also partnered with fellow Canadian academic A. Claire Cutler to release a neo-Gramscian inspired volume entitled New Constitutionalism and World Order (Cambridge, 2014). The book brings together a selection of critical theorists and neo-Gramscians to analyze the disciplinary power of legal and constitutional innovations in the global political economy. Co-editor A. Claire Cutler has been a pioneer scholar detailing a neo-Gramscian theory of international law. Outside of North America, the so-called Amsterdam School around Kees Van Der Pijl and Henk Overbeek (at VU University Amsterdam) and individual researchers in Germany, notably in Düsseldorf, Kassel and Marburg as well as at the Centre for Global Political Economy at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom and other parts of the world, have adopted the neo-Gramscian critical method. Christoph Scherrer at the University of Kassel is one of the leading neo-Gramscian theorists in Germany who introduced the concept of "double hegemony". He represents the critical global political economy approach in Germany. Basics of the neo-Gramscian perspective In the mainstream approaches to international or global political economy, the ontological centrality of the state is not in question. In contrast, neo-Gramscianism, using an approach which Henk Overbeek, Professor of International Relations at the VU University Amsterdam, calls transnational historical materialism, "identifies state formation and interstate politics as moments of the transnational dynamics of capital accumulation and class formation". Neo-Gramscianism perceives state sovereignty as subjugated to a global economic system marked by the emergence of a transnational financial system and a corresponding transnational system of production. The major players in these systems, multinational corporations and international financial institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, have evolved into a "transnational historic bloc" that exercises global hegemony (in contrast to the realist view of hegemony as the "predominant power of a state or a group of states"). The historic bloc acquires its authority through the tacit consent of the governed population gained through coercive techniques of intellectual and cultural persuasion, largely absent violence. It links itself to other social groups that have been involved in political struggles to expand its influence and seeks to solidify its power through the standardization and liberalization of national economies, creating a single regulatory regime (e.g. World Trade Organization). There are powerful forces opposing the progress of this historic bloc who may form counterhegemonies to challenge it as part of an open-ended class struggle. These might include neo-mercantilists