff.). Unsurprisingly,
the BRICS discourse embraces, through its ordering-principle of ‘coexistence’, the
norm of sovereignty, but links it primarily to anti-colonial and anti-imperial strug-
gles for self-determination.
Though not a postcolonial state per se, even Russia has—despite being an impe-
rialist power itself—appropriated the discourse of postcoloniality and adopted a
subaltern identity to justify its own authoritarian rule and external aggression.
As a result, Russia (and China) simultaneously oppose the ‘West’, but neverthe-
less tend to frame their own interests and demands in the ‘Western language’
of democracy. They acknowledge, in other words, the universal significance of
these values (or signifiers) but seek to detach them from their particularistic ‘West-
ern’ origin, endowing them with somewhat different meanings (Morozov 2015,
4/25). For example, when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 and annexed Crimea,
it invoked—like the US and its allies in their military interventions—the notions
of self-determination, democracy and humanitarian concerns (Medvedev 2016).
(3) In the third stage of the struggle for discursive hegemony, the (new) inscrip-
tions and subject positions generated after the dislocation become more stable and
routinized. Eventually, this could lead to the institutionalization of a new hegem-
onic discourse. Whether the previously hegemonic discourse is defended, modi-
fied or replaced or whether no discourse is able to achieve hegemony, will depend
on the degree of contestation inherent in the counter-hegemonic discourses. It will
also depend on the latter’s ability to link together various contingent subjects,
interests and demands into a chain of equivalence in order to produce a collective
identity and a common understanding or, in other words, an alternative hegem-
onic project. The power to hegemonize a discourse cannot easily be located or
quantified, because ‘[p]ower is everywhere’, as Foucault (1979, 93) writes: ‘Not
because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.’ The
‘Western’ discursive hegemony is, as we have seen, not simply contested by
‘non-Western’ actors but also from within the ‘West’, be it through scholars who
criticize the ‘Western’-centrism of IR or populist politicians.
Congruent with the anti-essentialist, discursive ontology set out in this article,
the trajectory of the ‘global power shifts’ as a battle over discursive hegemony is not
predetermined and can thus oscillate between a peaceful and violent contestation
 Global power shifts and world order  49

and transition. Similarly, the extent to which a ‘power shift’ exists in the first place
is not independent of this discursive struggle but rather a part of it. How this
discursive struggle will evolve depends to a great extent on the degree of antago-
nism inherent in the emerging discourses and the development of an institutional
framework in which political antagonisms can be managed peacefully and iden-
tities are not constituted in an absolutist or entirely exclusive way. For instance,
discourses that highlight geo-cultural difference and obscure the mutual constitu-
tion of and various interlinkages between these different spaces rather impede the
possibility of a peaceful contention of antagonisms.

Conclusion
This article re-conceptualizes the phenomena that are subsumed under the labels
of ‘global power shifts’ and ‘post-Western IR’ as a shift of representational power
dislocating and contesting the ‘Western’ discursive hegemony. Unlike conven-
tional and critical approaches to hegemony, the concept of discursive hegemony
does not equate hegemony with (material) primacy, dominance or coercion but
instead refers to the hegemony of a discourse that elevates a particular representa-
tion of world politics to a hegemonic and thus apparently universal status.
The article argues that broader hegemonic struggles are symbolized by the
discourses on ‘global power shifts’ and ‘Post-Western IR’. This hegemonic battle
finds expression in the dislocation of existing identities, disclosure of the inherent
tensions in the prevalent concept of world order and the empowerment of ‘new’
actors to assert particular representations of the world as universal. The articu-
lation of a crisis of the liberal world order embodies this dislocation just as the
growing awareness for the ‘Western’-centrism of IR.
A discursive understanding of ‘global power shifts’ and ‘world order’ does
not treat these phenomena as material or objective facts ‘out there’ waiting to be
observed and discovered, but emphasizes the social construction of knowledge
and thus how discourses create particular interpretative frameworks that make
them intelligible in the first place. This urges us to highlight their contingent,
non-essentialist and political character and to find an institutional framework that
allows for the peaceful contention of antagonisms in global politics.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Thorsten Wojczewski is a teaching fellow and post-doctoral researcher in the
India Institute, King’s College London. His research interests are: Indian
foreign policy, world order, global power shifts, poststructuralism, Post-Western
IR and critical security studies. He is the author of the book ‘India’s Foreign Policy
Discourse and its Conceptions of World Order: The Quest for Power and Identity’
(published by Routledge, 2018).
50  Thorsten Wojczewski

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