The Journal of World-Systems Research is the official journal of the Political Economy of the World-System Section of the American Sociological Association. JWSR is an open-access, peer reviewed journal with an interdisciplinary audience of readers from around the world.
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This symposium is based upon comments from a 2025 author meets critics discussion at the Eastern Sociological Society Conference. Between August 2020 and May 2021 Dr. Decoteau worked with four graduate students: Cal Garrett, Fructuso Basaldua, Cindy Brito and Bianca Perez to recruit interviewees from across the city of Chicago at a time when COVID-19 made any sort of qualitative analysis incredibly challenging. Interviewing Chicagoans living under increased public health focus because of COVID-19, those subjectified and hailed as Essential Workers as well as policy makers and health professionals, Emergency captures the struggles of communities living under the weight of legacies of racism, structural neglect and oppression and the limits of addressing systemic harms through the lens of emergency response.
Copyright (c) 2026 Alexandre White https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Introduction to the Spring 2026 Issue
Copyright (c) 2026 Daniel S Pasciuti; Devparna Roy, Hadley Briglin, Madelief Tilder, Jun Yang https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Resisting Capitalist Reproduction In The Liminal State
World-systems theory is known for innovative approaches to understanding resistance to forms of oppression, especially as it pertains to anti-capitalist and environmental social movements. This article invites world-systems theorists to rethink resistance by recognizing that the modern world-system is in a soft collapse driven liminal state of transition to a new world-system. The provocation challenges conventional world-system understandings of resistance by inquiring if capitalism perishes or reproduces in the liminal state. The article finds the latter to be valid due to profit-making potential of resolving the perfect storm of crises. It argues capitalist reproduction is anchored within the 2030 Agenda, which is a plan generated by technocrats for weathering the perfect storm of crises. The article argues the 2030 Agenda serves as capitalism’s accumulation mechanism through the liminal state transition. The agenda, however, calls for decarbonization, which requires a drastic increase in resource extraction that portends the end of capitalism through ecocide. To realize a just transition, this article advocates for the pluriverse proposition as a key to liminal state resistance, a position that places strategic primacy on defending other knowledges against the monoculture of the 2030 Agenda. The article proposes leveraging the instability, disruption, and confusion of the liminal state to undermine the legitimacy of technocratic elites through counter power campaigns informed by assemblage theory and classical counter-insurgency strategy. The article contributes to world-system theory by bringing the liminal state concept into our understandings of the future world-system.
Copyright (c) 2026 Glen Kuecker https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This article examines the current geopolitical and economic interregnum through the lens of World-Systems theory, focusing on what Ege Demirel (2024) identifies as the emergence of a “semi-core,” represented most prominently by China and Russia. Drawing on recent philosophical work by Zygmunt Bauman, empirical evidence from China's 'Global Community of Shared Future' white paper and Putin's 2024 Valdai address, alongside theoretical insights from contemporary Chinese Marxism, it argues that the semi-core's challenge to Western hegemony creates unique conditions for systemic transformation. Particular attention is given to the role of technical workers, whose strategic position at the intersection of competing infrastructural systems and alternative visions of global order makes them potentially crucial actors in determining the outcome of the current interregnum. By examining the philosophical foundations of Chinese Marxism—particularly its dialectical approach rooted in the yin-yang principle—the article reveals that the semi-core challenge represents not merely alternative policies but an alternative epistemology that fundamentally differs from Western either/or logic. Drawing on research by Muldoon, Graham, and Cant (2024) on the hidden labor supporting AI systems and the geopolitical competition over digital infrastructure, the article demonstrates how technical workers' potential for progressive transformation lies not just in their strategic importance and specialized knowledge but in their ability to build solidarity across the broader ecosystem of AI labor while between otherwise incommensurable philosophical and infrastructural systems.
Copyright (c) 2026 Stephen Wilkinson https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Development of Information Technologies and Specifics of their Use to Reach Ideological Goals:
Information technology, particularly through its use for ideological purposes, is an issue that is becoming increasingly important amid digital transformation and geopolitical change. This study uses a comparative framework to analyze how information technology influences both the internal and external policies of states by examining the impact of information technologies on political processes and ideological strategies in the United States, China, Kazakhstan, and selected EU member states (Germany, France, and Poland). Using comparative and content analysis, as well as the historical logical method, we assess how digital technologies shape political ideology and systems of social governance over time. Systematized international practices and national approaches to the use of information technologies are compared, focusing on their role in shaping ideological narratives. Findings show that China and Kazakhstan use digital technologies to reinforce state control through censorship, social media monitoring, and the dissemination of propaganda via fake accounts. In the United States, policy efforts emphasize cybersecurity, labeling inaccurate content, and regulating digital platforms during election campaigns. In the European Union, legislative measures have been actively developed to regulate online content, combat disinformation, promote platform transparency, and support anti disinformation platforms and independent fact checking initiatives. Across all cases, the use of social media to influence historical memory and political attitudes has become a widespread trend. The practical significance of this research lies in its recommendations for enhancing public policy in the areas of digital regulation, media literacy, and countering disinformation.
Copyright (c) 2026 Saniya Sarsenova, Aigerim Ibrayeva, Kairat Abdrakhmanov, Aygul Kozhakhmetova, Asiya Kasenova https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Editor's Introduction to the Summer/Autumn 2025 Issue
Copyright (c) 2025 Andrej Grubacic; Rallie Murray https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Dale Tomich (1946-2024)...in His Own Words (Part II)
Dale Tomich, who passed away in August 2024, had a singular trajectory as a Caribbean scholar. His best-known work, Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar: Martinique and the World Economy (1830-1848) (1990) stands rather apart in Caribbean historiography, even though his construct of the “second slavery” has been fertile for Atlantic history (Blackburn 2024; Dal Lago 2025). Tomich has been especially recognized beyond the United States, where his work has been at the cutting edge of scholarship in political economy, Marxist theory, theoretical history, and historical methodology. Over the course of four decades, Tomich’s books and essays have been seminal for “contextualizing and theorizing the history of the modern world economy, particularly the role of New World slavery (the plantation) in the construction of moern capitalism.” (Crichlow and Ciusti 2024: 249). Dale’s close understanding of Caribbean and Brazilian history, which he merged into a study of Atlantic history, built bridges where few scholars have crossed. Always self-effacing, ale did not often discuss his remarkable intellectual path; yet it is relevant to understandign the multiple layers of his work, its wider context, and its possibilities.
Copyright (c) 2026 Juan Giusti-Cordero https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Dale Tomich (1946-2024)...in His Own Words (Part I)
Copyright (c) 2025 Juan A. Giusti-Cordero https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This paper examines the 2022 Oder River ecological disaster through a world-ecology lens, arguing it is a localized manifestation of global "Cheap Water" dynamics. It traces the river's transformation across centuries, from its early appropriation in eighteenth-century Prussia to its exploitation under Polish state socialism and its continued devaluation in post-1989 predatory capitalism. The analysis reveals how the state, as an "inherently environmental entity," consistently mediated the relationship between capital accumulation and water flows, treating the river as a "free gift" for energy production, food cultivation, and waste disposal. The concept of "Cheap Water" is introduced as modern water reconfigured and devalued by capitalist world-ecology, interconnecting the concepts of Capitalocene and Wasteocene. The paper demonstrates how historical geo-managerial practices, driven by economic and geopolitical imperatives rather than socio-ecological justice, created a "sacrifice zone" in the Oder basin. The 2022 catastrophe, marked by mass aquatic death, exposed the fragility of this state-capital-science nexus and the inherent water injustice. The paper concludes by advocating for a re-politicization of water crises and a shift from control- and profit-oriented governance towards a more democratic, life-affirming, and justice-oriented approach, acknowledging the limitations of current localized solutions within the sovereign nation-state system.
Copyright (c) 2026 Piotr Walewicz https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Theorizing Labor Control in the Global Apparel Industry:
This article looks at the Bangladeshi apparel industry and critically draws on the extant literature on labor control to theorize how market and non-market actors control apparel workers and exploit their labor power at the bottom of a global value chain, reinforcing the modern world-system as a capitalist world-economy. My research draws on empirical evidence collected from 20 apparel factories in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and secondary sources to identify a new regime of labor control. I call this regime of labor control social despotism—a regime that deploys legal means, illegal coercion, informal power relations, and structural violence to dominate and exploit workers. Social despotism is created by two reinforcing forms of oppression: instrumental oppression and structural oppression. Market actors organize instrumental oppression to normalize coercion in the factory, creating the forced consent of workers to their exploitation. Market and non-market actors organize structural oppression, limiting workers’ collective bargaining power within the factory and marginalizing their existence in social life. Both forms of oppression are present throughout four distinct phases of labor control: searching for the cheapest labor forces and manufacturing sites; recruiting workers; organizing work; and socializing, rewarding, and punishing workers. In short, social despotism constitutes a new regime of labor control within the world’s second-largest apparel industry during the current phase of the modern world-system, where social institutions, including the state and family, collaborate with market institutions, such as multinational corporations and manufacturing industries, to exert control over workers both within and beyond factory settings.
Copyright (c) 2026 Lipon Mondal https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Revisiting World-Systems Theory in the Age of Dual-Core Competition
This study revisits Wallerstein’s world-systems theory to assess its explanatory leverage under dual-core U.S.–China competition, accelerating technological change, and institutional reordering. We argue that core–semi-periphery–periphery hierarchies persist but are increasingly mediated by (1) dual-core bargaining spaces, (2) institutional chokepoints in trade, finance, and standards, and (3) politically mediated technological infrastructures, including digital-currency and platform-based payment systems. Using a structured secondary-analysis design, we first synthesize contemporary debates to derive observable implications for semi-peripheral and peripheral mobility. We then map evidence from systematically selected policy documents, institutional reports, and peer-reviewed studies to evaluate whether reported autonomy gains reflect durable structural shifts or contingent responses to shocks (e.g., sanctions, inflation, payment disruptions). The findings indicate heightened boundary fluidity and new modalities of contestation, yet continued asymmetries in rule-setting, liquidity provision, and standards dependence. We conclude by specifying boundary conditions and measurement priorities for future cross-national tests.
Copyright (c) 2026 JiaYing Lyu https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Lead Battery Recycling and the Ecologically Unequal Exchange of a Crescive Contaminant Across the U.S.-Mexico Border
In 2008, the United States lowered the occupational and ambient air emissions standards for lead, but the regulations remained unchanged in Mexico. This has driven hundreds of millions of lead batteries across the border for recycling as U.S.-based companies side-step higher domestic compliance costs. In doing so, they perpetuate the unequal valuation of labor and human health commonplace across the U.S.-Mexico border. One company, Clarios, owns two of the largest lead smelters south of the border processing more than two-thirds of the batteries completing the U.S.-Mexico arbitrage cycle in recent years. Such leveraging of regulatory asymmetries is one dimension of ecologically unequal exchange wherein firms located in a more dominant nation shift the costs of pollution intensive production. In this regard, the U.S.-Mexico border does not simply reflect but produces racialized environmental violence as batteries flow freely but people do not. The veracity of this violence is detectable in the blood of those laboring under a three-fold higher occupational standard and the children living in the shadow of smelter facilities operating with ten-fold greater threshold for the imposition of ambient, lead-laced, air releases. The lead acid battery trade between the U.S. and Mexico underscores environmental load displacement by way of the secondary recovery of materials, amid differing regulatory standards, and a central contradiction within an industry widely touted as the most ecologically modern manufacturing sector in the United States.
Copyright (c) 2026 James Rice https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Editor's Introduction to the Winter/Spring 2025 Issue
Copyright (c) 2025 Andrej Grubacic https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Introduction to Part I of the Special Section on Global Disasters and World Society.
Copyright (c) 2025 Chris Chase-Dunn, Fábio Pádua dos Santos https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Generational Basis of Anti-Systemic Resistance
Scientific research, empirical evidence, and the clearly visible environmental devastation due to climate change/global warming are largely the consequences of the quest for profits of “fossil capital” that portends the greatest danger to human life. A nuclear war may kill half of the world, a sixth extinction would end all humanity. Can the wealth and political power of fossil capital be halted and reversed? Is a de-growth world society possible? Perhaps. A longer view of history has taught us that economic hegemons rise and fall, especially when people organize social movements to bring about change. But whom might be the agents of social change? And why would they act? It is at this point that we consider the importance of generations which, following Mannheim, may have as much impact as social class. It is evident that support for climate justice is most typical among the young—the Z generation. Why? Zoomers have grown up experiencing the adversities and precarities of capital, the 2008 crisis, school shootings, environmental disasters, the Covid-19 pandemic, and so on. By dint of age, education and psychological flexibility, Zoomers now spearhead several global justice movements that aim to end the use of fossil fuels, stop ecocide, and genocide.
Copyright (c) 2025 Lauren Langman https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
To place the ongoing disaster of climate breakdown in political-economic context and explore future possibilities, this article mobilizes three concepts central to historical materialism which form a “trifecta of power”: accumulation, imperialism, and hegemony. These are applied to the current regime of obstruction, comprised of an amalgamation of the deeply seated project of fossil capitalism and the emergent project of climate capitalism. Three alternative projects—Green New Deal, Degrowth, and Buen Vivir (“living well”) —move us toward real solutions, but need to be braided into a wider transformative project that addresses the trifecta of power that reproduces capitalism as a way of life. Eco-socialism provides such a synthesis. It offers a just, viable economic alternative to capitalism capable of addressing the climate emergency. It provides an alternative hegemonic project capable of unifying a post-capitalist historical bloc. It challenges the geopolitical economy of ecological imperialism and opens toward a world order organized for cooperation, solidarity, and peace. These gains stem from three important elements in the historical materialist theory informing eco-socialism. First, a comprehension of the dialectical relation between forces and relations of production as central to socio-ecological transformation. Second, an emphasis on the imperative to replace the anarchy of the market, capital’s governing mechanism with democratic planning. Third, identification of the social forces that can be brought together to form an historical bloc capable of leading the transformation. Our current trajectory is perilous, but there is still time to correct course.
Copyright (c) 2025 William K. Carroll https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The paper interweaves the concepts of two contemporary thinkers in order to describe the ongoing socio-environmental crisis. Based on the books Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital by Jason W. Moore (2015) and The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert (2013, 2015), I identify the common, or at least approximate, meanings between these two works. To do this, I have structured the article based on the discursive textual analysis. The first section analyzes the concepts of “oikeios” by Moore (2015) and “urihi a” by Kopenawa and Albert (2013, 2015). The second section interprets the descriptions of the processes of disorganization of nature. In the concluding section, the main results and future directions are outlined. The article demonstrates the possibility of building a confluent perspective between divergent ones.
Copyright (c) 2025 Giacomo Otavio Tixiliski https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Popular Anthropocene in Global Climate (Dis)Governance
The climate emergency is posing an existential threat to millions of species on Earth—including humans. Despite advances in climate science and the consolidation of global climate governance—which establishes processes, rules, and agreements that define mitigation strategies—the climate emergency has accelerated in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. At the same time, the popular anthropocentric conception, which presents a standard narrative about the genesis and conditioning factors of the climate emergency, prevails in the dialogues, negotiations, and strategies of global climate governance. Therefore, this article analyzes whether the propositions of global climate governance inspired by the popular Anthropocene are sufficient to define mitigation strategies in the face of approaching tipping points. The intellectual-ideological axioms of the popular Anthropocene, namely the carbon metric, sustainable development, and the green economy, are chosen as research criteria. It should be reiterated that popular anthropocentric propositions are not sufficient to delimit effective mitigation strategies; this is because they contemplate modern rationality and reformist liberalism, and therefore aim for “sustainable capitalism”—an oxymoron, since a balanced metabolic relationship with nature is opposed to the incessant accumulation of capital, the driving force of historical capitalism.
Copyright (c) 2025 Paola Huwe de Paoli https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
A Science-Based Ecosocialist Strategy for Climate Security
The natural, physical, and informational sciences—in particular, climatology, ecology, biogeochemistry, and thermodynamics—which along with the wisdom derived from the experience of thousands of years of indigenous peoples’ agriculture and culture should inform an effective global plan to prevent future climate catastrophes much worse than now witnessed which will very likely occur if the 1.5°C warming limit is exceeded in the next few decades. Strategy is imperative to guide transnational political struggle, to first defeat fossil capital while creating a Global Green New Deal (GGND) confronting the growing threat of climate catastrophes. Degrowth has been promoted as a program for climate security, but a major problem is its grounding in Georgescu-Roegen’s fallacious entropy concept with regard to energy supplies to society. Degrowthers call for a global reduction in energy. However, sufficient levels of renewable energy likely greater than the present global energy consumption level will eliminate energy poverty while having the capacity for climate mitigation and adaptation with a phase out of extractive industries. Organizing for a GGND must start now with the recognition of the role of green capital at least in its first stage, both for implementation of an ever-growing renewable energy infrastructure replacing fossil fuel, as well as a potential ally in defeating the agenda of militarized fossil capital. At the same time, green capital must be challenged to insure environmental, worker and community protection. The GGND can potentially develop in an increasingly ecosocialist direction, culminating with end of reproduction of capital on the planet.
Copyright (c) 2025 David Schwartzman https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Since the beginning of the Great Recession in 2008 the world-system has become increasingly in a state of crisis, which continues to deepen. Since Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine (SMO) in February 2022, the world-system has entered a new phase of development that combines international, economic and other crises. The geopolitical aspects of the world-system crisis and the consequences of the military conflict are now being actively debated, but there is almost no research on how these crises and military actions affect and will continue to affect the environmental situation in the region and in the world in general. In this paper we analyze different aspects and reasons and explain how and why the deepening crisis of the World-system has had and will have a negative impact on the ecology of the world.
Copyright (c) 2025 Leonid Grinin, Anton Grinin https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Sixth Century Global Climatic Disaster, the Origins of Islam, and its World-System Consequences
We suggest viewing the origins of Islam against the background of the sixth century global climatic disaster and the Arabian socio-ecological crisis that was one of its parts. Most socio-political systems of the Arabs reacted to the socio-ecological crisis by getting rid of the rigid supra-tribal political structures (kingdoms and chiefdoms) which started posing a real threat to their very survival. The decades of fighting which led to the destruction of most of the Arabian kingdoms and chiefdoms led to the elaboration of some definite “anti-royal” freedom-loving tribal ethos. At the beginning of the seventh century tribes which would recognize themselves as subjects of some terrestrial supra-tribal political authority, the “king,” risked losing its honor. However, this seems not to be applicable to the authority of another type, the “celestial” one. In the meantime the early seventh century evidences the merging of the Arabian tradition of prophecy and the Arabian Monotheist “Rahmanist” tradition which produced the Arabian prophetic movement. The Monotheist Rahmanist prophets appear to have represented a supra-tribal authority just of the type many Arab tribes were looking for at this very time, which seems to explain to a certain extent those prophets’ political success (including the extreme political success of Muhammad). The sixth century global climatic disaster influenced the world-systems development mainly through one of its logical outcomes, the formation of Islam and the formation of a colossal Islamic communication network reproduced through an annual pilgrimage to Mecca.
Copyright (c) 2025 Andrey Korotayev https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Collapse and Transformation? Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Energy Crisis of “Showcase” Peripheries in World-Ecological Perspective
The rise of oil-fueled accumulation in the global North produced an energy regime that by the mid-twentieth century was being extended to the semiperipheral and peripheral zones of the world-system. There it took the form of petroleum-driven development. This is especially the case for peripheral “showcases” in the Caribbean region. In the context of the Cold War, these two islands became opposing models of global South development—Puerto Rico’s industrialization program functioning as the American empire’s “showcase” to the Third World and Cuba emerging as an example of successful antisystemic developmentalism allied with the USSR. At least since the 1990s, both countries have experienced a long period of recurrent crises. Proposing a world-ecological and world-historical explanation, this article argues that while these islands represented different politico-economic regimes, both were nonetheless dependent on the oil-fueled accumulation dynamics of the capitalist world-ecology. Puerto Rico’s export-led industrialization and Cuba’s agrarian-based state socialism were underpinned by decades-long access to cheap oil. Thus, the crises—which have had the energy sector at its core—are in part the product of the unsustainability of their oil-fueled developmentalist regimes. Lastly, the article reflects on the ways in which the ongoing crises—and the respective responses taking place in Puerto Rico and Cuba—might prefigure some of the dilemmas that will characterize future world-ecological trajectories.
Copyright (c) 2025 Roberto Ortiz https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
(Geo)culture and the West’s War Against Gaza
This paper examines the challenges to the dominant Western geoculture of the modern world-system posed by the ongoing war on Gaza. Historically, the West’s geocultural power has seen it successfully construct, maintain, and defend a self-image as one in which it represents an international community which adheres to universal liberal values: human rights, international law, and the use of force in international relations only when sanctioned by law. However, the ongoing war on Gaza (which is best viewed as a war undertaken by the West, not simply Israel) has exposed the West’s actions to unprecedented critical scrutiny. The paper argues that the traditional mechanisms by which the West has built and maintained its geocultural dominance (media, education, intellectual culture) have been undermined in the digital age by the proliferation of new media forms. In short, the West has struggled to control the narrative that Israel is defending civilization against barbarism. The reality, as many critics have noted, is the opposite—the West defends barbarism against civilization.
Copyright (c) 2025 Peter Wilkin https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Global Capital and Amphibian Extinctions
Sri Lanka has the highest number of recorded amphibian extinctions and most of the island’s remaining amphibian species are threatened with extinction. From a critical political-economic perspective that integrates previously disconnected lines of analysis in herpetological conservation, development, land use change, and colonial and neocolonial histories, we argue that these extinctions and extinction risks should not be understood as a localized event, but, instead, in relation to global networks that emerged from the international development of capitalism. Mass deforestation of the Southern Highlands, the region of Sri Lanka with the highest diversity of endemic and endangered amphibians, began following the commodification of land to establish plantations under British colonial rule. The core-periphery power relations installed during colonization remain in the neocolonial period, undergirding the forces driving deforestation to this day. Higher-income countries and multinational corporations have financially benefited from Sri Lanka’s “development” at the expense of many Sri Lankans and the island’s diverse amphibian populations and their habitats, a relationship consistent with the theory of ecologically unequal exchange.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ryan Gunderson, William Charles, Claiton Fyock https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Washington has imposed an arms embargo to punish growing Sino-Cambodian military cooperation, yet Cambodia’s subsequent arms imports from China and the latter’s dominant investments via the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) have pushed it deeper into Beijing’s orbit. In this context, this article addresses scholarship on China-U.S. hegemonic rivalry by examining China’s hegemonic features vis-à-vis Cambodia using the features of peripheralization and economic dominance per world-systems analysis in order to gauge whether U.S. hegemonic unipolarity has unraveled therein, with China emerging as hegemon. We find that, through BRI investment and the ruling Hun family network, China has achieved significant gains in economic dominance via facilitated copper and rice exports and increased tech imports by Cambodia, resulting in substantial trade surplus and production dominance. However, this economic influence remains incomplete due to Washington’s continued role as Cambodia’s primary export destination and the persistent use of the U.S. dollar, illustrating the complex, contested nature of hegemonic transitions in small state contexts.
Copyright (c) 2025 Toufic Sarieddine https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The purpose of this article is to discuss the role of migration processes to changes in the world-system. We highlight the significance of these processes and their impact through a comparative historical perspective. By using an approach based on an integrated comparison, two cases are compared: the rise of the early modern Dutch state to hegemony and the corresponding rise to hegemony by the United States in the twentieth century. In presenting secondary sources on the two cases, we argue that neither expansion had been possible without a significant inflow of labor and skills carried by migrants. There seems to be a strong correlation between migration and changes in the world-system in general and the rise to hegemonic status in particular. By analyzing long-term processes like migration and its role in energizing and stimulating changes in the world-system, we argue, in line with the new economics of migration, that previous economic explanations to the rise of hegemony can be qualified. We also argue that the use of integrated comparison in the way we tentatively do in this paper can be fruitful in better understanding historical processes and their impact on power relations and economic relations in the world-system.
Copyright (c) 2026 Jimmy Engren, Lars Hansson https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This article examines the intellectual foundations of Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis, focusing on the formative period of the late 1960s and 1970s. It traces how Wallerstein’s evolving engagement with Marxism—shaped through dialogue and debate with contemporary scholars—contributed to the development of his theoretical framework. Rather than treating Marxism as a fixed doctrine, Wallerstein approached it as a method of critical inquiry, adapting and extending it to better account for the historical dynamics of the capitalist world-economy. By situating his work within key academic debates of the era, the article highlights the central role Marxist thought played in shaping both his conceptual innovations and his enduring political commitments.
Copyright (c) 2025 Sam Chian https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Despite flourishing after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the American order has been weakened by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, growing unilateral neo-isolationism within conservative American politics, and the meteoric rise of China as a great power rival. Though theories of historical comparison are often critiqued, some, such as George Modelski’s pattern of long cycles, seem timely to revisit amid this “deconcentration” of world leadership. This work supports Modelski’s historical case-study by applying quantitative measures of power to make statistically informed comparisons between the changes in the distribution of power between British deconcentration (1885–1914), to the current period of supposed American decline. This work finds statistical evidence of American decline in more measures than the British Empire, despite maintaining a wider margin with its rival. China is increasing its power in all measures at a faster rate than the German Empire during its rise to challenger status. Though statistical forecasting raises doubts whether China can near parity in the coming decades, (mis)perceptions of Beijing’s power, domestic American political fracturing, geopolitical flashpoints, escalating regional wars involving partner states, and differing military readiness strategies make global war between the United States and China a near-future possibility worth continued study.
Copyright (c) 2025 Layton Mandle https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Marxist theory of unequal exchange challenges the idea that trade never results in outright losses. As a biophysical process, ecological unequal exchange reveals global disparities in resource flows. Using material flow analysis, alternative indicators, and new country clusters, this study updates earlier research and identifies a new phase of intensified disparities since 2015, with rising net outflows of resources from low-income countries (LICs) to high-income countries (HICs). From 1970 to 2024, HICs accumulated 290 gigatons (Gt) of raw material equivalents (RMEs) as net imports, while upper-middle-income, lower-middle-income, and low-income countries net-exported 164 Gt, 53.1 Gt, and 9.6 Gt, respectively. In a relative sense, LICs consume 13.3 percent less RMEs than they extract domestically, while HICs consume 25.4 percent more. This study challenges assumptions about global divisions of labor: not all HICs are net-importers of RMEs, nor are all LICs net-exporters. However, net-exporter HICs earn more than net-exporter LICs, and net-importer HICs spend less than net-importer LICs. On average, LICs export 6 tons of RMEs to earn what HICs earns from 1 ton; for net-exporter LICs, this ratio rises to 12.7 tons. The more a country exploits the environment, domestically or abroad, the more it earns.
Copyright (c) 2025 Crelis Rammelt, Raimon C. Ylla-Catala https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Historicizing the Prison in the History of Capitalism
The goal of this paper is to rethink the timeline through which scholars have conceived of the history of capitalism and imprisonment. Scholars including Oliver C. Cox, Fernand Braudel, and Giovanni Arrighi, among others, have presented a story of capitalism centered around the Italian-city states, followed by the Netherlands, Britain, and the United States. Yet discussions on the origins of capitalism and imprisonment, eventually resulting in the invention of the penitentiary as an institution of reform, usually start around the sixteenth century. Incorporating insights from both of these angles, this paper shows the historical ways that different centers of capitalist power developed prisons in the context of the broad contours of the history of capitalism from fourteenth century Italy to nineteenth century England.
Copyright (c) 2025 James Parisot https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Thirty Years of the Journal of World-Systems Research
Editors' introduction to the Journal of World-Systems Research 30 (2) Summer/Autumn issue.
Copyright (c) 2024 Rallie Murray https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Founding editor Chris Chase-Dunn reviews the history and genesis of the Journal of World-Systems Research in recognition of its 30th Anniversary.
Copyright (c) 2024 Chris Chase-Dunn https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Copyright (c) 2024 Boaventura de Sousa Santos https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Rethinking “World Wars” Through a World-Systems Lens
What are the key characteristics of the current instabilities of the capitalist world-system, and how does it compare to previous periods that led to world wars? What factors are driving the similarities and differences between the present systemic chaos and earlier transitions in the world-system? What potential trajectories might the unfolding period of systemic instabilities take, and what balance of forces could emerge as dominant in shaping the world-system? Focusing on the foundational works of Wallerstein, Chase-Dunn, Goldstein, and Arrighi, this article critically re-evaluates the contemporary relevance and explanatory power of world-systems analysis. Its key contribution to world-systems literature lies in moving beyond the predominantly cyclical interpretations of world wars by integrating analytical tools, such as conceptual schemas and statistical evidence, with narrative approaches highlighting historical contingencies. Overall, contemporary systemic instabilities within the capitalist world-system are marked by the intensification of economic competition, geopolitical rivalries, and social discontent, reflecting historical patterns of systemic chaos during prior hegemonic transitions, yet distinguished by the unanticipated disruption of economic expansion since the 2010s, China’s unexpected rise alongside the fading influence Germany and Japan, the U.S.-China decoupling, the pivotal role of frontier technologies, and the fragmented character of heightened popular mobilization.
Copyright (c) 2025 Efe Can Gürcan https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Border Disputes in the Global Periphery amid Declining U.S. Hegemonic Influence
Contrary to popular expectations about a post-oil future, oil remains an important commodity in the global political economy and the world-system, in which peripheral economies rely on the export of raw material to earn foreign exchange. We argue that Venezuela’s aggressive geopolitical stance against its smaller neighbor Guyana emanates from Guyana’s newfound oil discoveries resulting in fast economic development in Guyana, the Maduro regimes’ desire to distract from diminished internal legitimacy from the mismanagement of its own oil resources, the diminution of Venezuela’s status from the semi-periphery to the periphery within the world-system and the declining hegemonic power of the United States that must handle other expensive foreign conflicts, thereby giving Venezuela leverage in the region. As a hegemonic power, the United States is punishing Venezuela via sanctions and supporting its oil companies in controlling Guyanese oil reserves and making Guyana subservient to U.S. economic interest within the world-system. The world-system generates an inherent power imbalance among states, where the economic interests of multinational corporations of the core states take priority; but in addition, some peripheral states can threaten smaller peripheral states, putting the smaller peripheral states at an even greater disadvantage.
Copyright (c) 2025 Larry Liu, Leon Wilson https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Translation and the Political Economy of Global Knowledge Production
The translation of contemporary Arab thought has received scant scholarly attention in recent translation theory. This paper explores the status of translating contemporary Arab thought, offering a macro socio-economic analysis based on the basic assumption that translation forms a global system. Translation production and reception processes occur between asymmetric languages in an interdependent “world translation system,” organized by a core-periphery model with hypercentral, central, semi-central, and peripheral languages. The world-system has created an “international division of labor” in knowledge production, impacting the demand for certain languages and texts while neglecting others. The paper further examines the Arab nation’s position in the world-system, contextualizes knowledge production, language, and translation in its peripheral position which largely reflect its peripheral position. It scrutinizes the translation landscape of contemporary Arab thought English translations of books by eighteen contemporary Arab thinkers, analyzing volume, themes, publishers, and sponsorship. The paper employs reasonably straightforward theoretical-methodological approaches, with the Amazon website serving as the primary data source. The paper concludes that the characteristics of translating contemporary Arab thought are essentially a reflection of the Arab nation’s and Arabic language’s position in the global system and mostly confirm the characteristics of the world translation system.
Copyright (c) 2025 Fuad Rayyan, Mohammad Thawabteh https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Lex Capitalocenae addresses a lacuna in the Transition Debate by reconstructing the origins of international law in the formation of the capitalist world-ecology in the long sixteenth century (c. 1450–1650). In doing so, this paper bridges a rift in Marxist legal scholarship between the commodity form theorists who emphasize the importance of doctrine and the social property form theorists who stress the determinative role of legal practices. Unacknowledged in this exchange is Wallerstein’s historical-geographic account of the transition and its development by Moore into a political Marxism on a world-scale. Through this perspective, I empirically narrate the centrality of legal transformations surrounding property, territoriality, and Naturalism. The formation of capitalism as a world-ecology, as a way of organizing human and extra-human life, cannot be understood without accounting for the emergence of its legal infrastructure and its dualistic source code—Civilization and Nature—amidst the long sixteenth century. It was only through the failure of the Spanish imperial project that concepts of property, territoriality, and Natural law were revolutionized to create the juridical basis for the capitalist world-ecology and its political structure of nation-states. This geohistorical reconstruction of law, life, and the rise of capitalism allows us to better grasp contemporary debates over planetary law in the climate crisis.
Copyright (c) 2025 Jeremy Santora https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Editors' introduction for the Special Issue on Women in World-Literature: A Woman’s Work Winter/Spring 2024, 30 (1).
Copyright (c) 2024 Andrej Grubacic; Rallie Murray https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Copyright (c) 2024 José Neves https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Copyright (c) 2024 Ravi Arvind Palat https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Haiti has endured both natural and man-made violence since colonization, shaping its population into a global reserve army of labor for the world-system. This paper examines how historical and structural factors, including colonialism, political instability, and economic exploitation, have contributed to the creation of a vulnerable population appropriable as a cheap labor force. It explores how these factors, compounded by phenomenological violence—the internalization of oppression and fear—have led to widespread migration, positioning Haitians as a global reserve army of labor, particularly in industries like sugarcane production in the Dominican Republic. Through this lens, the paper highlights how migration, fueled by both environmental and systemic violence, has entrenched Haitians in labor markets worldwide.
Copyright (c) 2025 Jean Robert Dery, Yoan Molinero-Gerbeau https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Copyright (c) 2024 William I. Robinson https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Copyright (c) 2024 Peter Linebaugh https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Copyright (c) 2024 Jonas Van Vossole, Marcela Uchôa https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Reproduction of Peripherality during the Covid-19 Pandemic
This article situates itself in the theoretical space between world-systems theory and postcolonial theory, exploring how the state of peripherality and concomitant dependency is reproduced in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Covid-19 pandemic. The dependent position of the Bosnian protectorate in the world-system, its heritage of colonial rule and peripherality, as well as post-colonial influences of Pax-Americana on state constitution and state capture, have all contributed to the inability of the divided state to adequately respond to the pandemic. This article reveals a multifaceted dependence of Bosnia and Herzegovina on the Western core economies in relation to aid, equipment and vaccines as well as its gradual move towards China as a new opportunity. The pandemic also becomes the stage for competition between the Eastern and Western companies for mining concessions needed to secure the green transition in the respective economies, as a new wave of primitive accumulation ravages the European periphery. As a result of this new scramble for the Balkans, and amidst the global shift towards multipolarity, we see a stable reproduction of peripherality in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Western Balkans, and re-emergence of ethnic conflict in previously disputed areas, where ethnic groups identify with the interests of their respective hegemons.
Copyright (c) 2025 Jasna Balorda https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Impact of Economic Dependence on Economic Growth in Egypt
The dearth of empirical research on economic dependence in Egypt since the 1980s underscores the significance of this study, which investigates the relationship between economic dependence and economic growth in Egypt from 1977 to 2021. Utilizing the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model, this study examines the effects of trade, investment, debt, and aid dependence on economic growth. The findings reveal that investment and aid dependence have a positive impact on economic growth, while trade and debt dependence have a negative impact. These outcomes are compared with the arguments of dependency and neoclassical economics theory to provide a comprehensive analysis of the implications. Moreover, the study provides policy recommendations to mitigate the negative impacts of economic dependence and promote self-reliant development, including prioritizing local development goals in global relations, diversifying the sources of aid, reducing debt used in financing investment projects, and restructuring the economy to prioritize national interests. These policies can help Egypt achieve higher rates of growth while mitigating the negative effects of economic dependence.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ahmed Anees, Salah Hassan, Ahmed Ayman https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Appraising Sociological Approaches to Ecologically Unequal Exchange
Ecologically unequal exchange has enjoyed several decades of rich theoretical and empirical scholarship. Quantitative assessments of the theory in sociology typically sample lower income nations to see whether more trading to high income nations contributes to environmental problems in the former. In this paper, we explore ecologically unequal exchange theory, as well as related traditions, to draw attention to how these theories develop relational understandings of global advantage and disadvantage in socioecological terms. Thus, we argue that relational methods, like social network analysis, among other approaches, better align with the underlying theoretical framework in the research area. More specifically, ecologically unequal exchange’s emphasis on “extractive peripheries” calls for those geographic zones to be the primary site of analysis as opposed to bifurcating nations based on income. We specifically propose social network tools and methods, such as position/role analyses, because they can directly analyze trade data to construct categories of nations, such as extractive export sites. Generally, we argue that these methods better approximate the underlying theory, while acknowledging the utility of the longstanding approach, calling for methodological diversification in general and embracing relational methods in particular.
Copyright (c) 2024 Nicholas Theis, Mauricio Betancourt, Amanda Sikirica https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Brazilian Indigenous as an Uneven Identity
Orality has always been the main channel through which culture and knowledge has passed onto generations of Indigenous peoples in Brazil. Yet, today, the need to resist cultural assimilation or, even worse, annihilation, has led to the creation of new, written materials where Indigenous people can speak for themselves by relating their history, defending their identity, and their cultural territory. Among these, Brazilian geographer, poet, and activist Márcia Wayna Kambeba of the Omágua/Kambeba people uses literature as a space where decolonial thought and traditional knowledge meet to build a philosophical, political, and poetic view on indigenous identity in general and on the experience of Indigenous women in particular. Drawing from previous studies on Brazilian Indigenous literature, decolonial theory, and decolonial feminism, this paper discusses Kambeba’s works and underpins the relevance and need to examine the specificity of the experience of Brazilian Indigenous women writers as fundamental participants in the periphery of the world-literature to discuss the postcolonial configurations of identities in present-day Brazilian society.
Copyright (c) 2024 Federica Lupati https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0