“The persistent myth of lost hegemony,” revisited: structural power as a complex network phenomenon

2020/09/01 by W. Kindred Winecoff · 84 citations
Business, Management and Accounting · Social Sciences · #China #Complex network #Computer science #Economic system #Economics #Elite Sociology and Global Capitalism #Epistemology #Hegemony #International Relations and Foreign Policy #International relations #Law #Neoclassical economics #Phenomenon #Political Influence and Corporate Strategies #Political economy #Political science #Politics #Power (physics) #Redistribution (election) #Sociology

paper · doi:10.1177/1354066120952876

published in European Journal of International Relations 26(1_suppl), 209-252 (SAGE Publishing)

openalex publication_date 2020/09/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/19

Abstract

This article resuscitates the idea of structural power in world politics by linking it to modern complex network science, presents a theoretical framework for understanding how global structures develop and change, and empirically analyzes the prominence of leading states within global finance, trade, security, and knowledge networks. It argues that the “fitness plus preferential attachment” (FPA) model of complex network evolution provides a logical explanation for the durability of American influence even as some of its advantages in country-level capabilities has eroded, and it introduces a network methodology that is capable of empirically analyzing the organizational complexity that exists within and across domains in world politics. It argues that the rise of China and other emerging powers has been overstated in some ways, but that a redistribution of structural prominence is taking place, in some domains, as emerging markets increase their transnational connections; this has mostly come at the relative expense of Europe, however, rather than the United States.

Citations

• Sectoral Differentiation and Network Structure Within Contemporary Worldwide Corporate Networks
• Power-Law Distributions in Empirical Data
• Emergence of scaling in random networks
• Power in International Politics
• Dependent Diplomacy: Signaling, Strategy, and Prestige in the Diplomatic Network
• The Persistent myth of lost hegemony
• Open economy politics: A critical review
• The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers in the Twenty-first Century: China's Rise and the Fate of America's Global Position
• All Crises are Global: Capital Cycles in an Imbalanced International Political Economy
• The Power of Nations: Measuring What Matters
• Toward a political economy of complex interdependence
• Hegemony Studies 3.0: The Dynamics of Hegemonic Orders
• Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion
• America's Global Advantage

Cited by

• Susan Strange [wikipedia]

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• Hegemonies in the World-System: An Empirical Assessment of Hegemonic Sequences from the 16thto 20thCentury