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Karl Polanyi’s scholarship is interpreted in radically different ways. The “hard” reading of Polanyi sees him as a radical socialist; the “soft” reading presents him as a theorist of mixed economy. This article sides with the soft interpretation. It uses Polanyi’s biography to explain his theoretical “elusiveness,” presents a novel interpretation of his three types of economic integration, claiming all economies are “mixed.” While it acknowledges Polanyi as one of the major sources of world system theory, it claims that Polanyi saw not only the dangers, but also the necessity and positive consequences of globalization. Finally, it shows that, in spite of Polanyi’s life-long commitment to the political left, his scholarly work did not offer an apology of socialism. Instead this article uses Polanyi’s theory of economic integration to build a critical political economy of state socialism.

Background/objectives: To examine the factors which can influence the presence of world countries in news tweets of international news agencies. Methodology: The study draws upon the World Systems Theory, which categorizes the world into Core, Semi-Periphery, and Periphery with respect to economic, political, and communication relationships. We attempt to study and compare the coverage of Core, Periphery, and Semi-Periphery countries in tweets of international news agencies. Scholars argue that certain attributes of a country make that country more newsworthy for international news agencies and also these factors contribute significantly in making these countries more prominent on the digital landscape of twitter. We used the method of content analysis of purposively selected tweets of four international news agencies; AFP, AP, Reuters, and Xinhua about the 15 sample countries, including Pakistan, for the period of 7 year from 2010– 2016. Findings: We found that there are significant differences in the coverage of world countries in tweets of international news agencies. Core and Semi-Periphery countries are given more coverage in international news tweets. Similarly, Core and SemiPeriphery countries are more retweeted and liked by the followers of international news agencies. Finally, we found that GDP is not the sole determinant of countries portrayal and their sharing on Twitter by the international news agencies and their followers. Novelty/ improvements: If a country, including Pakistan, wants to increase its sharing on Twitter, the country should develop its information sector and internet penetration should be accelerated. Keywords: International News Flow, World System Theory, News Tweets, News Determinants, Country Attributes.

In the last few years, the language of globalism and borders has been pervasive in the narratives of politics and social commentary. Despite the flurry of opinions, debates, and claims of “fake news,” those who are practitioners in theological education broadly speaking, and theological librarianship, specifically, recognize the deep and profound reality of global education, and the impact that it has on both domestic students and the international representation of students and faculty as one community of learners, practitioners, and seekers. In this paper, we will look at how the language of globalism has been expressed both in popular terms and theological terms; how the evocation of borders and boundaries is not a new idea, but a dated trope reused throughout history for steering narrative claims; and how World-Systems theory enables a broader understanding of theological education and librarianship.

‘Globalization’, certainly, has transformed the globe massively in the last few centuries. Globalization has multiple dimensions and issues to discuss all over the world. Now, the world is under the united umbrella having diversified notions and apparitions. It has been believed that socio-economic, political, cultural, technological, and military subjects and matters are related to globalization intimately. The primary objective of this research is to find out the driving force of globalization. This study has been conducted based on the content analysis of the globalization. The analytical pattern of writing has been incorporated in this paper and very smoothly described all the possible driving forces of globalization. The study has found that many factors work for the procedures of globalizing as well as de-globalizing in world societies those are considered as the driving force of globalization. Therefore, this study will be cooperative for the researchers, teachers, and students of social sciences especially, sociology, political science, International Relations, etc. for the robust understanding of globalization.

Neoliberal economic theorists posit that the economic sphere is to be differentiated from the social world and governed by its own rationality that is distinct from religious, ethical, social, or political considerations. My article explores how the issuance of fatwas in the contemporary Muslim world discursively compete with neoliberal capitalist ideology by embedding religious ethics in economic discourse. First, I contextualize this analysis with a historical discussion on how the Muslim world was incorporated into the capitalist world-system, a process that peripheralized their established economic and cultural practices. Then, I examine the contemporary fatwas on commercial transactions that are issued by an international Muslim organization. My overall argument is that the Islamic moral economy proposes financial arrangements that represent alternatives to capitalist financial practices, which are the standard modes of operation in global financial institutions. Such practices pose a challenge to Muslim economic ethics and law, a challenge that Muslims are trying to negotiate using traditional legal practices such as the fatwa.

The chapter covers the mid- to late Cold War period in three parts. The first part deals with the politics and literature of the 1960s (when Rhodesia announced Unilateral Declaration of Independence and Zambia hosted liberation groups from the region); the second addresses the 1970s (when Angola and Mozambique gained independence and the Zimbabwe war and the anti-apartheid struggle intensified); and the third covers the 1980s (when Zimbabwe achieved independence and South Africa devised a ‘total strategy’ to destabilise the region). Avoiding the pitfalls of reflection theory and relying instead on a version of world systems theory, the chapter charts how, in a period marked by political pressures and violence, black authors used the novel form to articulate sophisticated and emancipatory international political standpoints.

I argue that the 1930s—considered as a key decade in a longer historical moment—presents important analytical resources for interpreting Latin America’s present. The first four decades of the twentieth century, and the half century from 1970 to 2019, were structurally similar periods for the world economy, characterized by processes of financial expansion and turbulent transition between regimes of accumulation. In Latin America, this has meant, for both periods, decades of economic turbulence, with expansion characterized by natural resource extraction and dispossession, punctuated by capitalist crises and depressions. The accumulation of antagonisms produced a tendency toward “passive revolution” in both periods, which combined accommodation of demands from below with political and economic transformations in pursuit of capitalist modernization. Stopping short of fundamental challenges to systemic inequalities and entrenched structures of accumulation, however, such “populist” political economic projects proved vulnerable, in both periods, to the vicissitudes of global capitalism and reactionary politics.

This study examines the micro foundations of political support in Arab polities. Most Arab states rank highly in aggregate human development or economic wealth, but they lag behind in democ...

The literature on education and globalization states that patterns of higher education systems tend toward international convergence, and that trends such as massification, privatization and internationalization are observable in nations with different degrees of development around the world. Neo-institutionalism and world systems theory differ on whether focus should be given to international convergence or domestic adaptation. Studies addressing historical and contextual dimensions of policy diffusion are relevant as they will further specify the nature of the extranational effects on national policies. The case of Argentina’s national higher education policy is particularly relevant to this literature due to political and academic traditions that have inhibited the diffusion of many global trends into the country. This study offers a comparative historical analysis of the issues that have been prioritized in Argentina’s higher education policy over three decades (1983–2015), the strategies empl...

Globalization spearheaded professionalization and commercialization of sports, which has contributed and elevated sport labour migration out of Africa. People move far from their home base to improve their standards of living, form new identities, and to enhance national pride, which enabled many African men and women involved in elite sports to become an integral part of global sport competitions. This paper investigates factors that influenced the migration of athletes/players out of Eastern Africa and to understand their transnational experiences in a global context. The World System Theory, transnationalism and neoclassical theoretical perspectives guided this research in broad and specific contexts. Data sources included research journal articles, public government documents, theoretical and philosophical papers, newspapers, and internet documentaries that provide stories about sport migrants individually and as a collective group. Themes emerging from this study focus on the following: (a) p...

This research attempts to analyze the wave of North Korean refugees toSouth Korea and how problems arise on the domestic political level to thesocietal level. Waves of refugees have occurred since the division of thetwo Koreas through the 38 parallel, which gave rise to defections fromNorth Korea. Meanwhile, South Korea is perceived as an ideal and safeplace to take shelter. This in turn raised numerous problems explicableby at least two theoretical frameworks, namely the world system theoryin explaining the desire to migrate, and the multiculturalist paradox,which explains the emergence of social and cultural frictions. Discourseon identity and social problems poses a challenge for the South Koreangovernment. On one hand, North Korean refugees can provide beneficialinformation for the government. On the other hand, two social problemsarise, namely the long-term problem for refugees in surviving the mentaland financial burdens, as well as the negative stigma and xenophobiaplaced by the South Korean society on the refugees. These are the reasonswhy integration remains difficult for refugees.

This chapter is concerned with the spatial articulation of the emerging world system of production and markets through a global network of cities. World cities lie at the junction between the world economy and the territorial nation state. Being essential to both transnational capital and national political interests, world cities may become bargaining counters in the ensuing struggles. World cities are the control centers of the global economy. Their status, of course, is evolving in the measure that given regions are integrated in a dominant role with the world system. Building upon a broad range of intellectual sources—including radical international political economy, world systems theory, Marxian urban studies, urban systems theory, and radical community studies—John Friedmann and Goetz Wolff’s “agenda for research and action” represented a genuinely original synthesis. The primary social fact about world city formation is the polarization of its social class divisions.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and leading Western and East Asian politicians demand coherent global management of migration and flight. This article wants to explore whether global management on refugees is feasible. It attempts to make these very different regions and regional mechanisms comparable aiming to contribute to a better intraregional understanding to raise common awareness. It compares the data on refugees and migration of the recent years to or within both regions, looking for interconnections. Then, it compares the structure, namely the legal framework in Europe and in Asia. This analysis will be followed by an agency analysis, under consideration of identity politics and discourse. The politicization of identity politics in both regions frames, and is framed by, decision makers towards global management options.This paper concludes that global management of flight and migration has become more probable in recent years since the awareness has risen in both regions about this issue. The legal foundations in many Asian states are strengthened and orientate towards the UN refugee conventions, while the restrictive rich East Asian economies have begun to realise their responsibilities.

This article explores the expansion of feminist ideas as both a conceptual and a political issue. It focuses on two major theories of social change, world culture theory (WCT) and world system analysis (WSA), comparing and contrasting how they frame gender as a factor shaping society, how they account for the diffusion of feminist ideas and how they assess the impact of gender norms on sociocultural outcomes. Through the examination of texts and research based on these theories, this article weighs the ability of the theories to meaningfully and justly recognise the place of gender politics within the dynamics of social change. Both WCT and WSA predict isomorphism in the way gender is framed in modern society, but their explanatory accounts traverse drastically different paths. One asserts a conflict-free diffusion of values, whereas the other, decidedly based on conflict, sees gender as emerging from resistance or anti-systemic movements. The article concludes with an assessment of the contribution and m...

This issue presents some of the most innovative and inspiring contributions to ‘Comparing Centres, Comparing Peripheries’, a 2012 British Comparative Literature Association postgraduate conference. 1 Since the title of the preceding postgraduate BCLA event, ‘Comparison Beyond the West’, may have appeared geographically prescriptive and polarizing, we sought keywords that would be inclusive, dynamic and with a critical edge. The terms ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’, and the invitation to compare, did the trick: the event attracted forty speakers from various disciplinary backgrounds, who discussed a plethora of languages,regionsandphenomena.Somespeakersconjuredcomparisons claiming ‘the centre’ as the all-important yardstick; others privileged peripheral traffic, circumventing the centre; others scrutinized the scope and usage of the very terms ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’. Magnetic and multifaceted, ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ served us well as title keywords and it is around them that this issue is loosely based. Literary scholars have long used the words in their general meaning and we are acutely aware that the general usage escapes a succinct summary. In this brief introduction we survey only some examples of the relatively systematic and specialized usage of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ in recent world literature and comparative literature debates that draw on world systems theory from political and economic sociology. Developed by Immanuel Wallerstein, the theory envisages the whole world, since at least the sixteenth century, as one capitalist economy ‘built on a worldwidedivisionoflabor,inwhichvariouszonesofthiseconomy([...] termed the core, the semiperiphery, and the periphery) [...] profited unequally from the working of the system’. 2 Before sketching how the theory, and the terms, have been harnessed in literary discussions, we note that the semi-specialized sense in

The interface between economic globalization and territorial formation has been a fundamental concern to scholars from a wide range of disciplines as both supra- and subnational configurations increasingly supplant the role of the nation-state so as to achieve purported political or economic objectives. Though extensive literatures document this process, considerable lacunae exist with regard to the understanding thereof within a socio-historical framework. This article invokes the concept of 'palimpsest' as a metaphor through which one reads the re-inscription of multiple layers of the built environment or territory vis-a-vis the widespread changes within Panama's 'transit corridor' - a densely settled territorial strip extending from the northern city of Colon to Panama City in the south. Though much of this transformation has been attributed to the newfound economic stability of the Panamanian state, I argue that these structural changes are best understood in the context of prior developments on the Isthmus of Panama dating back centuries. To this end, both structural and poststructural arguments are invoked so as to transgress a narrow focus on Panama as a fixed territorial entity.

This article calls for a re-conceptualization of the social sciences by asking for a cosmopolitan turn. The intellectual undertaking of redefining cosmopolitanism is a trans-disciplinary one, which includes geography, anthropology, ethnology, international relations, international law, political philosophy and political theory, and now sociology and social theory. Methodological nationalism, which subsumes society under the nation-state, has until now made this task almost impossible. The alternative, a 'cosmopolitan outlook', is a contested term and project. Cosmopolitanism must not be equalized with the global (or globalization), with 'world system theory' (Wallerstein), with 'world polity' (Meyer and others), or with 'world-society' (Luhmann). All of those concepts presuppose basic dualisms, such as domestic/foreign or national/international, which in reality have become ambiguous. Methodological cosmopolitanism opens up new horizons by demonstrating how we can make the empirical investigation of border crossings and other transnational phenomena possible.

In studies of world politics and international relations (IR, IPE and world order), the concept of “hegemony” is often applied to describe different enduring aspects of an order in the international system. It is a useful instrument in conceptualizing and understanding the dynamic and dialectic interplays in world order and international relations/systems. Realism perceives hegemony as the dominance by one leading state in interstate relations, such as in the concept often used by realism: “hegemonic stability”. Liberalism sees hegemony as being embedded in the interactions of each individual at the bottom, and in the norms and values of international institutions as rule-settlers at the top. And world system theory emphasizes state-based class and material forms of a hegemony which is shaped and maintained by a global division of labor. This division of labor constantly generates and regenerates unequal exchange, and that, in turn, differentiates the strong/rich versus the weak/poor, not only economically, but also politically and militarily.

Palumbo-Liu,David, Bruce Robbins, and Nirvana Tanoukhi, eds. 2011. Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World. Durham NC: Duke University Press. $84.95 hc. $23.95 sc. 272 pp.Sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein is well known in social science circles for his theory of the modern world-system as an interdependent network of core, semi-periphery, and periphery states. This edited collection, which emerged from a conference at Stanford's Program in Modern Thought and Literature, considers what the humanities, so much concerned with the particular, the local, and the subjective, can learn from Wallerstein's systematic vision. As the introduction argues, many disciplines have already begun to transform their methodologies under the pressure of globalization, a process which has led, in literary studies, to the highly contested (re)emergence of world literature. Participants in the discussion about appropriate methodologies for understanding the relationship between macro and micro, systemic and particular, are typically loath to practice the kind of "worlding" that Gayatri Spivak associates with a (neo)imperial impulse to assimilate the world into Western rubrics of civilization and development. Contributors challenge existing models of world-scale thinking put forward by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Wai Chee Dimock, and Wallerstein himself on this issue and others. Engaging with Wallerstein's work thus presents an occasion for scholars from a variety of disciplinary positions to explore current models of the global within the terms of their respective fields.The collection is organized into four sections. In the first, "System and Responsibility," sociologist Richard E. Lee situates world systems theory within its historical context, claiming that its emergence during the tumultuous decade of the 1970s makes it particularly useful for understanding our contemporary moment of crisis. Speaking to scholars in the humanities, Lee represents "structures of knowledge" as an essential part of the modern world-system in Wallerstein's tripartite schema (alongside the political and the economic). He points to "the new liberalism" as one such structure of knowledge, which has exhausted its ability to contain the growing political and economic turmoil of the world capitalist system. For Lee, the outcome of this crisis is uncertain, but he sees some promising signs for interdisciplinary scholarship in the collapse of established structures of knowledge, which is "closing the gap between the humanities and the historical social sciences" (37). Wrapping up the first section, Bruce Robbins challenges the conventional critique that world-systems theory misreads culture "as merely a passive reflection of economic relations" (48), cautioning against the tendency in the humanities to overemphasize agency at the expense of larger forces that constrain individual action. Rather than a choice between system or agent, he calls upon scholars to approach this dilemma as "an open question: how far have people actually been able to make their own history in this case or that, under these circumstances or those?" According to Robbins, such an approach "will help us understand what can and can't be done about global injustice and thus how our interpretive puzzles do or don't contribute to that goal" (50).Moving beyond the challenge that world-system theory's marginalization of culture poses to the humanities as a whole, the second section, "Literature: Restructured, Rehistoricized, Rescaled," assesses the particular costs and benefits of systemic global analysis for literary studies as a discipline. Franco Moretti identifies world systems theory as a critical tool for describing the production and circulation of literature within an ever more homogenized global literary market after the eighteenth century; but he contends that evolutionary theory presents a more accurate picture of the disparate forms produced prior to this period within relatively isolated cultures. …

Adam Smith in Beijing offers a subversive analysis of China's rise, an analysis which has provoked a strong reaction in the academic world outside China. Based on Adam Smith's economic principles and world systems analysis, the book comprehensively explores China's reform and opening up and its market economy, as well as the role they have played in China's rise. In his view, Adam Smith's economic principles offer the best way of understanding China's rise. But objectively speaking, in this book, Arrighi misjudges the significance of China's rise and actual situation. Therefore, to a certain degree, his theory serves as the contemporary protector and defender of bourgeois political domination and the capitalist system.

Continental Divides: Remapping the Cultures of North America by Rachel Adams University of Chicago Press, 2009. 310 pages The "transnational turn" in American Studies is often traced to the early 1990s, when the impact of postcolonial studies and global perspectives was being felt even within the reputedly isolationist realms of American Studies. Seminal pieces such as Carolyn Porter's "What We Know that We Don't Know" and influential essays and collections by Donald Pease, Jose David Saldivar, Doris Sommer, Amy Kaplan, and John Carlos Rowe, among others, articulated the growing awareness that "America" did not stand by, or even for, itself, even if most scholars in the field (at least in the US) seemed to have assumed so. Decentering the United States in descriptions of "America" has of course been precisely the point of much scholarly and cultural commentary across the Western Hemisphere, at least since the nineteenth century when US domination became increasingly palpable and inescapable. As Jose Marti famously noted, the American "octopus" was already looming over "nuestra America" ("Our America") by the mid 1800s and showed no signs of slowing its drive for economic and political domination of the continent. Well aware of these historical and political genealogies, Rachel Adams has taken up the baton of comparative American Studies in a lucid and elegant new book. Offering a valuable corrective to some of the already-solidifying archives and habits of thought that have come to characterize the emerging field of study and cultural production focusing on the Americas, Adams's book announces its ambitions in a title that turns out to be impressively precise: Continental Divides: Remapping the Cultures of North. America. There is nothing accidental about either Adams's emphasis on "continent" or the active process of "remapping," and she mines even seemingly static terms such as "cultures" and "North America" for their significance to a project that works from the outset to set itself apart from the mainstream of Americanist scholarship. As her introduction repeatedly notes, Adams hopes that the frame of the continent of North America will underline how nation-states, their borders, and even the continent itself are imagined places: i.e., the somewhat arbitrary products of a history of contingent and politically charged events and turns. In defamiliarizing the continent as a figure in world mapping (as opposed to perhaps more standard interrogations of the "nation" in American Studies), Adams raises interesting conceptual questions that draw on an influential line of hemispheric thought including Edmundo O'Gorman on "the invention of America" (9) and the "world systems theory" (10) of Anibal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein. In setting up these various threads and sources, the introduction to Continental Divides offers a comprehensive overview of transamerican thinking and indicates how the history of such thinking informs the more specific readings that follow. The nation provides the main target of Adams's announced desire to grant "new centrality to people and places that have been marginalized by official histories of conquest and nation building, thus bringing a new repertoire of texts and subjects into view" (7). Similar interrogations of the nation-state have been, by many estimations, the most transformative angle brought to American studies by transnational approaches. Adams's introduction does an admirable job of explaining how and why her continental frame shifts and critiques the reliance on the nation as the primary rubric of literary and cultural analysis, even as she highlights the neglect given to marginalized national entities--Mexico and Canada, especially in relation to one another--in most critical studies of North America. The overall organization of Continental Divides thus involves a series of texts and conceptual questions that highlight the ambivalent status of national borders in North America, where they function as political and affective fictions and/or limits. …

Recent literature on immigration and immigrants reveals a shift in language, concepts, and theories that reflect the growing influence of global capitalism on transnational migrants. Largely deriving from an imperialism or world systems theory framework, the literature varies widely in its scope of concern, assessment of the current and future impact of globalization, and policy implications. The prior notion of the immigrant as unidirectional sojourner is being replaced by a focus on the political and economic context that creates migration flows. Transnational theories also emphasize the importance of collective identities, activities, and social spaces formed by transnational migrants and explore their functions for these groups. The literature review concludes with a summary of the significance and contributions of transnational theories focusing on transmigration and the transnational migrant and a concept map describing analytical trajectories in the literature.

This review of economic theories seeks to expand our understanding of the “pull and push” factors of emigration. It features political economy theories of rational choice, supply and demand, world system, and network. Rational choice theory helps to identify the personal and household considerations for emigration by weighing the costs and the benefits. Supply-and-demand theory takes into account the oversupply of labor as a strong push factor and the demand for labor in advanced industrial countries as a strong pull factor. World system theory focuses on the complex political and economic factors that lead to exploiting third-world countries and create a strong push to emigrate. Finally, network theory can be used to explain the dynamics of immigrant communities in both overseas countries and country of origin that can create a pull toward emigration. The review concludes with the implications of these economic theories for expanding our understanding of human behavior and social environment and internat...

The Kingdom of Kush flourished in northern Sudan between 2000 and 1500 BCE. During this period, the capital Kerma emerged as a major economic and political centre in the Nile Valley. After a short review of the application of world system theory and centre-periphery perspectives in archaeology, the author proceeds to a presentation of the Bronze Age societies in northern Sudan and their wide-reaching trade relations. A central argument is that an incentive for the rise of the Kingdom of Kush was its intermediate position in long-distance trade between the north and the south. The article concludes with a discussion of Kush as a centre on the periphery of the so-called Bronze Age World System in Afro-Eurasia.

This article examines, through a quantitative analysis of survey data, the extent to which union members and labor activists attending the World Social Forum from different world system zones vary in their political goals and activities. Consistent with world systems theory, we find that labor activists from the semiperiphery protested most frequently whie their counterparts from the periphery protested the least frequently. We also found that union members and labor activists from the periphery were significantly more supportive of reforming (rather than abolishing and replacing) capitalism and international financial and trade institutions compared to their counterparts from other zones, although this finding disappears after local (Kenyan) participants are excluded from the analysis. Finally, we find that representatives of organized labor from the semiperiphery were the least supportive of proposals for creating a democratic world government, while those from the core were the most supportive of global/international strategies for social change.

Few intellectual constructs have the resilience of Marxism. Despite numerous convincing refutations, this theory remains just as prevalent and contagious as tuberculosis, another unexpectedly persistent legacy of the 19th century. While economists are relatively immune to Marxist ideas, other social scientists easily succumb. Many sociology departments provide an intellectual environment to scholars whose devotion to Marxism has been strong enough to survive repeated confrontations with reality. More than one section of the American Sociological Association has close affiliation with Marxism, both doctrinally and ideologically. One of them is the political economy of world system, which includes scholars working within the paradigm of world system theory. Although only one theory among the theoretical smorgasbord of today's sociology, its importance should not be underestimated, as for most sociologists this theory provides the preferred window through which they view economic and political processes worldwide. The founder of the world system theory is Professor Immanuel Wallerstein, one of the more celebrated exponents of contemporary Marxism. Actually, he claims a rather intimate bond with Karl Marx, that of "a comrade in the struggle" (Wallerstein 1983: 9). Professor Wallerstein spent much of his life trying to vindicate his comrade's ideas, exposing capitalism's monstrosity and calling for its eventual replacement by socialism. (For a succinct explication of the latter two points, see Wallerstein 1991: 166-167). His views on the emergence, development, and inevitable crisis of capitalist economy and society, expressed in more than 20 books and countless articles, brought Professor Wallerstein widespread recognition in academia, both in the United States and abroad, including the presidency of the International Sociological Association. Currently, as a senior research scholar in the sociology department at Yale, he is enlightening his colleagues on the finer details of capitalist exploitation. Professor Wallerstein's prominence is not limited to academia. In true Marxist tradition he leads his colleagues in theorizing for the benefit of the progressive social movements (Wallerstein 1984). For the last quarter of a century his writings have served as an encouragement to his fellow progressives as he has consistently predicted the rapid decline of the leading capitalist power, the United States. The latest book on the subject, The Decline of American Power, was released by New Press in July 2003. Wallerstein's apocalyptic forecasts are worthy of attention, but not because of their plausibility. In fact, he made a distinguished career in sociology by making predictions that, for all their prophetic fervor, were regularly proven wrong by incontrovertible facts. What makes Wallerstein's writings so interesting is their peculiar theoretical foundation. His theoretical efforts are not meant to merely explain reality. While writing on Wallerstein's theory almost 20 years ago, the philosopher Roger Scruton noted that intellectuals who pursue radical political causes need a theory that "converts burning sentiment into justified 'praxis' " (1984: 16). Professor Wallerstein's brainchild, the world system theory, does just that. With an elegant simplicity, the world system theory divides countries of the world into two principal groups: the core and the periphery. The core includes the rich and well-developed countries, while the periphery consists of poor and badly developed ones. Obviously, the precision with which these two categories are constructed means that some societies will not fit either of them. These cases are temporarily placed in the category of semi-periphery and left there in anticipation of their eventual movement up or down, since, according to one of the main postulates of the world system theory, relative economic and political power of individual societies tend to change over time. …

From Aden to Hong Kong, British Imperialism and the Roots of National Resistance By Justin Chen This paper addresses the colonial presence and effect of the British Empire, facilitated through the trade ports established to promote the interests and thoughts of the Western empire, and its implications for the course and narrative of history. This paper places the individual routine and dimension into the context of British imperialism with the macro scale events being constructed from the realities of the situation on the ground. Examining trade manifests and the writings of Englishmen in Aden and Hong Kong, this paper demonstrates that a socially imbedded belief, cultivated by British global hegemony, changes in reaction to social or political events to become larger historical events, or as a result of them. As a result, nationalism inevitably emerges from the weakening of the “invincible” West, which as a continuation of long-term beliefs is historically and socially charged. Specifically building off of Akahitsu Shigeru’s interpretation of Wallerstein’s World System Theory, I find capitalism, the connection between political diplomacy, and economic enterprise as the primary factor of British Imperialism as an action. Through understanding the British colonial system, and applying its broad structures as a factor in the course of events in the locale, I find the roots and underlying perspectives of the Chinese and Arab’s nationalist resistance and contact with the Occidental West, specifically Britain and later the United States.

The term political economy has been used by anthropologists since the 1970s, particularly in North America, to signal a shift in the focus of anthropological analysis away from isolable local communities and toward large-scale regional political/economic systems, along with the adoption of broadly Marxist, or at least materialist, theoretical frameworks. In this article, the field is also taken to include the field of Marxist anthropology based mainly on the work of French structural Marxists, which emerged in the same period. Although both Political Economy and Marxist anthropology have fallen out of favor in recent years, many of the concerns of the 1970s have returned in the more recent critical engagement with globalization and neoliberalism and in new work on the anthropology of money and finance and the ethnography of capitalism.

As Jane and Peter Schneider's work has shifted over the past three decades, from the Mafia in a Sicilian village to the antimafia movement in Palermo, their epistemology has changed too, from a world systems approach influenced by Wallerstein, to a more political process-centered approach that shows their ethnographic skills to best advantage. Whereas their first book, Culture and Political Economy in Western Sicily, placed the Island in its Mediterranean historical/economic framework, the second, Reversible Destiny, shows how culture and politics intertwine in the slow, halting and reversible struggle to displace the Mafia from Sicilians' lives and mentalities. These ‘two songs’ of the Mafia reflect changes in both the Schneiders' opera and in the growth of middle-range theory in today's social scientific treatments of Italy.

This paper evaluates Peter Gowan’s musings on the topic of a U.S.-centered “capitalist world-empire.” Gowan’s heterodox concept of a “capitalist world-empire” is intellectually defensible. And his claim that U.S. hegemony is historically unique, because unlike previous dominant powers the U.S. has been able to distinctly mold the accumulation regimes and security environments of its would-be rivals in the core, is more than convincing. However, Gowan tends to overstate the degree to which the U.S. in the 1990’s enjoyed a productive sector revival, rather than a mere super-inflation of dollar-denominated assets. This tendency prevents him from anticipating just how summarily the U.S. would ditch consensual approaches to managing the capitalistworld-economy once the Wall Street bubble collapsed, and hence from appreciating just how fed up Western European and East Asian elites would become with the predatory character of U.S. hegemony in decay. In conclusion the paper argues that while the U.S. may have neither the resources nor the credibility to politically control the global division of labor, something akin to a U.S.-East Asian geo-economic bloc may be in the process of forming. This is so because the Chinese and Japanese economic growth models remain wedded to the underwriting of the U.S.’ seigniorage privileges', and because past and present frictions between China and Japan stand in the way of tighter Sino-Japanese political coordination.

Frontier studies have long been the focus of considerable debate in various fields and subdisciplines of the humanities and social sciences. As early as 1893, Fredrick Jackson Turner brought frontier studies to the forefront of research in American History by arguing that the political, economic and cultural underpinnings of American society were not the result of European influence, but were rather the product of the American frontier experience. Expansion into the vast "empty" wilderness of the American west insolated American pioneers from the European world while the rugged frontier lifestyle induced the uniquely American qualities of individualism and democracy. Although it has since been discredited on various grounds including, among other things, its ethnocentrism and linearity, Turner's thesis sparked a debate that even today continues to inform approaches to frontiers in many fields (Adelman and Aron, 1999; Cayton and Teute, 1998; Faragher, 1994; Jacobs, 1994; White, 1991). Frontiers are also, of course, fundamental to geographers who took up their own discussion of the topic early in the twentieth century (Curzon, 1907; Fawcett, 191 8; Ratzel, 1897). In fact, their definition of concepts such as maritime and aerial borders as well as their discussion of political and ethnic boundaries was instrumental in shaping the physicality of modern nation states (Baty, 1928; Boggs, 1930, 1937, 1940; Crocker, 19 19; Fawcett, 191 8; Fischer, 1949; Holdich, 1916). The fields of Classics and Ancient History also have a long "history" of frontier studies, with some of the major works in especially Roman studies focused on the frontiers of the empire (Dyson, 1985; Elton, 1996; Isaac, 1990; Luttwak, 1976; Whittaker, 1994 for example). Frontier studies reached the fields of social science and anthropology first through the study of the process of acculturation (Broom et al., 1954; Spencer, 1961; Redfield et al., 1936) and more recently through the development and application of Wallerstein's "World Systems Theory" (Wallerstein, 1974, 1980). In recent years world systems theory has helped to direct frontier studies in these disciplines by giving researchers a framework within which to turn their focus from core polities to peripheral regions (Chase-Dunn, 1988; ChaseDunn and Hall, 1991, 1992). This debate soon spread to archaeology as scholars attempted to adapt the basic tenets of this model to the ancient world (Algaze, 1989b, 1993; Blanton and Feinman, 1984; Champion, 1989; Chase-Dunn and Hall, 1991; Kohl, 1987; Rowlands et al., 1987; Stein, 1999). Despite nearly a century of research in these and other fields, however, there is still very little consensus about classifications and comparative frameworks within which to consider an interdisciplinary study of frontiers. Prudence Rice recently concluded that her review of various

he summer of 2000 was hot and humid in Princeton, New Jersey, where I live, but delightfully temperate in Amsterdam, where Diane Wolf was conducting research on post-Holocaust Jewish life. She and I have many interests in common. I have studied women's employment in Mexican maquiladoras, conducted research among Hispanic women in the garment and electronics industries, and investigated the lives of impoverished African Americans in west Baltimore. To understand the relationship between economic change and gender has been one of my top priorities for two decades. Along the way I discovered Diane's exceptional work. Her book, Factory Daughters: Gender, Household Dynamics, and Rural Industrialization inJava (1992), is an exemplary case study to which I often return in search of inspiration. Not surprisingly, I thought of her as a preferred interlocutor to discuss the relationships among globalization, feminism, and gender. Below is our exchange, which, true to the age of technological wonder, occurred in cyberspace. Patricia Ferndndez-Kelly: After more than two decades of feminist exhortations and a large supply of literature on the subject, few would deny the importance of gender as an aspect of international development. Gender is apparent everywhere, from the recruitment strategies of corporate managers to the differences in the educational performance of immigrant boys and girls, the unequal distribution of disease throughout the world, and the varying effects of "structural adjustment policies" in poor countries. Yet the concept has received scant attention in studies of globalization. Economists speak about neoliberalism and free markets as if those phenomena were gender neutral. On a lesser scale, sociologists do the same. That is partly because many studies of women and development are thinly veiled political tracts that owe more to feminist ideology than to disciplined research. They command small credibility. Diane Wolf: You overstate the injurious effects of feminist politics. A more important reason is gender. World system theory, for example, is

In the post-Cold War period there has been a dramatic increase in the number of states which can be classified as disrupted, thus creating a major source of political, social and military turbulence and instability in world politics. The causes have been varied, ranging from the fragmentation of the national elite and breakdown of social order, ethnic antagonisms, ideological struggle, confessional or sectarian strife to legitimacy crises and separatism. This has focused attention once again on the future of the international system. This paper considers the nature of disrupted states, the external and internal sources of the disruption, and the options that are available to the international community, in particular whether there is an appropriate role for the United Nations.

By analyzing the 64 countries that represent the largest number ofinternational student exchanges, this article describes internationalstudent flows from a macro perspective. The findings indicate that theinternational student exchange network remained relatively stable. TheUnited States and most Western industrialized countries maintained theirposition at the center of the network, while East European and Asiancountries have become more central and the African and Middle Eastcountries have stayed peripheral. The results suggest an academichegemony consistent with world economic and political performance. Alliedwith World System Theory, the higher a country's position in the worldsystem, the more central it is in the international student exchangenetwork.

After decades of relative silence, the study of frontiers and boundaries is resuming a prominent place in political geography. The impetus for the revival of limology (border studies) comes from the global context of a post-Cold War order, which has led to challenges to existing political arrangements, and from the identity turn in human geography and related disciplines. The study of frontiers and borders needs to be integrated into the main theories of the discipline. World-system theory, long criticized for its lack of a territorial footing, offers an opportunity for extension of its three geographic scales (world-economy, nation-state and locality) to incorporate two newly-emerging spatial dimensions at the macro-regional (bloc) and sub-national levels. Global and geopolitical trends, as well as shifting identities at national and sub-national scales, are reviewed and their effects on the changing scales of territoriality are reviewed. A geographic model illustrating the shifting and overlapping nature of borders is developed based on the contemporary developments in Eastern Europe. The case of contemporary Ukraine, as an example of state-and nation-building, shows these geopolitical changes as complex and dynamic.

Geopolitics and the Post-Colonial: Rethinking North–South Relations. By David Slater. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. 296 pp., $69.95 cloth (ISBN: 0-6312-1452-6), $34.95 paper (ISBN: 0-63121453-4). Is globalization merely US imperialism masked as the philanthropic diffusion of neoliberalism into the Third World? In Geopolitics and the Post-Colonial: Rethinking North-South Relations , David Slater—drawing primarily from the deconstruction methodology of James Derrida (1992), the critical theory of Michel Foucault (1979, 1980), the structural theory of World Systems Theory (although Wallerstein is not cited), and the postcolonial perspectives of a myriad of Latin American scholars—argues that it is. More specifically, Slater asserts that the United States (with the aid of such neoliberal organizations as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization) has sought to liberate the Third World from its indigence for the purpose of establishing a Southern hemisphere of “quasi-sovereignties” (see Jackson 1996:60) that can be easily manipulated politically. Slater argues that the neoliberal order creates an asymmetry of structure that facilitates the dominance of the North over the South in “a conscious and often violent intervention on the part of [the US] government which impose[s] market organization on society for non-economic ends” (p. 93). In short, the United States seeks to use the neoliberal economic order to achieve its political goal of geopolitical imperialism. Drawing on dependency theory, Slater explains that the neoliberal project in Latin America helps sustain the wealth of the United States by importing raw materials from the South and exporting processed goods from the North—a relationship that clearly favors the North. This argument is not a new one (see Wallerstein 1974). Nonetheless, as Slater argues, it is one that has been largely abandoned with the discursive hegemony of neoliberal theory. …

Preliminaries We begin with a caveat. For many, “Central China” will appear to be misapplied to the region on which we focus in this book. The term may evoke the so-called Central Plains of the Yellow River valley in northern China, which are central to most discussions of Chinese civilization and central to the primary narratives of China's origins. The area discussed here, comprising the modern provinces of Hubei and Hunan, the Sichuan Basin, and the municipality of Chongqing, is peripheral to these stories and often referred to as “Southwest China.” But the southwest of the modern People's Republic of China (PRC) in fact includes the Tibet Autonomous Region, Yunnan, Guizhou, and the western mountainous parts of Sichuan not focused on here. Because archaeology speaks to the processes that set the foundations for modern nation-states, and because these nation-states play a considerable role in determining how archaeological and historical data are collected and considered, it is appropriate to use the PRC to identify our broader area of interest, and the Sichuan Basin, Chongqing, Hubei, and Hunan are actually just south of its geographical center. As this book makes clear, notions of centrality and peripherality need to be interrogated in our investigation of the ancient world, and our provocative use of Central China is intended to draw attention to this issue.

‘To me, England is the country, and the country is England’, Stanley Baldwin stirringly declared during his speech to the Royal Society of St. George in London on 6 May 1924. Baldwin’s patriotic nostalgia, expressed in the belief that an unchanging rural England serves as ‘the gifts of that great English race’, may appear anachronistically mawkish today (Baldwin, 2012, 95–6). Yet a powerful, if quiet, strain of his elan continues to resonate and reside in national life in the early twenty-first century, a palpable force that is neither innocuous nor free from historical entanglements. One of the central aims of The Postcolonial Country in Contemporary Literature concerns the material histories underlying such sentiments, histories that are at once international and colonial, lying well beyond the village verge and the borders of England’s green and pleasant land. The residual effects of these imperial histories not only subtly bear on contemporary race relations in Britain but also indirectly impinge on the lives of marginalised communities across the vast spaces of the British ex-colonies. More particularly, this book centres on literary representations of the polyvalent and overlapping meanings of ‘the country’ within the global legacy of British colonialism: as the rural in England and in the ex-colonies and as predominantly rural nations from a world systems perspective. It explores the ‘postcolonial country’ as encompassing all of these diverse meanings and discursive sites through a range of contemporary texts drawn from different geographies and genres. This constellation of texts portrays the politics underlying the postcolonial country as crucial not only to constructing national consciousness, but also to determining self-identity within a globalised, postcolonial world.

The conquest and colonization of Mesoamerica by Spain during the period AD 1519-1821 forms part of a macroregional interaction network known as the modern or capitalist world system. Regions incorporated within the world-system usually undergo economic change such that production and labor are increasingly commoditized, dramatically altering the productive strategies of households and communities. As Price (1986) observes, world systems theory is difficult to apply to prehistoric or precapitalist macroregional systems because the world systems analogy lacks referents to broader processes of state expansion, political-economic structure, and the corresponding archaeological record. This paper uses archaeological and historical data from the Parroquia de Yaxcaba, Yucatan, to explore the variable impact of political and economic change on the organization of production and labor of rural communities. Archaeological site structure and spatial organization are analyzed to assess the implications of world-system expansion for the archaeological record in a region where the market transitionultimately fails. Settlement patterns and site structure in Yaxcaba Parish suggest variation in production organization among communities that differs from historical reconstructions. Comparison of independent lines of evidence indicates that variation inthe processes of core-periphery integration are archaeologically recognizable.

World Systems Theory has been one approach used to explain the rise of the Mississippian social and political phenomenon. In this paper it is argued that a hierarchical model of core-periphery interaction does not explain the Cahokianphenomenon, because several crucial clements of such a model cannot be demonstrated to have existed within the Mississippian system. It is suggested that looking at Mississippian society as a differential core-peripheral system may have utility as a framework for including concepts such as gateway communities and interaction spheres previously used to describe the economic interactions between Cahokia and its neighbors.

This article argues that social scientists should reconsider the analytic value of the term “capitalism.” The paper argues that the two most coherent definitions of capitalism are those derived from classical Marxism and from the World System theory of Immanuel Wallerstein. Marx and Engels’ formulation was basically a genetic theory in which the structure of a mode of production is determined by the mode of surplus extraction. During the course of the 20th century, however, Marxist theorists had to modify this framework and the result has been an uncomfortable hybrid. Wallerstein resolved these tensions by redefining capitalism in terms of the logic of a world system. However, his argument has difficulty in explaining the consequential variations over time in the specific rules and institutional structures that operate at the global level. The article goes on to argue in favor of Karl Polanyi's concept of market society because it focuses attention on the political governance of market societies at both the national and the global levels.

This paper explores the implications of empirical theories of migration for normative accounts of migration and distributive justice. It examines neo-classical economics, world-systems theory, dual labor market theory, and feminist approaches to migration and contends that neo-classical economic theory in isolation provides an inadequate understanding of migration. Other theories provide a fuller account of how national and global economic, political, and social institutions cause and shape migration flows by actively affecting people's opportunity sets in source countries and by admitting people according to social categories such as class and gender. These empirical theories reveal the causal impact of institutions regulating migration and clarify moral obligations frequently overlooked by normative theorists., Global Justice : Theory Practice Rhetoric, Volume 5: Migration and Global Justice

© Cambridge University Press The Democratic Peace research programme explicitly and implicitly presents its claims in terms of their potential to underpin a universal world peace. Yet whilst the Democratic Peace appears robust in its geographical heartlands it appears weaker at the edges of the democratic world, where the spread of democracy and the depth of democratic political development is often limited and where historically many of the purported exceptions to the Democratic Peace are found. Whereas Democratic Peace scholarship has tended to overlook or downplay these phenomena, from a critical materialist perspective they are indicative of a fundamental contradiction within the Democratic Peace whereby its universalistic aspirations are thwarted by its material grounding in a hierarchical capitalist world economy. This, in turn, raises the question of whether liberal arguments for a universal Democratic Peace are in fact hollow promises. The article explores these concerns and argues that those interested in democracy and peace should pay more attention to the critical materialist tradition, which in the discussion below is represented principally by the world-system approach.