Journal of World-Systems Research

Editor's Introduction

Andrej Grubacic — 2025-04-17

Editor's Introduction to the Winter/Spring 2025 Issue

Global Disasters and World Society

Chris Chase-Dunn — 2025-04-17

Introduction to Part I of the Special Section on Global Disasters and World Society.

The Generational Basis of Anti-Systemic Resistance

Lauren Langman — 2025-04-17

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.

Refusing Ecocide

William K. Carroll — 2025-04-17

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.

Shamanic Thinking in the Capitalocene

Giacomo Otavio Tixiliski — 2025-04-17

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.

Shamanic Thinking in the Capitalocene

Giacomo Otavio Tixiliski — 2025-04-17

The Popular Anthropocene in Global Climate (Dis)Governance

Paola Huwe de Paoli — 2025-04-17

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.

The Popular Anthropocene in Global Climate (Dis)Governance

Paola Huwe de Paoli — 2025-04-17

A Science-Based Ecosocialist Strategy for Climate Security

David Schwartzman — 2025-04-17

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.

Deepening of the World-System Crisis

Leonid Grinin — 2025-04-17

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.

Sixth Century Global Climatic Disaster, the Origins of Islam, and its World-System Consequences

Andrey Korotayev — 2025-04-17

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.

Collapse and Transformation? Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Energy Crisis of “Showcase” Peripheries in World-Ecological Perspective

Roberto J. Ortiz — 2025-04-17

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.

Modelski’s Long Cycle Revisited

Layton Mandle — 2025-04-17

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.

Ecological Unequal Exchange

Crelis Rammelt — 2025-04-17

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.

Historicizing the Prison in the History of Capitalism

James Parisot — 2025-04-17

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.

Thirty Years of the Journal of World-Systems Research

Rallie Murray — 2024-08-30

Editors' introduction to the Journal of World-Systems Research 30 (2) Summer/Autumn issue.

The Rise and Trajectory of JWSR

Chris Chase-Dunn — 2024-08-30

Founding editor Chris Chase-Dunn reviews the history and genesis of the Journal of World-Systems Research in recognition of its 30th Anniversary.

AI and the Epistemologies of the South

Boaventura de Sousa Santos — 2024-08-30

Rethinking “World Wars” Through a World-Systems Lens

Efe Can Gürcan — 2025-04-17

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.

Translation and the Political Economy of Global Knowledge Production

Fuad Rayyan — 2025-04-17

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.

Lex Capitalocenae

Jeremy Santora — 2025-04-17

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.

Poetry After Gaza

Andrej Grubačić — 2024-04-17

Editors' introduction for the Special Issue on Women in World-Literature: A Woman’s Work Winter/Spring 2024, 30 (1).

Empire, Marxism, and Nationalism

José Neves — 2024-04-17

World-Systems at Fifty

Ravi Arvind Palat — 2024-04-17

Palestine and Global Crisis

William I. Robinson — 2024-04-17

Palestine and the Commons

Peter Linebaugh — 2024-04-17

Israel and the End of International Law

Jonas Van Vossole — 2024-04-17

The Reproduction of Peripherality during the Covid-19 Pandemic

Jasna Balorda — 2025-04-17

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.

Appraising Sociological Approaches to Ecologically Unequal Exchange

Nicholas Theis — 2024-08-30

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.

The Brazilian Indigenous as an Uneven Identity

Federica Lupati — 2024-04-17

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.

A Woman’s Work is Never Done: Exhaustion and Alienation

Roxanne Douglas — 2024-04-17

This concluding coda to the “A Woman’s Work is Never Done” Special Issue focuses on themes of exhaustion and alienation in women’s work. This coda builds on the Introduction and papers in the issue to examine how women’s labor often negotiates between and beyond the world-systemic wage relation, yet, women of course still operate within the capitalist world-system. Here I bring together the papers in this Special Issue to consider how, if “a woman’s work is never done” at the same time as there being “no such thing as an easy job” in our current world-system, this system of exhaustion and alienation can be mapped onto the gendered enmeshment of work with non-work, especially around care, pleasure, and emotional investment, which alienates us from those very same things in our current capitalist formations. I demonstrate how this enmeshment is thought through in literature by comparing the lyrics from c. 1629’s “A Woman’s Work Is Never Done” with Kikuko Tsumura’s recent bestseller, There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job (2021), to frame the key themes that have emerged in this Special Issue, using Audre Lorde’s theorization of the erotic as a form of unalienating activity and energy.

Reading Hunger and Exhaustion in Clarice Lispector’s A Hora de Estrela

Hannah Gillman — 2024-04-17

Coined by Karl Marx in Capital (1867), the “metabolic rift” or “ecological rift” model describes the cycle of extraction, exportation and exhaustion present in agricultural production and, in particular, highlights the unsustainability of this ecologically-unequal exchange. This article integrates world-literary theory, Social Reproduction Theory, and the model of the metabolic rift to explore how Clarice Lispector’s Hour of the Star (1977) illuminates the peripheralization of women within the capitalist mode of production. The increasing pressure on women to be producers causes contradictions in the protagonist’s materiality and exposes the pressures placed on writing—especially women's writing—to meet the expectations of literary production. The novel’s commodity consumption, crisis of social reproduction, and meta-narrational features become windows to view the women’s work and women’s narratives which simultaneously sustain and are exploited by the capitalist mode of production. By connecting these various threads, I suggest the ignored labor of social reproduction under capitalism signals a crisis of consumption and a loss of capitalistic futurity, alerting readers to the unsustainable nature of the current capitalist mode of production.

Containers of “Meat, Blood, and Madness”

Bushra Mahzabeen — 2024-04-17

In the capitalist world-system, the gendered dynamics of power often deny women autonomy to their own bodies, force upon them the responsibilities of care work and motherhood while criminalizing abortion to further subjugate the feminized body. The sexist state, Lola Olufemi (2021: 3) argues, discriminates against women in allocating resources, “…reinforces gendered oppression by restricting women’s freedom and ensuring that poor women have no means to live full and dignified lives.” By analyzing two novels—Leïla Slimani’s Lullaby (2018), translated from French by Sam Taylor, and Guadalupe Nettel’s Still Born (2022), translated from Spanish by Rosalind Harvey—this paper examines how neoliberal capitalism exploits women’s labor and often reduce them to being mere vessels for reproduction. The texts present the commodification and exploitation of women’s labor who inhabit the gendered and uneven world-system. Drawing on the theorization of the combined and unevenness of the modern world-system by the Warwick Research Collective (WReC), social reproduction, and feminist theories from scholars like Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Verónica Gago, Silvia Federici, Lola Olufemi among others, this paper aims to critically examine the exploitative care work, reproductive labor, and the body politic as depicted in the two texts, arguing that neoliberal capitalism turns women into disposable commodities.

“When the Skin Comes Off, Their True Selves Emerge”

Madeleine Sinclair — 2024-04-17

This article considers how a contemporary wave of Caribbean short story writers re-work the language of folkloric irrealism as a tool of critique against the structural inequalities ingrained in the patriarchal capitalist world-system. Building on the Warwick Research Collective’s (2015: 72) examination of how irrealist aesthetics correspond to the “violent reorganization of social relations engendered by cyclical crisis,” it considers how transplanted folk figures attend to the distinctly gendered geographies of unevenness produced by the expansion of capitalist modernization. This article first unpacks the significance of the short story as a distinct vector for folkloric re-inscription, tracing the form’s dialogic interconnection with folk orality and its unique responsiveness to registering the processes of uneven development in Caribbean societies. Secondly, it offers close readings of selected short stories from collections including Nalo Hopkinson’s Skin Folk (2018), Breanne Mc Ivor’s Where There Are Monsters (2019) and Leone Ross’s Come Let Us Sing Anyway (2017). Tracking a resistant aesthetic of folkloric corporeality, it considers how these writers re-animate oral poetics to critique the interrelated problems of global racial capitalism and what Silvia Federici describes as capitalism’s new war waged against women’s bodies in the current phase of accumulation (Federici 2018).

Compassion as Commodity

Hendrikje Kaube — 2024-04-17

While it was common for Victorian working-class women to be employed outside of the home, a paid occupation spelled the end of gentility for their bourgeois counterparts. Yet many of these ladies found respectable alternatives to make a living. For our research of the nineteenth century, we rely to a great extent on numbers – census data, population statistics, percentages. However, few contemporary employment records give an accurate or reliable account of the respective household constellation, particularly with regard to women. Looking at these numbers, we have to bear in mind that we are also looking at numbers accrued with certain assumptions about the role of women in society. Unlike the New Woman of the fin de siècle, who is a typist or clerk, some held positions which fell outside of the common labor categories. From Charles Dickens to Neo-Edwardian literature, these ‘odd women’ appear as caretakers, companions, and assistants performing various duties. Broadening the scope of investigation into women and work in England during the long nineteenth century beyond considerations of manual and educational employment into the realm of emotional labor, we can obtain more information on the restrictions of contemporary ideology and the power dynamics of affective care.

“What Will Set Yuh Free is Money”

Charlotte Spear — 2024-04-17

Studies have noted a dependency on sex work to “make do” in economies ravaged by foreign debt (Harrison 1991; Obregón 2018), necessitating a framing of the dynamics of sex work through a globalized system of enforced debt. This paper explores sex workers’ rights in post-quake Haiti and contemporary Jamaica, through an examination of Makenzy Orcel’s The Immortals (2020) and Nicole Dennis-Benn’s Here Comes the Sun (2017). Like global debt systems, the exploitation of sex workers relies on a politics of dependency and constructed narratives of victimhood. This results in the refusal to recognize sex work as autonomous labor, meaning sex workers do not possess the protections of labor rights (Mgbako 2019). A literary examination of these debates exposes global debt’s modes of subject creation and the powerful resistance inherent in resubjectifying sex workers as conditionally agential rights claimants. This therefore reflects the Warwick Research Collective’s (WReC) suggestion that world-literature registers the “single but radically uneven world-system” in its form and content (2015). By exposing the tensions in subject-making at the heart of both debt economies and sex workers’ rights debates, Orcel and Dennis-Benn create feminized spaces to narrate sex workers’ negotiations of patriarchal-capitalist structures that peripheralize them.

A Woman’s Work: Making Something Out of Nothing

Roxanne Douglas — 2024-04-17

This paper introduces this Special Issue of the Journal of World-Systems Research, “Women in World-Literature: A Woman’s Work” by making the case that the Warwick Research Collective’s (WReC 2015: 9) conception of “combined and uneven development” can not only be applied to women’s writing in conversation with materialist feminist theory, but perhaps misses the ways in which women, Black feminists, indigenous lifeways, and queer world-making shows us a form of work that is not bound by the wage or value-exchange system, as many acts of care or favors often described as “women’s work”—cannot be repaid (Walton and Luker 2019). Missing from the WReC’s framework is an explicit engagement with women’s writing and how women contribute to, and are exploited by, the world-system. This Special Issue thus focuses on only one aspect of women’s engagement with the world-literary system: women’s work. From the labor market, motherhood, sex work, affective work, to knowledge production and storytelling, to the very work of consumption itself. Social reproduction theory and materialist feminists have made the case that capitalism relies on the invisible labor of women, particularly domestic work and community work. Yet, if we consider the creative dimensions of women’s work, do we discover gaps in world-systems frameworks which, when refracted through literary analysis, actually upset capitalism’s insistence upon the inevitability of exchange value? To exemplify this, I turn to Silvia Federici’s explanations of the witch as a tool to think about how we might “make something out of nothing.”

A Nez Perce/DuBoisian Theory of Whiteness and the Global Color-Line

Levin Elias Welch — 2025-04-17

Using a researcher-collected archive of publications by the Nimiipuu/Nez Perce, this paper argues that Nimiipuu/Nez Perce observations of white people extend W. E. B. Du Bois’s world-systems analysis. The Nimiipuu/Nez Perce and Du Bois explicate a cannibalistic cycle of whiteness that emerged from competition among various imperial groups claiming whiteness for geopolitical advantage. This cycle helps explain the U.S. ascension from periphery to core in the capitalist world-system; its competition is epitomized by any rush (for gold, souls, land, etc.) that induces a state of anomie (by violence, isolation, boom/bust, etc.) and devolves into crises of social and ecological relationships (built on reciprocity, trust, symbiosis, etc.). This process creates a positive feedback loop whereby whiteness must be recalibrated as a legitimate source of advantage in the capitalist world-system, setting off new rushes to solve the problems created or compounded by whiteness. Likewise, crises sometimes present opportunities for Indigenous groups to reassert their political, economic, and cultural influence (e.g., environmental restoration)—exemplified by the 1979–1981 Nez Perce “fish-in” at Rapid River, Idaho—which simultaneously undermine white claims to superiority and progress and help people imagine and build worlds beyond the new world-order of capitalism and nation-states.

World-Systems Analysis and Postnatal Care Utilization among Periphery Women

Neema Langa — 2024-08-30

Current cross-national research suggests that increased economic dependence by peripheral countries on core ones is associated with poor maternal health outcomes and greater socioeconomic inequalities in the periphery. However, not enough attention has been given to analyzing how this economic dependence—via foreign direct investment (FDI), importation, and exportation between peripheral and core nations—specifically influences periphery utilization of postnatal care. Utilizing a world-systems framework, this study examines data from the Tanzania Demographic Health Survey (TDHS) and World Development Indicators (WDI) from the World Bank to shed light on the detrimental impacts of economic dependence on Tanzania’s postnatal care utilization between 2010–2016. Findings show that data constructed around socioeconomic status, rural/urban residence, and region disclose noteworthy negative correlations for importation, exportation, foreign direct investment, and Tanzanian postnatal care utilization over 2010–2016. Even after controlling for these factors, it was observed that marginalized women in Tanzania continued to have significantly lower utilization of both mother's and newborn postnatal care during this period. Higher and statistically significant inequalities in the use of newborn postnatal care were also found for rural women with less than secondary education compared to urban women with the same education level. These findings highlight the need to consider economic dependence on core countries when crafting policies and strategies for addressing disproportional effects on postnatal healthcare utilization among underserved women in Tanzania.

Editorial Note

Andrej Grubačić — 2023-08-22

The editor's introduction for the Summer/Autumn 2023 issue of Journal of World-Systems Research.

Power, Profit, and Prometheanism, Part II

Jason W. Moore — 2023-08-22

Immanuel Wallerstein

Christopher Chase-Dunn — 2023-08-22

Cancelling Apocalypse by Risking to Envision

Salimah Valiani — 2023-08-22

Review Of: Does Skill Make Us Human?

Patricia Ward — 2023-08-22

The Travesty of “Anti-Imperialism"

William I. Robinson — 2023-08-22

Immanuel Wallerstein’s Lasting Legacies

Valentine M. Moghadam — 2023-08-22

Where are Fossil Fuels Displaced by Alternatives?

Amanda Sikirica — 2024-04-17

In light of ongoing and accelerating climate change driven by human combustion of fossil fuels, researchers have found evidence that national-level inequality influences whether nations are able to replace fossil fuels with alternative energies. This paper asks whether the inequality between nations also influences the rate at which nations replace fossil fuels. I use multilevel modeling techniques, World Bank data and data aggregated by Our World in Data for 146 nations from 1960–2021 to better understand the variation in national-level displacement of fossil fuels. Findings suggest there has been only partial displacement of fossil fuels at the global level during this period. In examining whether the variation in displacement of fossil fuels with alternative fuels at the national level can be described by lasting global inequality among nations, here measured by world-systems position, I find that semiperiphery nations displace fossil fuels at a higher rate on average as compared with core nations. This is further evidence for the importance of fossil fuel infrastructure and global inequality for implementing energy transitions to address climate change.

Europe in a State of Denial

Boaventura de Sousa Santos — 2023-08-22

The Case for a Decolonization of Global History

Javier García Fernández — 2023-08-22

Carceral Power in World Historical Context

Zhandarka Kurti — 2024-04-17

This paper invites a conversation between world-systems perspective and radical criminology to contribute to a more robust materialist, historical, and global understanding of policing, prisons, and carceral power. We trace the genealogy of these two approaches to the larger transformations of global capitalism in the 1960s and 1970s, including ruling class responses to capitalist crises vis a vis neoliberal restructuring as well as the social struggles waged by antisystemic movements. Both world-systems and radical criminology brought a critical and Marxist perspective to the liberal social sciences, yet dialogue between them has been lacking. On the one hand, world-systems analysis offers a structural explanation of capitalism but often side steps the role that carceral power plays to manage the system’s deepening contradictions. On the other hand, radical criminology focuses on carceral power but often limits its analysis to advanced core countries and not to the entire capitalist system. We argue that bringing these two critical approaches together can offer us a renewed Marxist perspective to the interrelated issues of capitalist crisis and carceral power and thus make possible new lines of inquiry and research best suited for grappling with the major contradictions of capitalism in the twenty-first century.