Hegemony is forged through cultural and ideological struggle, not just force.

Evidence

It thus requires an extensive cultural and ideological struggle to bring about or effect the intellectual and ethical unity which is essential to the forging of hegemony: a struggle which takes the form of “a struggle of political hegemonies and of opposing directions, first in the ethical field and then in that of politics proper” (PN, 333). — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 126

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines hegemony as requiring ethical-cultural struggle before political struggle — a core mechanism for the field’s vocabulary.
• XREF: Connects to Gramsci’s base-superstructure theory and to later Islamophobia readings on how ideological consensus (as opposed to state coercion alone) sustains exclusion. — connects to: Demand meanings get fixed only through hegemonic struggles over frontiers. — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 266