Journal of World-Systems Research

Editorial Note

Andrej Grubačić — 2022-03-26

The editor's introduction for the Winter/Spring 2022 issue of Journal of World-Systems Research.

How to Read Capitalism in the Web of Life

Jason W Moore — 2022-03-26

Give and Take

Patricia Ward — 2022-03-26

Leaning on the BRICS as a Geopolitical Counterweight Leads Only to Faux-Polyarchic, Subimperial “Spalling”

Patrick Bond — 2022-03-26

Why Not Default?

Jerome Roos — 2022-03-26

Review Of: Pacifying the Homeland: Intelligence Fusion and Mass Supervision.

Corey R. Payne — 2021-08-14

Editorial Note

Andrej Grubačić — 2021-08-14

Editors introduction to Journal of World-Systems Research Vol. 27, No. 2 Summer/Autumn 2021

Be Careful What You Fight For

Nandita Sharma — 2021-08-14

Beyond Sovereignty

Victoria Hattam — 2021-08-14

Rethinking Decolonization

Radhika Mongia — 2021-08-14

The Banality of Citizenship

Bridget Anderson — 2021-08-14

Neither Native or National

Rinaldo Walcott — 2021-08-14

The Making and the Undoing of “Migration”

Martina Tazzioli — 2021-08-14

The New Shape of the Global Power-Field (GPF) After the Transformation of the Modern World-System Post-WWII (Part. 2)

Omer Awass — 2022-03-26

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.

Tributary World-Ecologies, Part I

Çağrı İdiman — 2022-03-26

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.

For a Revolutionary Feminist World-Systems Analysis

Umaima Miraj — 2022-03-26

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.

Can Liberation Be National?

Zachary Levenson — 2021-08-14

Capitalizing on Green Debt

Tomaso Ferrando — 2021-08-14

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.

Technological Change before Globalization

Michael Calderon-Zaks — 2022-03-26

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.

Blackness, Disposability, and the Black Spirit

Marilyn Grell-Brisk — 2021-03-22

Review Of: The Global Police State

Zhandarka Kurti — 2021-03-22

Review Of: Routledge Handbook of Transformative Global Studies

Amentahru Wahlrab — 2021-03-22

Introduction to the Special Issue on Capitalist World-Economy in Crisis

Zeynep Gönen — 2021-03-20

Editorial Note

Andrej Grubačić — 2021-03-20

Editors introduction to Journal of World-Systems Research Vol. 27, No. 1 Special Issue on Capitalist World-Economy in Crisis: Policing, Pacification, and Legitimacy

Review Of: Contesting the Global Order: The Radical Political Economy of Perry Anderson and Immanuel Wallerstein

Juho Korhonen — 2021-03-22

Starting a Dialogue: From Radical Criminology to Critical Resistance

Zhandarka Kurti — 2021-03-21

The Logic of Dispossession

Lipon Mondal — 2021-08-14

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.

Covid-19 and Semi-Periphery

Daniel Blinder — 2021-08-14

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.

Periodizing the Capitalocene as Polemocene

John Peter Antonacci — 2021-08-14

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.

Remarks on Challenging Capitalist Modernity

Immanuel Wallerstein — 2021-03-21

All Economies are Ultimately Human Economies

David Graeber — 2021-03-21

The Evolving Arctic in the World-System

Zachary Lavengood — 2021-08-14

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.

Conversations with Staughton and Alice Lynd

Staughton Lynd — 2021-03-21

A Feminist Analysis of Security in Turkey

Simten Cosar — 2021-03-20

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.

World Histories of Big Data Policing

Brendan McQuade — 2021-03-21

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.

Divergent Convergence

Víctor Ramiro Fernández — 2022-03-26

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.

Outlines of a Global Power-Field (GPF) Theory (Part 1)

Omer Awass — 2021-08-14

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.

Pre-Emptive Decline

Robert Denemark — 2021-03-21

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.

Deglobalization, Globalization, and the Pandemic

Alexandre Abdal — 2021-03-21

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.

Middle Kingdom Enters Middle East

Toufic Sarieddine — 2021-03-21

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.

Ecologically Unequal Exchange of Plastic Waste?

Yikang Bai — 2021-03-21

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.

Policing Asylum Seekers’ Flight Within Europe

Tom Montel — 2021-03-21

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.

Securing Manifest Destiny

Steven Osuna — 2021-03-20

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.

Theorizing Capitalist Imperialism for an Anti-Imperialist Praxis

Kristin Plys — 2021-03-21

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.

Introduction to the Special Issue on World-Systems Analysis and the Anthropocene

Leslie Sklair — 2020-08-20

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.

Review Of: La guerre de Sept Ans

Matthew Hayes — 2020-08-19

Review Of: First-Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite Politics and the Decline of Great Powers

Corey R Payne — 2020-08-19

Debt as Pacification

Mark Neocleous — 2021-03-21

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.

Editor’s Introduction

Jackie Smith — 2020-08-06

Editors introduction to Journal of World-Systems Research Vol. 26, No. 2

Onward To Liberation!—Samir Amin and the Study of World Historical Capitalism

Salimah Valiani — 2021-08-14

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.