Global Hegemony in the 21st Century: Bifurcations in the Face of the Global Constellation of Crisis

Abstract

The questions surrounding the situation of global hegemony in the first two decades of the 21st century have been multiple and increasingly recurrent. The position of the United States as a superpower has shown an increasing vulnerability due to its internal social and economic contradictions, as well as the renewal of global geostrategic competition. The crisis of hegemony has not only been expressed in the sphere of competition between hegemonic subjects, but fundamentally through the signs of exhaustion in the capacity of management, organization and execution of the capitalist system as a civilizing horizon throughout the planet. Thus, the new century begins as a historical moment in which we witness a profound crisis of hegemony, expressed mainly in the tensions and contradictions inherent to its systemic reproduction, where possibilities of bifurcation open up to rethink the relational category of hegemony at its different scales. This article will seek to contribute to the reflection on hegemony as a relational category, which is in constant transformation and adaptation to its own conditions of possibility, with the aim of proposing lines of analysis for the understanding of a complex, uncertain, risky and unequal world where the contemporary crisis of hegemony uncovers the possibility of strategic rearticulations and systemic bifurcations in struggle for a new civilizing horizon on a global scale.