Reification and Theoreticism in the Study of Globalisation,Imperialism and Hegemony: Response to Kiely,Pozo-Martin and Valladão

This commentary critiques the nation-state framework of analysis that informs papers published by Ray Kiely, Gonzalo Pozo-Martin and Alfredo Valladão in a section appearing in the Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 19:2 (2006), on the theme of globalisation, imperialism and hegemony. Kiely, Pozo-Martin and Valladão reify the state and the inter-state system by giving them an agency independent of historical social forces. They fail to put forward a conception of agency and institutions that could address the central problematic of the political management, or rule, of global capitalism. They presuppose a state-based understanding of global politics that ignores the reality of transnational capital and transnational social forces and that reduces global capitalism to international capitalism. We should focus not on states as fictitious macro-agents but on historically changing constellations of social forces operating through multiple institutions, including state apparatuses that are themselves in a process of transformation as a consequence of collective agencies.