Journal of World-Systems Research

Review of: Globalizing the Caribbean: Political Economy, Social Change, and the Transnational Capitalist Class

Zophia Edwards — 2020-03-10

Review of: Globalization, EU Democracy Assistance and the World Social Forum: Concepts and Practices of Democracy

Marek Mikuš — 2020-03-10

Remembering Immanuel Wallerstein

Christopher Chase-Dunn — 2020-03-10

Immanuel Wallerstein, one of the leading founders and promoters of world-systems analysis, died on August 31, 2019. Given the importance of his scholarship to the Journal of World-Systems Research, we plan to publish in future issues research articles based on conferences and symposia that are now being planned to honor Wallerstein’s work and legacy. In this essay, JWSR founding editor, Christopher Chase-Dunn, is joined by current editor Jackie Smith incoming editor Andrej Grubacic, and World Historical Information section editor Patrick Manning offering reflections on some of Wallerstein’s contributions to both scholarship and practice.

Editors' Introduction

Jackie Smith — 2020-03-10

Editors' Introduction to Journal of World-Systems Research Volume 26, Issue 1 (Winter/Spring 2020)

Fear of a Yellow Planet: The Gilets Jaunes and the End of the Modern World-System

Peter Wilkin — 2020-03-02

The emergence of the Gilet Jaunes has seen a section of the popular classes present a significant challenge to the elite-driven ideological frameworks that have dominated since the end of the cold war: neoliberalism and the Clash of Civilisations. What Immanuel Wallerstein calls ‘centrist liberalism’ has been the dominant ideological foundation of the modern world-system since the late nineteenth century. Its current form, neoliberalism, is in crisis across the core of the world-system, intensified following the Great Recession of 2008. This has invited new challenges from revived and reconstituted political formations of both right and left. Populist movements are a part of this process of ideological reconstitution, and the Gilets Jaunes are an important example of progressive populism calling for social and economic justice. What was triggered by a protest directed at increased fuel taxes rapidly escalated into a much broader protest movement whose influence has spread beyond French borders. Importantly, the Gilet Jaunes have brought a layer of the French working-classes into the public realm in dramatic fashion, raising issues such as equality, public welfare, and participatory and direct democracy that challenge neo-liberal norms. The agenda that has emerged from the Gilet Jaunes illustrates the way in which a working-class left is being reconstituted in opposition to forces of the political right. The article addresses three main questions: Why have the Gilet Jaunes emerged? Who makes up these protests? What do they mean?

Coppering the Industrial Revolution: History, Materiality and Culture in the Making of an Ecological Regime

Daniel Cunha — 2020-03-02

No copper, no Industrial Revolution. Although accountants listed it in the very last position in the table of “value added” per sector in 1831, the British copper industry was essential for the Industrial Revolution, the period of British hegemony over the world-economy. In this article, I use the figure-ground method proposed by Terence K. Hopkins to show that the copper industry played key roles in the ecological regime of the 1700-1840 period, due to its material properties and related historical contingencies and cultural valuations. By focusing in on particular production processes, historical contingencies, and cultural phenomena in which copper played an important and unique role, and then zooming out again to the world-economy as a whole, I show that an Industrial Revolution would not have happened without copper. From sugar production in the Caribbean to textile printing, from the slave trade to the Battle of Saintes, from the development of the steam engine to gin and rum production, from the telegraph to buckles and buttons, copper was conspicuous. This demonstrates the ecological regime of the period, in which the removal of a single commodity from the picture—i.e., copper—disrupts the whole constellation of relations. This study also shows that a “copper boom” immediately before and at the start of the Industrial Revolution (~1700-1800), instrumental in the British struggle against France for the hegemony over the world-economy, has been overlooked in the literature. Additionally, the article includes a reflection on method.

Opposing Observations and the Political-Economy of Malaria Vulnerability: A Community-Based Study in Bududa, Uganda

Kelly F. Austin — 2020-03-02

Malaria is a parasitic infection that remains a leading threat to health and development in many communities, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. In Bududa, Uganda, malaria represents a key threat to health and well-being. However, whether or not malaria rates are improving in the district over time represents a conundrum. By using principles of structural fieldwork and drawing on multiple data sources that include the more- and less- powerful, opposing observations emerge, where community members perceive marked increases in malaria rates over time, while official district-level data depict the opposite. World-systems analysis illuminates the reasons behind this discrepancy, along with the factors that community members use to explain the rise in malaria suffering, including environmental changes and decreased healthcare access. Overall, this research demonstrates how global economic policies and structures create unequal health impacts, placing those in Bududa at disproportionate and elevated vulnerability to malaria.

Review of: Using Gramsci: A New Approach

Gifawosen Markos Mitta — 2020-03-02

Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks has become a very important inspiration for the twentieth-century Marxist political thinkers around the world. ‘Using Gramsci A New Approach’ is one of the most recent additions to various works done around the Prison Notebooks of this Great Italian political theorist and cultural critics. Michele Filippini, a researcher in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna has come up with ‘a new approach’ on Prison Notebooks and has touched some major concepts that are previously given little attention by Gramscian scholars. By extending Gramsci’s concepts beyond Marxist perspective, Filippini’s book provides expert guides to key features and themes in Gramsci’s writing in combination with the pressing political, social and cultural struggles of our time. The author does not show a clear connection between those topics discussed in the book, but his work remains a valuable addition to Gramscian thoughts in the twenty-first century.

Key Words: Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, ideology, the individual, Society

Research Note on Captive Atlantic Flows: Estimating Missing Data by Slave-Voyage Routes

Patrick Manning — 2020-03-02

This essay provides new estimates of the number of captives carried in the Atlantic slave trade during each decade from the 1650s to the 1860s. It relies on two categories of known data—on the routes of voyages and the numbers of captives recorded on those voyages—as a basis for estimation of missing data and totals of captive flows. It uses techniques of Bayesian statistics to estimate missing data on routes and flows of captives. As a framework for the Bayesian estimates, it focuses on analysis of 40 distinct routes linking the African coast to the Americas and traces the captive flows—that is, the number of captives embarked on or disembarked from voyages along those routes. The dataset that provides the basis for this research note is available at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/6HLXO3.

The Land Question in China: Agrarian Capitalism, Industrious Revolution, and East Asian Development

Wenkai He — 2019-09-03

Migration and Agriculture: Mobility and Change in the Mediterranean Area

Susan E. Mannon — 2019-09-03

Dirty Gold: How Activism Transformed the Jewelry Industry

Tim Bartley — 2019-09-03

Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change

Jacob F. Northcutt — 2019-09-03

Emotions and Mass Atrocity: Philosophical and Theoretical Explanations

Thomas Reifer — 2019-09-03

Giants: The Global Power Elite

Hiroko Inoue — 2019-09-03

American Tianxia: Chinese Money, American Power, and the End of History

Marilyn Grell-Brisk — 2019-09-03

Erratum: Marion Werner. Global Displacements: The Making of Uneven Development in the Caribbean

Jackie Smith — 2019-09-03

Volume 25(1) of the Journal of World-Systems Research initially included a review by Jeb Sprague of Marion Werner’s Global Displacements: The Making of Uneven Development in the Caribbean, DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2019.920. Because the book review editor decided it would be better suited for inclusion in a proposed review symposium, she removed the review from the website, with the idea that it would run in a future issue. This was done in error, since by the time the decision was made to reschedule the review, it had already been published in the first issue of volume 25. Accordingly, a slightly revised version of the review has been restored to its original publication site. The book review editor regrets the mistake and apologizes for the confusion.

The Political-Military Foundations of China’s Global Ascendency

Aaron Major — 2019-09-03

In recent years China has positioned itself as a global economic leader, working through its “Belt and Road” initiative (BRI) and Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), to not only expand its global economic reach, but to organize and lead global economic relations. China’s rise is largely understood in economic terms, but the history of global power dynamics suggests that such leadership is built on both economic and political-military foundations. This paper explores the structural relationship between China’s economic and political-military relationships with other states over the period 1993 to 2015. Drawing on a wide variety of data sources, we present a multi-dimensional analysis that measures the changing size of China’s economic and political-military networks, their shifting regional distribution, and the degree of coupling, or decoupling of economic ties from political-military ties. In describing these patterns, we conduct a similar analysis for the United States. This allows us to situate Chinese trends in the context of the structures of U.S. global power. Our analysis points to ways in which China’s global rise has been shaped through navigating U.S. global power. Our analysis also shows that China’s growing leadership in the global economy builds upon a set of existing political-military relationships that, while their scope and form are quite different from those that the United States built to support its hegemonic ascendency, are nevertheless critical for understanding the mechanisms by which Chinese power and influence has grown in the global political economy.

Anarchism in the Web of Transnational Social Movements

Christopher Chase-Dunn — 2019-09-03

Anarchists have played a visible and significant role in global civil society since the 19th century and in the New Global Left since it emerged in the 1990s. Horizontalism and social libertarianism have been central components of the contemporary World Revolution and were also important in the world revolutions of 1968 and 1989. Anarchists have participated in the Social Forum process at the global, national and local levels and, in various ways, have influenced the contemporary world revolution far beyond their numbers. We use surveys from Social Forums to examine how self-identified actively involved anarchists are similar or different from other attendees. We also conduct a formal network analysis to examine the links that the anarchists have with other social movement themes. Despite the small number of self-identified anarchists, our findings suggest that anarchist organizational approaches and political values are widely shared among the activists who have been involved in the Social Forum process.

Sugar, Slavery, and Creative Destruction: World-Magnates and “Coreification” in the Longue-Durée

Roberto Patricio Korzeniewicz — 2019-09-03

Recent literature in the world-systems perspective has refocused attention on questions of ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ in historical capitalism, yet rarely critically examines the underlying assumptions regarding these zones. Drawing on a developing dataset on the world’s wealthiest individuals (the World-Magnates Database), we trace the development and expansion of sugar circuits across the Atlantic world from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries to explain how the sugar commodity chain leads us to rethink some prevailing notions of core and periphery. Namely, we challenge the notion that these zones consist of geographical spaces that, since very early in the development of the world-economy, became permanently specialized in the production of raw materials (periphery) or more sophisticated manufactures (core); and that labor forces have been trans-historically relatively free/better-paid in core activities and coerced/poorly-paid in peripheral ones. We argue that, prior to the nineteenth century, the world-economy is not only characterized by the uneven and combined emergence of various forms of labor exploitation, as usually argued within a world-systems perspective, but also one in which core-like and peripheral activities (that is, those providing access to relatively greater or lesser wealth) were not yet as clearly bounded geographically as they would become in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We find that a longue-durée analysis of sugar production by enslaved labor illustrates not merely processes of peripheralization, but of what we call coreification.

Saving the Sacred Sea: The Power of Civil Society in an Age of Authoritarianism and Globalization

Salvatore Babones — 2019-09-03

Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, and the Injustice of ‘Green’ Capitalism

Md Belal Hossain — 2019-09-03

Dialogue: Race in the Capitalist World-System, Author Responses

Michael G. Hanchard — 2019-09-03

Routes of Atlantic Slave Voyages: Revised Framework and New Insights

Patrick Manning — 2019-09-03

This study explores data on the Atlantic slave trade through a revised framework, focusing not simply on voyages of individual slave ships but on aggregating them by route, linking an African region of departure with an American region of arrival. The result shows a total of 40 slave routes, for which documented voyages are aggregated by decade from the 1650s through the 1860s. Within this framework, analysis is conducted at the level of documented voyages (by route and by decade) and also at the level of documented captive flows (by route and by decade). This intermediate frame of analysis lies between analysis of individual voyages and aggregate figures for the whole slave trade. Results of this analysis show the variation among routes: ten out of the forty routes account for 85% of the voyages. For each route, it is shown that the average numbers of captives departing Africa remained roughly constant from the 1650s through the 1830s; the same is true for the numbers of captives arriving in the Americas. These and other characteristics of the routes, as seen through voyages and captive flows, allow for new insights into the character and the changes in the Atlantic slave trade over two centuries.

Dialogue: Race in the Capitalist World-System, Review of Hanchard's The Spectre of Race

William I. Robinson — 2019-09-03

Dialogue: Race in the Capitalist World-System, Review of Robinson’s Into the Tempest

Michael G. Hanchard — 2019-09-03

Forging a Diagonal Instrument for the Global Left: The Vessel

Rebecca Álvarez — 2019-09-03

This article takes up Samir Amin’s challenge to rethink the issue of global political organization by proposing the building of a diagonal political organization for the Global Left that would link local, national and world regional and global networks and prefigurational communities to coordinate contention for power in the world-system during the next few decades of the 21st century. The World Social Forum (WSF) process needs to be reinvented for the current period of rising neo-fascist and populist reactionary nationalism and to foster the emergence of a capable instrument that can confront and contend with the global power structure of world capitalism and aid local and national struggles. This will involve overcoming the fragmentation of progressive movements that have been an outcome of the rise of possessive individualism, the precariat, and social media. We propose a holistic approach to organizing a vessel for the global left based on struggles for climate justice, human rights, anti-racism, queer rights, feminism, sharing networks, peace alliances, taking back the city, progressive nationalism and confronting and defeating neo-fascism and new forms of conservative populism.

Needed: A New International for a Just Transition and Against Fascism

Francine Mestrum — 2019-09-03

Mestrum draws from her extensive experience in the World Social Forum process to outline some of the reasons for past failures of left struggles to come together around the kind of fifth Internationale Amin proposes. A new Internationale, she argues “will require some serious and honest self-criticism and a downright rejection of all romanticism and naive utopianism…. we have to look for solutions beyond the easy slogans and assumptions.” Mestrum identifies important structural and ideological rifts in the global left. She is also wary of localized movements such as those advocated by Sklair, fearing that they could detract from the left’s ability to coalesce around a strong structural critique of globalized capitalism. What she sees as essential is the construction of “alter-globalist” identities and solidarity across issues and borders. This will require moving beyond abstract “anti-capitalist” ideology to build inter-connected campaigns that tackle the complex inter-connections among movement struggles. While cautioning against slogans, she sees lasting wisdom in Enlightenment principles of freedom, equality, and solidarity and modernity’s respect for universalism and diversity. These can help advance a politics of system change that is “emancipatory and transformative, geared towards the full realisation of individual and collective human rights for all.”

World Revolution or Socialism, Community by Community, in the Anthropocene?

Leslie Sklair — 2019-09-03

Like Robinson, Sklair is critical of Amin's state-centrism, and he sees the international system of hierarchical states: “The power of capitalist hegemony today is so overwhelming (allied as it is with the military and police powers of states) that the only viable strategy for change is by a process of negating, avoiding, and eventually consigning capitalism and the state to the dustbin of history.” He argues that, “Putting all our energies into world socialist revolution” (as Amin argues) “seems increasingly like a self-defeating strategy.” For Sklair, “[t]he only way out of this mess, the only chance of having a liveable planet for the generations to come …is to organise for small-scale socialist communities to create new forms of less destructive and hierarchical economy and society.” He envisions a project of locally-grounded “anarching,” where autonomous producer-consumer cooperatives (P-CCs) advance a “double strategy” that serves to “slow down capitalism” and to “bring into existence a new mode of production based on the different principles and [new] mentalities.” “[A] reconstructed political community could create more genuinely democratizing forms of economic, social, and political organization to encourage and facilitate networks of P-CCs [and…t]he transition from the present capitalist-statist hegemony to the new form of society.

Climate Justice and Sustained Transnational Mobilization

Paul Almeida — 2019-09-03

Samir Amin’s final essay called for the creation of a new international organization of progressive social forces. This essay provides evidence from twenty-first century transnational movements on the likelihood of the emergence of such an international organization and the issues and sectors most likely to facilitate coalitional unity. More specifically, the ecological crises identified by Amin in the form of global warming and climate change create an unprecedented global environmental threat capable of unifying diverse social strata across the planet. The climate justice movement has already established a global infrastructure and template to coordinate a new international organization to confront neoliberal forms of globalization. Pre-existing movement organizing around environmental racism, climate justice in the global South, and recent intersectional mobilizations serve as promising models essential to building an enduring international organization representing subaltern groups.

Rethinking Samir Amin’s Legacy and the Case for a Political Organization of the Global Justice Movement

Bonn Juego — 2019-09-03

Juego argues that the new Internationale’s “primary organizational function should be the global coordination of actions of progressive grassroots movements from country to country.” He calls for a ‘learning organization,’ where the new Internationale supports “a continuous dialogue between bottom-up and top-down approaches to decision-making.” He sees it as “[a]kin to a global coordinating council” meaning that it works to integrate and synthesize the “varying initiatives, campaigns, and mass actions at all geographical levels of membership” while remaining mindful of the “dialectics between reform and revolution.” The new Internationale must, moreover, be “grounded on a pragmatic understanding of realpolitik especially in struggles at national and local scales,” and institutionalize a commitment to dialogue, research, and discussion.

The Twenty-First Century Revolutions and Internationalism: A World-Historical Perspective

Şahan Savaş Karataşli — 2019-09-03

In his essay, “It is imperative to reconstruct the Internationale of workers and peoples”, Samir Amin (2018) suggested that in order to “deconstruct the extreme centralization of wealth and the power that is associated with the [capitalist world] system”, we should seriously study “the experience of the worker Internationales [...], even if they belong to the past. This should be done, not in order to ‘choose’ a model among them, but to invent the most suitable form for contemporary conditions.” In this paper, I will follow Amin’s (2018) suggestion and provide a brief examination of the past experiences of first Internationales in the nineteenth century and conditions that produced them with an eye to the present moment. By comparing the political climate of the early twenty-first century to analogous comparable periods in world history, I will argue that today we need two distinct forms of global political organizations that are modeled after the International Workingmen’s Association and the Communist League. First one should serve as a horizontal “movement of movements” that would reflect the spontaneous and creative energy of mass movements from below; the second one should serve as a hierarchically organized world communist party.

Capital has an Internationale and it is Going Fascist: Time for an International of the Global Popular Classes

William I. Robinson — 2019-09-03

Robinson concurs with Amin’s centering of the problem of extreme concentration of capital and the centralization of power worldwide. However, he critiques Amin’s “tenacious nation-state/interstate framework,” arguing for an approach that transcends state-centrism to identify class and social dynamics that have enabled both the rise of the fascist right and create openings for emancipatory left formations.

The Fifth International: International or Global?

Owen Worth — 2019-09-03

Worth welcomes Amin’s call for a renewal of Internationalism, but he is critical of the “significant shortcoming of understanding an internationalist strategy around a traditional collection of national struggles.” Recalling Rosa Luxemburg’s contributions to the second International at the 100th anniversary of her brutal murder, he notes: Luxemburg … condemned any form of nationalism as a tool used by the bourgeoisie in order to divide the proletariat….[F]or Luxemburg, the whole notion of dialectical materialism should be understood not through the development of existing structures but as a process where new structures emerge and develop over time. Likewise, Internationalism should not be something restricted by structures of the present, nor by pre-existing norms such as national sovereign, but instead be understood as a mechanism that could move beyond the confines of the present towards the realms of the ‘possible.’”

Editors' Introduction

Jackie Smith — 2019-09-03

Editors' introduction to Summer/Fall 2019 issue

Carrying on Samir Amin’s Legacy

Boris Kagarlitsky — 2019-09-03

Kagarlitsky argues, “The global defeat of the left has stimulated rapid corruption and degradation of the capitalist classes and, as a result, has aggravated all the contradictions and problems that the system faces. The collapse of the left movement has given rise to a more acute need for a socialist alternative than ever before in the past 50 years.” Yet, he notes that the situation for building left unity is now rather dire, as few countries have strong left parties and old left parties have lost their legitimacy and appeal. “[A] new political alternative can be neither invented nor constructed artificially or mechanically. Our task today is to collect and integrate the experience of the struggle (including the political one) accumulated in different countries. We are entering a period when bold strategic experimentation is needed.”

Forum on Samir Amin's Proposal for a New International of Workers and People

Samir Amin — 2019-09-03

Amin argues that “[w]e are now in the phase of the ‘autumn of capitalism’ without this being strengthened by the emergence of ‘the people’s spring’ and a socialist perspective. …There is no alternative other than that enabled by a renewal of the international radical left, capable of carrying out—and not just imagining—socialist advances.” What is needed is “the lucid and organized intervention of the international front of the workers and the peoples.” He proposes the establishment of a “new Internationale” that consists of “an Organization… and not just a ‘movement’” or discussion forum (such as the World Social Forum process). Such an Internationale should draw from experiences of previous worker Internationales, and seek to apply lessons from this history to the current context.

Truncated 21st-Century Trajectories of Progressive International Solidarity

Patrick Bond — 2019-09-03

Patrick Bond provides a biography of Amin’s work as a global political thinker and leader on the left. From his early days building the Third World Forum and establishing “origins of a South-centric organic intelligentsia with global visions” to his work with the World Social Forum process, Amin dedicated his life to trying to lay the foundations for a Fifth International. Bond notes Amin’s frustration with the extreme fragmentation and limited policy impacts of left struggles. Yet he points out some recent exceptions here in the successes of global South campaigns around the right to water, access to medicines and the right to health, and Via Campesina and MST’s success in building global resistance to corporate land grabbing.

On Samir Amin’s Call for a Fifth International

Valentine M. Moghadam — 2019-09-03

In his prodigious output, from works on capitalist development to analyses of Islamist movements to involvement in the World Social Forum, Samir Amin’s was a consistent voice for struggle against capitalism’s domination of the world and its peoples. In this brief essay I address his call for a shift from movement to organization, indeed, toward a kind of Fifth International (Amin 2018a) and explain why I endorse it.

Race-Class-Gender Articulation and the Fifth International

Biko Agozino — 2019-09-03

Agozino supports Amin’s call for a Fifth International, but offers suggestions to make it more inclusive. He argues “It is not enough for the Fifth International to call on Workers of the World to Unite without questioning the extent to which racism, imperialism and patriarchy divide the working class and weaken the struggle to end exploitation.” Although the First International addressed class exploitation in articulation with the struggles against the oppression of nationalities and racial groups and against gender oppression, “[t]he departure from the race-class-gender articulation or intersectionality model that Marx envisaged by the organizers of subsequent internationals may be part of the reasons why the organizational aim was not sustained.” Agozino calls for more intentionality in constructing the leadership of the Fifth International than is in Amir’s proposal. While Amir was attentive to the inclusion of African leadership, he paid less attention to the inclusion of women or indigenous peoples. And while Amin seemed concerned with creating a manageable process through the delegation of a small number of leaders, Agozino says it is “better to allow a million leaders to emerge from local to the global levels.”

Marion Werner. Global Displacements: The Making of Uneven Development in the Caribbean

Jeb Sprague — 2019-09-03

Ravi Palat. The Making of an Indian Ocean World-Economy, 1250-1650

Chris Nierstrasz — 2019-03-25

Matthew Vickery. Employing the Enemy: The Story of Palestinian Labourers on Israeli Settlements

Andy Clarno — 2019-03-25

Marcel Paret et al., eds. Southern Resistance in Critical Perspective: The Politics of Protest in South Africa’s Contentious Democracy

Bradley Williams — 2019-03-25

Shoma Hamal Gurung. Nepali Migrant Women: Resistance and Survival in America

Barbara Grossman-Thompson — 2019-03-25

Alvin Y. So and Yin-wah Chu. The Global Rise of China

Shaohua Zhan — 2019-03-25

Tim Bartley. Rules without Rights: Land, Labor and Private Authority in the Global Economy

Jean Jenkins — 2019-03-25

Do China’s Environmental Gains at Home Fuel Forest Loss Abroad?: A Cross-National Analysis

John M Shandra — 2019-03-25

The theory and empirical research on ecologically unequal exchange serves as the starting point for this study. We expand the research frontier it in a novel way by applying the theory to China and empirically testing if forestry export flows from low-and middle-income nations to China are related to increased forest loss in the exporting nations. In doing so, we analyze data for 75 low-and middle-income nations using ordinary least squares regression and find support for our main hypothesis.

Puzzling Politics: A Methodology for Turning World-Systems Analysis Inside-Out

Leslie C. Gates — 2019-03-25

Can world-systems analysis illuminate politics? Can it help explain why illiberal regimes, outsider parties, and anti-immigrant rhetoric seem to be on the rise? Can it help explain any such nationalchanges that seem destined to shift how nations relate to world markets? Leading surveys of historical sociology seem to say no. We disagree. While there are problems with Wallerstein’s early mode of analyzing politicsin the capitalist world-system from the outside-in, historical sociologists have been too quick to dismiss world-systems analysis. We propose an alternative inside-out approach anchored in a methodology for selecting what to study: those national political transformations which constitute puzzling instances within a given world-historical political process. We recommend promising theoretical lineages to guide empirical research on the selected puzzle: those that specify the elite social bases of politics. We thereby turn world-systems analysis inside-out. Our inside-out approach advances the project of world-systems analysis as a methodology, rather than a theoretical prescription in several ways. First, it addresses an important but largely overlooked question: how to select what to study. Second, it devises a methodology that can, but does not have to, pair with the methodology of incorporated comparisons. Third, it offers a methodology that stimulates, rather than forecloses, theoretical flexibility and fresh interpretations of politics and the world-economy. We illustrate the strengths of this new approach with three books, two of which won the best book award from ASA’s Political Economy of the World System (PEWS) Section.

Contending with Capitalism: Fatwas and Neoliberal Ideology

Omer Awass — 2019-03-25

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