Journal of World-Systems Research
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr
<p>The <em>Journal of World-Systems Research</em> is the official journal of the <a href="http://www.asapews.org/">Political Economy of the World-System Section </a>of the American Sociological Association. <em>JWSR </em>is an open-access, peer reviewed journal with an interdisciplinary audience of readers from around the world.</p>University Library System, University of Pittsburghen-USJournal of World-Systems Research1076-156X<p>Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:</p><ol><li>The Author retains copyright in the Work, where the term “Work” shall include all digital objects that may result in subsequent electronic publication or distribution.</li><li>Upon acceptance of the Work, the author shall grant to the Publisher the right of first publication of the Work.</li><li>The Author shall grant to the Publisher and its agents the nonexclusive perpetual right and license to publish, archive, and make accessible the Work in whole or in part in all forms of media now or hereafter known under a <a title="CC-BY" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License</a> or its equivalent, which, for the avoidance of doubt, allows others to copy, distribute, and transmit the Work under the following conditions:<ol type="a"><li>Attribution—other users must attribute the Work in the manner specified by the author as indicated on the journal Web site;</li></ol>with the understanding that the above condition can be waived with permission from the Author and that where the Work or any of its elements is in the public domain under applicable law, that status is in no way affected by the license.</li><li>The Author is able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the nonexclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the Work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), as long as there is provided in the document an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.</li><li>Authors are permitted and encouraged to post online a prepublication manuscript (but not the Publisher’s final formatted PDF version of the Work) in institutional repositories or on their Websites prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work. Any such posting made before acceptance and publication of the Work shall be updated upon publication to include a reference to the Publisher-assigned DOI (Digital Object Identifier) and a link to the online abstract for the final published Work in the Journal.</li><li>Upon Publisher’s request, the Author agrees to furnish promptly to Publisher, at the Author’s own expense, written evidence of the permissions, licenses, and consents for use of third-party material included within the Work, except as determined by Publisher to be covered by the principles of Fair Use.</li><li>The Author represents and warrants that:<ol type="a"><li>the Work is the Author’s original work;</li><li>the Author has not transferred, and will not transfer, exclusive rights in the Work to any third party;</li><li>the Work is not pending review or under consideration by another publisher;</li><li>the Work has not previously been published;</li><li>the Work contains no misrepresentation or infringement of the Work or property of other authors or third parties; and</li><li>the Work contains no libel, invasion of privacy, or other unlawful matter.</li></ol></li><li>The Author agrees to indemnify and hold Publisher harmless from Author’s breach of the representations and warranties contained in Paragraph 6 above, as well as any claim or proceeding relating to Publisher’s use and publication of any content contained in the Work, including third-party content.</li></ol><p><span style="font-size: 75%;">Revised 7/16/2018. Revision Description: Removed outdated link. </span></p>Editorial Note
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1128
<p>The editor's introduction for the Winter/Spring 2022 issue of <em>Journal of World-Systems Research</em>.</p>Andrej Grubačić
Copyright (c) 2022 Andrej Gruba?i?
2022-03-262022-03-262811310.5195/jwsr.2022.1128How to Read Capitalism in the Web of Life
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1127
Jason W Moore
Copyright (c) 2022 Jason W Moore
2022-03-262022-03-2628115316810.5195/jwsr.2022.1127Give and Take
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1125
Patricia Ward
Copyright (c) 2022 Patricia Ward
2022-03-262022-03-2628117517710.5195/jwsr.2022.1125Leaning on the BRICS as a Geopolitical Counterweight Leads Only to Faux-Polyarchic, Subimperial “Spalling”
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1124
Patrick Bond
Copyright (c) 2022 Patrick Bond
2022-03-262022-03-2628114615210.5195/jwsr.2022.1124Why Not Default?
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1123
Jerome RoosAndrej Grubačić
Copyright (c) 2022 Jerome Roos, Andrej Gruba?i?
2022-03-262022-03-26281169174?10.5195/jwsr.2022.1123Review Of: Pacifying the Homeland: Intelligence Fusion and Mass Supervision.
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1079
Corey R. Payne
Copyright (c) 2021 Corey R. Payne
2021-08-142021-08-1428158658910.5195/jwsr.2021.1079Editorial Note
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1078
<p>Editors introduction to <em>Journal of World-Systems Research </em>Vol. 27, No. 2 Summer/Autumn 2021</p>Andrej Grubačić
Copyright (c) 2021 Andrej Gruba?i?
2021-08-142021-08-1428135635810.5195/jwsr.2021.1078Be Careful What You Fight For
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1077
Nandita Sharma
Copyright (c) 2021 Nandita Sharma
2021-08-142021-08-1428135936910.5195/jwsr.2021.1077Beyond Sovereignty
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1076
Victoria Hattam
Copyright (c) 2021 Victoria Hattam
2021-08-142021-08-1428138338910.5195/jwsr.2021.1076Rethinking Decolonization
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1075
Radhika Mongia
Copyright (c) 2021 Radhika Mongia
2021-08-142021-08-1428139039510.5195/jwsr.2021.1075The Banality of Citizenship
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1074
Bridget Anderson
Copyright (c) 2021 Bridget Anderson
2021-08-142021-08-1428137037710.5195/jwsr.2021.1074Neither Native or National
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1073
Rinaldo Walcott
Copyright (c) 2021 Rinaldo Walcott
2021-08-142021-08-1428140440910.5195/jwsr.2021.1073The Making and the Undoing of “Migration”
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1072
Martina Tazzioli
Copyright (c) 2021 Martina Tazzioli
2021-08-142021-08-1428137838210.5195/jwsr.2021.1072The New Shape of the Global Power-Field (GPF) After the Transformation of the Modern World-System Post-WWII (Part. 2)
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1071
<p class="AbstractParagraphs">This article is a follow-up to a previous essay that mapped the dynamics of the modern world-system theory into what was called a Global Power-Field (GPF) during the colonial era phase of planetary history. It continues this mapping project by exploring the reconfiguration of the field in the postcolonial period. This field of power operated on the practice of ‘objectification’ of asymmetrical relations within its domain. The current essay extends that analysis by further identifying the forms of ‘objectification’ in the field’s contemporary phase. A prominent feature of the current field is the non-locality of its operations; a term signifying the level of dispersion of its vectors of power across the globe. The investigation will conclude with a detailed case study of how this current version of the GPF impacts the Global South by examining Post-Revolutionary Iran’s relations with the West.</p>Omer Awass
Copyright (c) 2022 Omer Awass
2022-03-262022-03-26281424Tributary World-Ecologies, Part I
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1066
<p>This essay, in two parts, argues for the centrality of the world-ecology perspective for theorizing the relations, dynamics, and crises of the High Medieval Worlds. Commercialization Theorists view the High Middle Ages as a period of early capitalism, while classical Marxist theorists conceive it as a continuation of feudalism. In contrast to both conceptions, I argue that this era can instead be evaluated on its own terms from the world-ecology perspective. In Part I, I develop two interrelated historical-geographical and theoretical arguments. By employing a comparative world-historical methodology, I first argue that two distinct world-ecologies emerged in the North Sea and the Mediterranean during the High Middle Ages. Second, I define world-ecologies not only in terms of commercial relations, but also of production relations, that is, the mode of appropriation of nature and labor. Next, I focus on the common characteristics of tributary world-ecologies. These two world-ecologies were distinguished by agrarian tributary relations, two-tiered commercial networks, and a multiple state-system. I argue that they expanded due to the unique bundling of climatological upturn, novel production relations, and technological and organizational innovations. I conclude Part I by analyzing the North Sea world-ecology, which has typically served as a model for both Commercialization and Classical Marxist perspectives. While there is no question that both perspectives have their merits, it seems more fruitful to explain the relations and dynamics of the North Sea world by the mutual-conditioning of nature, tributary production, and two-tiered commerce. Second, it is more useful to theorize the North Sea world in relation to the larger tributary worlds, characteristic of the High Middle Ages.</p>Çağrı İdiman
Copyright (c) 2022 Ça?r? ?diman
2022-03-262022-03-26281255210.5195/jwsr.2022.1066For a Revolutionary Feminist World-Systems Analysis
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1065
<p class="AbstractParagraphs">In revolutionary anti-colonial movements, women's involvement has been limited, and their contributions often marginalized or forgotten. This is not only an empirical puzzle in that anti-colonial movements have historically recruited women and furthered feminist discourse while also marginalizing female members, but also a political problem for movements that the lived reality for female participants diverges from the egalitarian philosophies of the movements themselves. In this article, I build on and further develop theories of feminist world-systems analysis, contending that feminist world-systems needs to rethink theories of anti-systemic movements to better include women’s revolutionary roles as active agents in the historical process of colonial independence and decolonization. In so doing, I contend that a revolutionary feminist world-systems analysis is increasingly important to analyze that women’s active roles as revolutionary agents have been sidelined because the movements that they have been a part of have also found themselves co-opted by dominant liberal ideology. This theoretical position is illustrated through an analysis of the published periodicals of the anti-colonial Ghadar Party. Through this empirical case study, I show that Ghadar’s revolutionary potential receded to the background because of its failures to fully include its female members. This case study is then levied to demonstrate how reviving a feminist world-systems analysis can help us better theorize women’s important but under-analyzed role in revolutionary anti-colonial movements.</p>Umaima Miraj
Copyright (c) 2022 Umaima Miraj
2022-03-262022-03-26281537610.5195/jwsr.2022.1065Can Liberation Be National?
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1064
Zachary Levenson
Copyright (c) 2021 Zachary Levenson
2021-08-142021-08-1428139640310.5195/jwsr.2021.1064Capitalizing on Green Debt
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1062
<p>Green bonds represent an increasingly popular way to match “environmental sustainability,” growth, and the aspirations of global financial capital. In this article, we leverage a world-ecology approach to unpack and make sense of green bonds as public/private constructions that shape and subordinate the complex ecologies of territories to the needs of finance and reproduce the global patterns of uneven development and capitalist accumulation. Through the study of recent green bond issuances realized by private companies active in the forestry sector in Brazil, we discuss how green bonds as a “new” form of “green” debt put nature at work and transform the territories and natural elements in the global south into “temporal and spatial fixes” for the needs of global financial capital.</p>Tomaso FerrandoGabriela De Oliveira JunqueiraMarcela Vecchione-GonçalvesIagê MiolaFlávio Marques ProlHector Herrera
Copyright (c) 2021 Tomaso Ferrando, Gabriela De Oliveira Junqueira, Marcela Vecchione-Gonçalves, Iagê Miola, Flávio Marques Prol, Hector Herrera
2021-08-142021-08-1428141043810.5195/jwsr.2021.1062Technological Change before Globalization
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1061
<p>Though the world-systems school has argued that globalization has been a long process over the last five centuries, globalization is often only synonymous with the late twentieth century. Globalization has gained a lot of attention in the context of declining blue-collar job sectors, but the technologies that enabled it had already displaced workers on U.S. railroads. To bridge both schools, railroads are the perfect setting for this study since it’s at the intersection of race, labor, technological changes, and globalization. Mexicans once accounted for ninety percent of track workers in the U.S. Southwest, but after gaining higher wages by the early 1950s, most of their jobs were lost to automation by the 1960s. While faster and larger cargo ships and railroads in recent decades have been synonymous with globalization, the technologies and infrastructure didn’t enable that global process until the 1970s at the earliest. Technological changes eliminated more jobs on the tracks before 1970 than to globalization since. Globalization was not possible without those technological changes.</p>Michael Calderon-Zaks
Copyright (c) 2022 Michael Calderon-Zaks
2022-03-262022-03-26281779710.5195/jwsr.2022.1061Blackness, Disposability, and the Black Spirit
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1057
Marilyn Grell-Brisk
Copyright (c) 2021 Marilyn Grell-Brisk
2021-03-222021-03-2228134535510.5195/jwsr.2021.1057Review Of: The Global Police State
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1056
Zhandarka Kurti
Copyright (c) 2021 Zhandarka Kurti
2021-03-222021-03-2228134134410.5195/jwsr.2021.1056Review Of: Routledge Handbook of Transformative Global Studies
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1055
Amentahru Wahlrab
Copyright (c) 2021 Amentahru Wahlrab
2021-03-222021-03-2228133734010.5195/jwsr.2021.1055Introduction to the Special Issue on Capitalist World-Economy in Crisis
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1054
Zeynep GönenZhandarka Kurti
Copyright (c) 2021 Zeynep Gönen, Zhandarka Kurti
2021-03-202021-03-2028141110.5195/jwsr.2021.1054Editorial Note
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1053
<p>Editors introduction to <em>Journal of World-Systems Research </em>Vol. 27, No. 1 Special Issue on Capitalist World-Economy in Crisis: Policing, Pacification, and Legitimacy</p>Andrej Grubačić
Copyright (c) 2021 Andrej Gruba?i?
2021-03-202021-03-202811310.5195/jwsr.2021.1053Review Of: Contesting the Global Order: The Radical Political Economy of Perry Anderson and Immanuel Wallerstein
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1052
Juho Korhonen
Copyright (c) 2021 Juho Korhonen
2021-03-222021-03-2228133333610.5195/jwsr.2021.1052Starting a Dialogue: From Radical Criminology to Critical Resistance
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1051
Zhandarka Kurti
Copyright (c) 2021 Zhandarka Kurti
2021-03-212021-03-2128113614810.5195/jwsr.2021.1051The Logic of Dispossession
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1050
<p>One particular focus of world-systems analysis is to examine the historical trajectory of capitalist transformation in peripheral regions. This paper investigates the capitalist transformation in a specific peripheral area—the country of Bangladesh. In particular, it examines the role of dispossession in transforming an agricultural society into a neoliberal capitalist society by looking at the transformation of Panthapath Street in Dhaka, Bangladesh, since 1947. Building on the existing literature of dispossession, this article proposes an approach that explains the contribution of dispossession in capitalist accumulation. The proposed theory consists of four logics of dispossession: transformative, exploitative, redistributive, and hegemonic. These four logics of dispossession, both individually and dialectically reinforcing one another, work to privatize the commons, proletarianize subsistence laborers, create antagonistic class relations, redistribute wealth upward, and commodify sociopolitical and cultural aspects of urban life. This paper’s central argument is that dispossession not only converted an agricultural society into a capitalist society in Bangladesh, but that dispossession continues to reproduce the country’s existing capitalist system. This research draws on a wide range of empirical and historical evidence collected from Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2017 and 2018.</p>Lipon Mondal
Copyright (c) 2021 Lipon Mondal
2021-08-142021-08-1428152254410.5195/jwsr.2021.1050Covid-19 and Semi-Periphery
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1049
<p>The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has disturbed the order of the world-system. While central countries—through their pharmaceutical multinationals—focused on the development of vaccines, semi-peripheral and peripheral countries fulfill another role, either by offering an environment for trials, or by inserting themselves in the hierarchical global order as a hub for research, development, or production of the candidate vaccines. This paper focuses on the analysis of the geopolitics of the world-system regarding production and participation in the clinical trials of vaccines for SARS-CoV-2 of Oxford University-AstraZeneca, BioNTech-Pfizer, and Sinopharm in Argentina. This is a case analysis of the Argentine semi-peripheral context, the local and global pharmaceutical industry, and the geopolitical order. We conclude that Argentina, which has scientific and industrial capabilities to manufacture vaccines, has joined in global value chains on the dependence side, deepening the scientific and technological gap vis-à-vis the central countries.</p>Daniel BlinderLautaro ZubeldíaSofya Surtayeva
Copyright (c) 2021 Daniel Blinder, Lautaro Zubeldía, Sofya Surtayeva
2021-08-142021-08-1428149452110.5195/jwsr.2021.1049Periodizing the Capitalocene as Polemocene
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1045
<p class="AbstractParagraphs">Lewis and Maslin explore geological markers for the beginning of the “Anthropocene”-beginning, in their periodization, in either 1492 (naming the birth of capitalism as the cause of planetary crisis) or 1945 (naming elite-driven militarization as its cause). In this essay, I argue for a synthesis of these two dynamics, locating both the birth of capitalism and a transformation of elite-driven militarization in the conquest of the New World during the Long Sixteenth Century. As such, I propose narrating planetary history through a “capitalocene as polemocene,” “the age of capital as an age of war” framework.</p>John Peter Antonacci
Copyright (c) 2021 John Peter Antonacci
2021-08-142021-08-1428143946710.5195/jwsr.2021.1045Remarks on Challenging Capitalist Modernity
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1044
Immanuel Wallerstein
Copyright (c) 2021 Immanuel Wallerstein
2021-03-212021-03-2128131431610.5195/jwsr.2021.1044All Economies are Ultimately Human Economies
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1043
David Graeber
Copyright (c) 2021 David Graeber
2021-03-212021-03-2128131732310.5195/jwsr.2021.1043The Evolving Arctic in the World-System
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1042
<p>Global climate change’s continuing effect on the Arctic has brought about a fundamental shift in the region’s identity as it becomes an ever more active area in the world-system. Economic opportunities such as new shipping routes and a bounty of natural resources that were hitherto ice-locked are becoming accessible as the pace of climate change quickens, garnering increasing attention from actors around the world-system. This article explores the new geopolitical and economic realities of the Arctic through the lens of world-system analysis by examining the region’s budding role in the world-economy and emerging economic opportunities, its unique core-peripheral nature, and its potential to spark a regional hegemonic rivalry between NATO and a Sino-Russian partnership. This article aims introduce the evolving Arctic to world-systems studies and promote further research on the region using the theoretical framework.</p>Zachary Lavengood
Copyright (c) 2021 Zachary Lavengood
2021-08-142021-08-1428146849310.5195/jwsr.2021.1042Conversations with Staughton and Alice Lynd
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1037
Staughton LyndAlice Lynd
Copyright (c) 2021 Staughton Lynd, Alice Lynd
2021-03-212021-03-2128132433210.5195/jwsr.2021.1037A Feminist Analysis of Security in Turkey
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1034
<p>This article analyzes the securitization of the political space under the Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi (Justice and Development Party, AKP) governments in Turkey with a critical feminist lens. We argue that a feminist reading unpacks the connection between AKP’s discursive strategies in the spheres of social and national security. We focus on the AKP’s proposals that address social policy and defense policy spheres—namely, the “Women’s Employment Package;” “Family Package;” and “Internal Security Package.” In our analysis, we start from the argument that the AKP’s terms in office represent the last phase of neoliberal transformation in the country. Packages in this phase also speak to the patchwork style of neoliberal policy making. They function as means for checking, and then, manipulating public opinion. Analysis of the packages provides insight into the AKP’s increasing resort to violence vis-á-vis opposition as well as the deepening of the economic crisis in the country in the last two decades.</p>Simten CosarGulden Ozcan
Copyright (c) 2021 Simten Cosar, Gulden Ozcan
2021-03-202021-03-20281355710.5195/jwsr.2021.1034World Histories of Big Data Policing
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1033
<p>Textbook presentations of U.S. policing name the present as new stage of professionalization: the homeland security era, where the application of “big data” promises “smarter” policing. Within this framework of gradual progress, liberal police scholarship has become the official criticism of big data policing to organize a project of liberal reform. Of course, this scholarship is being in written in the context of both militant social movements within the United States and the terminal decline of U.S. global hegemony. To clarify the stakes of this moment, this paper connects the Marxist anti-security perspective and anti-racist critiques of surveillance and big data policing from within the Black radical tradition. It argues that the emergence of big data policing is the latest development in on-going processes of pacification that have expanded, organized, and reproduced the colonial/modern world-system over the longue durée. The paper extends and elaborates conceptualizations of hegemonic cycles in relation to work on the maturation of intelligence tradecraft, focusing on two interrelated developments: (1) two information revolutions that reorganized social relations and (2) the police-wars that shaped the rise and decline of the United States as a world hegemonic power. It concludes that big data policing is the latest outgrowth of the imperial epistemology that organized and continues animate the work of pacification and obscure the politics of anti-systemic struggle. </p>Brendan McQuade
Copyright (c) 2021 Brendan McQuade
2021-03-212021-03-2128110913510.5195/jwsr.2021.1033Divergent Convergence
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1032
<p class="AbstractParagraphs">This article analyzes the economic convergence of the global South with the global North (GS and GN, respectively) as well as the divergence within the GS between Asia and “the rest” (Latin America and Africa). In order to address these processes, the paper is structured in three parts. In the first part, the fundamentals that support this “divergent convergence” are considered in light of two theoretical perspectives: world-systems analysis (WSA) and Latin American Structuralism (LAS). We take into account the analytical tools of these theoretical perspectives and differentiate the historical, systemic, and top-down approach of WSA (focused on the contributions of Wallerstein and Arrighi) from the historical, structural, and bottom-up perspective of LAS. In the second part, we analyze the convergence of the GS with the GN in terms of economic dynamic, economic dynamism, and control of the accumulation process, as well as the divergence within the GS between Asia and “the rest”. We finally argue the possibility and necessity of complementing WSA and LAS approaches in order to explain these simultaneous processes of “divergent convergence” and to reflect on the challenges for the rest of the GS in facing the consolidation of Asian dominance under Chinese leadership.</p>Víctor Ramiro FernándezLuciano MorettiEmilia Ormaechea
Copyright (c) 2022 Víctor Ramiro Fernández, Luciano Moretti, Emilia Ormaechea
2022-03-262022-03-262819812610.5195/jwsr.2022.1032Outlines of a Global Power-Field (GPF) Theory (Part 1)
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1031
<p>This essay takes modern world-system theory and maps it into a political-economic field of power. This re-modeling of the theory better illustrates the diffuseness and the spatiality of the operations of global forces; thus, helping us have a greater appreciation of the durability and scope of Western economic and political hegemony across the world. Our exposition also tracks the structural transformation undergone by the Global Power-Field (GPF) throughout its history showing the evolving character of its dominance. Moreover, this field paradigm does not restrict its considerations to matters of political economy but also centralizes factors of politics and international relations that play a fundamental a role in driving historical dynamics. The workings of this emerging model are then illustrated by a historical case study from the Middle East: The nineteenth and early twentieth century Ottoman Empire.</p>Omer Awass
Copyright (c) 2021 Omer Awass
2021-08-142021-08-1428154556510.5195/jwsr.2021.1031Pre-Emptive Decline
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1030
<p>Why do hegemonic powers appear to have so few viable policy levers with which to cope with their fears of decline, and often adopt policies that are least well-suited, if not antithetical to the task? In this work I suggest that status threat generates a set of typical and quite maladaptive responses at both the individual/organizational level, and in the context of popular political culture, that exacerbate decline. This phenomenon, “pre-emptive decline,” is evident in both elite-driven policy and mass political responses and is reviewed here in maladaptive courses of action adopted in 19th century Britain, and in the contemporary United States.</p>Robert Denemark
Copyright (c) 2021 Robert Denemark
2021-03-212021-03-2128114917610.5195/jwsr.2021.1030Deglobalization, Globalization, and the Pandemic
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1028
<p>This article is a theory piece focused on causal propositions codification and future trends identification, both supported by descriptive statistical data. It aims to analyze the middle-term dynamics of globalization and deglobalization due to the effects of the 2007-2008 Financial Crisis, in general, and the COVID-19 pandemic, in particular. The broader context in which such dynamics are situated are the processes of capitalist world-economy restructuring, propitiated by the crisis the U.S. hegemony, on the one hand, and by the Chinese rise, on the other. We argue that the COVID-19 pandemic tends to deepen and accelerate ongoing processes of global fragmentation, especially in the productive and commercial dimensions. From the point of view of governments, in particular the United States, there are growing protectionist and manufacturing repatriation efforts. From the point of view of large corporations, the perception of risk derived from the suspension and rupture of global production chains emerges thanks to measures to prevent infection. Somehow, governments and companies can converge on understanding the world market as a growing source of risk and decreasing advantages. The counterpoint here may be China's interest and ability to lead the fight against the pandemic and post-pandemic recovery, restructuring the global order built in the last forty years in new institutional basis and from which it has been the main beneficiary.</p>Alexandre AbdalDouglas M. Ferreira
Copyright (c) 2021 Douglas Ferreira, Alexandre Abdal
2021-03-212021-03-2128120223010.5195/jwsr.2021.1028Middle Kingdom Enters Middle East
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1027
<p>Through the lens of world-systems analysis, this research argues that Beijing is creating a miniature world-system overlapping with the United States-led world-system via its Belt Road Initiative (BRI). Although China has not yet become a core power, its BRI seems to possess the qualities of a new world-system in the making, within which China enjoys hegemonic traits such as economic and military might and capable alternative institutions. This BRI-bound world-system consists of BRI participant states whose areas and processes are being molded to better fit China as core and hegemon; a phenomenon known as peripheralization. In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), the Maritime Silk Road Initiative (MSRI) appears to be peripheralizing Arab states into this BRI-bound world-system through China’s growing economic dominance of the region and promotion of new modi operandi. After arguing the emergence of the BRI-bound world-system and establishing China’s peripheralization capacity, Lebanon is taken as a case study of a peripheral MENA state to illustrate how predominant Western hegemony can hamper China’s peripheralization apparatus, forcing it to choose areas/processes of the highest immediate relevance for focused peripheralization efforts.</p>Toufic Sarieddine
Copyright (c) 2021 Toufic Sarieddine
2021-03-212021-03-2128117720110.5195/jwsr.2021.1027Ecologically Unequal Exchange of Plastic Waste?
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1026
<p>Plastic production has been increasing since mass production of plastics started in the 1950s. As plastic production has continued to rise, so has plastic waste. Meanwhile, international trade in plastic waste has increased as well. The narrative about global trade in plastic waste oftentimes is that the Global North transfers waste to the Global South. However, little is known quantitatively about the extent to which the Global North shifts environmental harms of plastic waste to the Global South. We examine the extent to which global trade in plastic waste provides evidence for ecologically unequal exchange relationships from 2003 to 2013. We then explore whether plastic waste can be a resource for some countries. Specifically, we investigate how trade in plastic waste is associated with level of economic development in high-income countries and non-high-income countries. The findings provide nuanced evidence of ecologically unequal exchange relationships between high-income countries and non-high-income countries in plastic waste trade. The results also indicate that higher plastic waste import is associated with greater economic development in non-high-income countries. This research advances our understanding of the theory of ecologically unequal exchange in the context of international trade in plastic waste.</p>Yikang BaiJennifer Givens
Copyright (c) 2021 Yikang Bai, Jennifer Givens
2021-03-212021-03-2128126528710.5195/jwsr.2021.1026Policing Asylum Seekers’ Flight Within Europe
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1024
<p class="western" lang="en-US" style="line-height: 200%;" align="left">A critical assessment of the Dublin regulation requires a look beyond its official function of allocating asylum seekers across EU Member States. This article argues it embodies the “hidden face” of Schengen insofar as it legally fixes them in the sole country responsible for their application. Because this responsibility lies primarily with the first country of arrival, it is consistent with the core-periphery axis of division of labor in the EU. The first part of this paper examines how the Schengen/Dublin dual regime of (im)mobility might respond to the constant need for bridled labor alongside free wage labor in the world-system. However, equally constant is labor power’s propensity to evade its subsumption under capital; this is exemplified by Dubliners’ appropriation of freedom of movement through irregularity. By deserting the “plantations” of the European peripheries, those “maroons” of our present time disrupt the European geography of power and contest their assigned position in it. But the widely acknowledged failure of this regime to deter “secondary movements” does not necessarily mean it is non-effective. Attention must then be given to mechanisms of “exclusion from within” experimented on Dubliners. The second part will offer an overview of the tactics of internal rebordering that have been recently deployed in core countries and question the extent to which those attempts to recapture their flight meet the conditions for the optimization of capital’s operations.</p>Tom Montel
Copyright (c) 2021 Tom Montel
2021-03-212021-03-212817710810.5195/jwsr.2021.1024Securing Manifest Destiny
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1023
<p>This article argues Mexico’s war on drugs was a tactic by elites in both the United States and Mexico to legitimate the Mexican neoliberal state’s political, economic, and ideological governance over Mexican society. Through tough on crime legislation and maintenance of free market policies, the war on drugs is a “morbid symptom” that obfuscates the crisis of global capitalism in the region. It is a way of managing a crisis of legitimacy of Mexico’s neoliberal state. Through arguments of Mexico as a potential “failed state” and a “narco-state,” the United States has played a leading role by investing in militarized policing in the drug war and securitization of Mexico’s borders to expand and maintain capitalist globalization. In the twenty-first century, the ideology of manifest destiny persists, but instead of westward expansion of the U.S. state, it serves as the maintenance and expansion of global capitalism.</p>Steven Osuna
Copyright (c) 2021 Steven Osuna
2021-03-202021-03-20281123410.5195/jwsr.2021.1023Theorizing Capitalist Imperialism for an Anti-Imperialist Praxis
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1022
<p>How does one craft an explicitly left theory of anti-imperialism that would animate an anti-imperialist praxis? World-systems analysis has a long history of engagement with theories of anti-imperialism from an explicitly Leninist perspective. For the founding fathers of World-Systems Analysis—Immanuel Wallerstein, Giovanni Arrighi, Samir Amin, and Andre Gunder Frank—anti-imperialism was an early central concern. Each of the four founders of world-systems analysis reads Lenin’s theory of imperialism seriously, but each has slightly different interpretations. One significant commonality they share is that they adopt Lenin’s periodization of imperialism, seeing imperialism as emergent in the late 19th century as part of a particular stage within the historical development of capitalism. However, as I will argue in this essay, perhaps it would be preferable to temporally expand Lenin’s concept of imperialism. Walter Rodney’s concept of “capitalist imperialism,” as I shall show in this essay, similarly calls Lenin’s periodization into question. Thereby, putting Rodney in conversation with Amin, Arrighi, Frank, and Wallerstein, leads me to further historicize world-systems’ theories of global imperialism thereby refining existing theories and levying that to build stronger praxis.</p>Kristin Plys
Copyright (c) 2021 Kristin Plys
2021-03-212021-03-2128128831310.5195/jwsr.2021.1022Introduction to the Special Issue on World-Systems Analysis and the Anthropocene
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1021
<p>Across the social sciences and humanities, and in diverse forms of popular media around the world, discourse about the Anthropocene is proliferating. From the plastic particles found in deep sea trenches to the unfolding of Earth’s sixth mass extinction, among many other indicators—notably anthropogenic climate change—it is clear that human impacts may have irreversibly perturbed the planet. This special issue sets out to deepen and broaden the conversation from a world-systems perspective. Building upon a long tradition of scholarship deploying world-systems theory to understand global environmental change, we wish to explore the past, present, and future of the world-system with/in the Anthropocene. In this introduction we first offer prefatory remarks about the Anthropocene (by no means a universally accepted concept) that are meant to help orient readers to debates around the Anthropocene before turning to a summary of the contributions and the themes that emerge in this Special Issue.</p>Leslie SklairMichael Warren Murphy
Copyright (c) 2020 Leslie Sklair, Michael Murphy
2020-08-202020-08-2028117518310.5195/jwsr.2020.1021Review Of: La guerre de Sept Ans
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1020
Matthew Hayes
Copyright (c) 2020 Matthew Hayes
2020-08-192020-08-1928142843110.5195/jwsr.2020.1020Review Of: First-Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite Politics and the Decline of Great Powers
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1019
Corey R Payne
Copyright (c) 2020 Corey R. Payne
2020-08-192020-08-1928142442710.5195/jwsr.2020.1019Debt as Pacification
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1017
<p>Debt is pacification’s dirtiest little secret and its cleanest weapon. Pacification is the name we give to the fabrication of social order; it is the goal of the police power and the police wars that dominate our political landscape. To understand pacification, we need to pay close attention not only to professional violence workers, but also to the far more subtle ways in which subjects are rendered obedient to a social order of exploitation and alienation. As critical theories of police power have shown, the wage is crucial to this process. But so too is debt. This article argues that we need to understand debt as pacification. In the process, the article also aims to strengthen and deepen the concept of pacification and the idea of police power.</p>Mark Neocleous
Copyright (c) 2021 Mark Neocleous
2021-03-212021-03-21281587610.5195/jwsr.2021.1017Editor’s Introduction
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1015
<p>Editors introduction to <em>Journal of World-Systems Research </em>Vol. 26, No. 2</p>Jackie Smith
Copyright (c) 2020 Jackie Smith
2020-08-062020-08-0628113814210.5195/jwsr.2020.1015Onward To Liberation!—Samir Amin and the Study of World Historical Capitalism
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1014
<p>This article presents theoretical and methodological insights of world-systems analysis via the works of Samir Amin and his major interlocuteurs. It is argued that Samir Amin was central to sparking the study of world historical analysis, and offered unique contributions to the discussions that emerged. It is demonstrated that this is due to Samir Amin’s ability to balance structure, specificity, and historical contingency, as well as his enduring commitment to human liberation.</p>Salimah Valiani
Copyright (c) 2021 Salimah Valiani
2021-08-142021-08-1428156658510.5195/jwsr.2021.1014