Movements post-hegemony: how contemporary collective action transforms hegemonic politics

‘Post-hegemony’ is a critical notion introduced by theorists who take issue with the modern politics of hierarchical organization, representation, unification, the state and ideology: the politics of ‘hegemony’ according to A. Gramsci and E. Laclau. Post-hegemonic thinkers tend to celebrate, by contrast, contemporary social movements which appear to be horizontal, leaderless, participatory, diverse, networked and opposed to the state, global capitalism and ideological closures. Critical responses to the ‘post-hegemonic’ thesis object that contemporary democratic resistances do not attain, in effect, a full rupture with hegemony or they should not attain it. The paper offers, first, an illuminating, up-to-date map of the different positions in the debate over post-hegemony. It seeks to demonstrate, then, that diverse figures of contemporary activism are indeed post-hegemonic not as this has been understood in most post-hegemonic accounts till now, but in the sense of the ‘post-’ which implies an impure, ongoing development: a time and a space in-between. The second half of the paper is devoted, thus, to recasting and reformulating the conception of post-hegemony, tracing it out in the values, the practices and the logics which inform recent democratic movements, as these craft new modes of unification, leadership and representation beyond the hegemonic mould.