Center-periphery Relations Research Articles

The USSR is Dead: Long Live the USSR? Tajikistan’s Inconclusive Transition to Security (In)dependence, 1991–1992

This essay re-evaluates the history of Tajikistan’s close security and military links to Russia and the influence of this relationship on Tajikistan’s sovereignty. By analysing Tajikistan’s security services during the period of Soviet collapse, it suggests that the basic contours of these links can be observed developing in the early 1990s. Following the end of the Tajik Civil War (1992–1997), moreover, these links have only grown, leading to a current situation in which Tajikistan’s and Russia’s security services operate in close coordination. As a result, the Tajik state remains bound in a semblance of a centre–periphery relationship not dissimilar from what it experienced before 1991.

Building anti-racist education through spaces of border thinking

ABSTRACT This paper seeks to identify strategies for anti-racist higher education, drawing on scholarship that locates structural racism in global and local centre–periphery relations. We first examine how the centre-periphery divide has been identified and challenged in anti-racist intellectual and political movements, focusing on exchanges and solidarity between peripheral territories. We then discuss the implications of this framework for the setting in which the authors work: Brazilian higher education. The Brazilian university sector has recently expanded through affirmative action policies that have resulted in an influx of Black students from urban peripheries. However, the dominant nationalist ideology in Brazil has historically denied racial divisions, presenting a myth of racial democracy and delegitimising transnational links between anti-racist movements. Reflecting on our own experiences and perceptions through a narrative approach, we draw out elements of border thinking that we believe can contribute to anti-racist pedagogical and institutional relationships.

INDO – CHINA TRADE: A NEW CENTRE PERIPHERY RELATIONSHIP

Indo China trade names for last 3-4 years mainly because of three reasons one; China has become the robust trading partner of India outpacing USA, second; the balance of trade deficit of India is very high almost 60 Billion dollar, three; India and China are face to face on boundary issue and army skirmishes which has led to a boycott China slogan in India. But the issue do not end here. In fact China has become a manufacturing hub of all kind of industries in India. The inputs assembles spares as well as sophisticated machinery in India all Imported from China. In pandemic Covid-19 found that even dominant pharmaceutical companies of India are dependent on Chinese support. The whole consumer durable market of India is in fact only an assembly market. All parts of refrigerator, AC, cameras, microwave and what not are imported and then only assembly is done by Indian companies. Same is true for Electric gadgets, Telecommunication instruments, plastic industry and even handicrafts and handloom sector. Economics call it dependency of development. A Metropolis satellite like relationship in which India’s economic development at present is been conditioned by China. In fact this is an extension of Prebisch singer Centre periphery model where in the International division of labour is such that some group of countries (periphery) output, raw material, agro and mineral-based product to while the other group of countries (Centre) add value and exports them back to periphery. This leads to exploitation of resources of periphery and analogous development of the developed countries. In this research paper the researcher is trying to analyse the Indochina trade through the lens of dependency theory. KEYWORDS: Centre periphery relationship, manufacturing, exports, BOT, Indo China trade

The divergent logics of urban regeneration in Israel: A neoliberal toolkit and national rationales

In recent years, urban regeneration policy in Israel has relied largely on market-based mechanisms to deliver its goals, seemingly in keeping with neoliberal trends. Whereas, in previous decades, the construction and renovation of housing was facilitated primarily by state-run projects, current urban regeneration policy relies heavily on private actors – developers and homeowners – motivated by profit and the allocation of building rights. In this article, we argue that while this policy appears to be consistent with neoliberal trends, the Israeli government, as well as the public, in fact continue to view urban regeneration as a project of national significance, deserving of public funding if market forces should prove inadequate. We describe the unique characteristics of urban regeneration policy in Israel, arguing that they derive from ‘moral economy’ logic as well as geopolitical considerations such as national security and commitment to the periphery. We make this argument by examining urban regeneration in the country’s geographical and economic ‘periphery’, where the state is expected to finance and incentivise regeneration in the absence of market incentives. We conclude that even in a supposedly heightened neoliberal era, Israel’s regeneration policy continues to be centralised and driven by national objectives and centre–periphery relations that reproduce the country’s path-dependent development trajectory.

Systemic Reconfiguration of Capitalism: Applying Ruggie’s Critique of Waltz in Economics

Abstract This paper identifies changes in the center-periphery structure due to transformations in capitalism since 1970. In its new configuration, capitalism not only altered center-periphery relations but also exerted impact upon peripheral units that affect the system structure itself. This paper aims to apply Ruggie’s famous critique of Waltz in International Relations to analyse global capitalism and show how the changes in the center-periphery cleavage is affecting its systemic reconfiguration in the 21st century. This research identifies the boomerang effect as a new systemic element, that is, as a byproduct of the interaction of units of the global capitalist system in the 21st century.

Mimicking the mimics: problematizing cover performance of Filipino local music on social media

The performance of cover songs in popular music has long been a subject of critical discussion and debate due to the artistic, social, cultural, and commercial issues that covers raise. In non-Western societies, most popular songs covered by artists are Anglo-American, a situation which implicitly privileges Western music and reinforces both the “west and the rest” trope and the cultural imperialism thesis. Taking American amateur artists and their online videos performing Filipino popular music as case studies, this article examines how social media platforms facilitate and problematize center-periphery relations in popular music through a diffusion of cultural products “from the rest to the west.” Moreover, we show that more than the promise of audience reach, the phenomenon reflects how these cover artists embody cultural and social situatedness in Filipino culture. As they mimic the mimics, they also embody an identity in motion.

Decentralization, Repression, and Gambling for Unity

I study a dynamic model of center-periphery relations that endogenizes the periphery’s grievance via the legacy of repression. The center’s key trade-off is that repression prevents the periphery f...

Marginal gains: borderland dynamics, political settlements, and shifting centre-periphery relations in post-war Nepal

ABSTRACT In post-war transitions, how do centre-periphery relations change, and what is the role of actors at the margins of the state in negotiating these changes? This article explores these questions by examining Nepal’s post-war transition following the 2006 Comprehensive Peace Agreement focusing on three borderland districts (Saptari, Bardiya and Dolpa). The article analyses contrasting dynamics in these districts to highlight changes in centre-periphery relations across several areas including state reform, the economy, and transitional justice. The analysis shows how post-war transitions often generate new forms of contentious politics, and how groups at the margins can push back against emerging political settlements to reshape politics at the centre. The ambiguities and contradictions inherent to these processes are explored, with state restructuring processes susceptible to elite capture, and re-balancing of power between centre and periphery also coinciding with continuing or increased divisions and inequalities within borderland regions.

Community media’s role in changing centre–periphery relations through participatory, not-for-profit journalism

Traditional notions of journalism focus exclusively on professionals, often embedded in media outlets and publishing houses. However, preceding decades have seen transformations in the understanding of journalism. This contribution sets out to explore the role of community media in working towards the recognition of participatory, not-for-profit journalism, more diverse discourses and enhanced participation, especially in relation to minorities. This research draws on policy documents at the European level, reports from European projects with community media involvement as well as on interviews with community media activists and journalists. As a result, we can show strategies of bringing peripheral actors to the centre by using community media based on access and participation, social inclusion, giving a voice and media literacy development. The study proposes a model of the role of community media in shifting peripheral actors to more central positions.

Mobilities and Mediterranean peripheries: Narrating Maltese identities in Vincent Vella’s Slippery Steps

ABSTRACT This article examines the representation of European peripheries in contemporary postcolonial writing through a study of the centre–periphery relationship in the English-language novel Slippery Steps: A Maltese Odyssey (2011) by the Maltese writer Vincent Vella. The article argues that Vella’s novel is embedded in transnational mobility and shows that Maltese identity is constituted by constant movement between Malta and Britain, periphery and centre, as well as in interaction with other Mediterranean and European spaces. This reading of the novel suggests that its representation of Maltese identities is ambiguous. While the experience of mobility in the novel emphasizes the importance of contact zones as sites of hybridity in both the centre and the periphery, by locating its central characters in the contexts of diaspora and migration, the novel also shows how its diasporic identities signify trauma and loss, thus problematizing the centre–periphery relationship.

Exploring Determinants of ‘Mental Distance’ in Cross‐Border Contexts

ABSTRACTState‐of‐the‐art research has identified mental distance, which is the limited perception of occurrences beyond one’s country’s border, as the main determinant of moderate cross‐border interactions in Europe. While it is well understood that mental distance is an upstream process that occurs prior to (bounded) rational decision‐making, it is not clear whether and, if so, which determinants affect the degree of mental distance. Standardised interviews with inhabitants of the Euregio Meuse–Rhine cross‐border region were conducted in 2019 to detect the potential effects of language (areas), sociodemographic characteristics and centre–periphery relations. The results demonstrate that knowledge of regionally spoken languages (German, French and Dutch) leads to a lower mental distance in four out of five cases, whereas English abilities surprisingly have the opposite effect. In addition, the outcomes indicate that centre–periphery relations can outweigh the fact that two cross‐border sub‐regions share the same official language.

Stalin’s Faminogenic Policies in Ukraine: The Imperial Discourse

Because Stalin’s policy of famine creation in the early 1930s has been viewed through the prism of communist theory and practices, scholars have paid less attention to the imperial/colonial discourse of the period. This essay attempts to show the suitability of applying theoretical models of dependence and imperialism to analyze the dynamics and consequences of the collectivization of agriculture and the Holodomor (the mass deaths through starvation in Ukraine). The pressure applied to all regions of the USSR, resulting from the “communist experiment,” was in Soviet Ukraine supplemented and intensified, and, at some points, determined by a system of centre-periphery relations, characterized by political domination, control, the subordination of regional political elites to the centre, and the exploitation of economic resources. The appropriation of sovereignty over the Ukrainian republic by the central government in Moscow included establishing full control over Ukraine’s food resources, such as determining grain harvesting and distribution. The ongoing exploitation of Ukrainian economic resources and the anti-Ukrainian terror caused the Ukrainian famine of 1928-29. These also became significant factors in the onset of the 1932-33 Holodomor.

Tunisia's Peripheral Cities: Marginalization and Protest Politics in a Democratizing Country

This article investigates Tunisia's southern "periphery within the periphery," drawing on original interviews to examine marginalization and center-periphery relations in the country since the 2011 revolution. Comparisons are drawn between the informal economy of cross-border smuggling in Ben Guerdane and the jobless youth of Tataouine being left behind as corporate elites and companies become wealthy from the natural resources extracted from the area. This had led to an embrace of "unruly" protest politics, rebelling against the postrevolutionary political establishment. A trend toward disillusionment with democracy might be on the horizon for the marginalized youth in the south, exacerbating regional cleavages and posing a potential crisis for Tunisia's democratization.

The “Civilizational Project” and the southern Sudanese Islamists: between assimilation and exclusion

ABSTRACT Drawing upon interviews and a variety of newspapers and other media associated with the Sudanese Islamic Movement, this article analyses historic developments in its strategy for the Islamization of the now independent region of southern Sudan with particular reference to the experience of members of the movement from that region. It identifies significant parallels between the colonial and Islamist designs for “civilizing” southern Sudanese, arguing that like its colonial predecessor the “Civilizational Project” of Hasan al-Turabi’s “Salvation Regime” alternated between assimilating and excluding them. The post-1989 Islamist regime’s treatment of Islamist southerners before and after the secession of the south in 2011 highlighted the division between these assimilationist and exclusionary trends. Although the movement was largely unsuccessful in recruiting southern members, those who did join were not simply Islamist satellites – like Islamists from the other marginalized regions, they sought to use the Movement to traverse the social divide between center and periphery, sometimes in a manner that challenged the riverain elites that dominated it. In thus deconstructing the notion that Islamic movements are ideologically and socially homogenous, the article contributes a fresh perspective on the debate about Arabization and Islamization in Sudan as well as center–periphery relations in post-colonial contexts.

School segregation in Rio de Janeiro: geographical, racial and historical dimensions of a centre-periphery dynamic

ABSTRACT This paper examines educational segregation in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro through the lens of a multifaceted centreperiphery relationship involving geographical, racial and historical dimensions. The paper first situates Brazilian racial inequalities historically, drawing on decolonial theory, before examining student enrolment patterns in Brazil’s second-largest metropolis. Although Brazil is often held to be a racially integrated society, the analysis shows sharp racial and social divisions between a ‘peripherally’ oriented mass public school system, a ‘centrally’ oriented private sector, and selective public schools run by the federal government. The selective public sector is undergoing a period of transition, driven by affirmative action policies, and provoking tensions that are examined through the experiences of two politically-engaged teachers. The findings point to the importance of political mobilisation in effecting change and the need for further affirmative action policies, along with a revised funding model for public schooling.

The Peripheral Turn in Global Urban Studies: Theory, Evidence, Sites

The field of global urban studies has witnessed a “peripheral” turn since the 1990s, first led by the Los Angeles School of urban geographers, with a more diverse group of urban scholars who study the global South following. Challenging the city-centric view, as exemplified by the Chicago School’s concentric model of urban growth, these scholars train their lens on urban peripheries, such as suburbs, small towns, and the sprawling hinterlands outside metropolitan regions. This essay discusses what can be gained from shifting the analytical lens from the city center to the periphery, and from Western cities to cities in the global South. Drawing upon the new scholarship on urban peripheries in India, it also identifies three major avenues for further investigation—the comparative method, center-periphery relations, and ways of life.

The Evolution of Forming “Territories of Traditional Nature Use” in the Sakha Republic (Iakutiia)

In the struggle of Russia’s Indigenous northerners for greater control over their ancestral lands, the spatiolegal formations known as Territories of Traditional Nature Use (TTPs, using the Russian acronym) have become their most effective tool. TTPs have assumed diverse characteristics across Russian regions in response to the evolution of federal and sub-federal law and of center-periphery relations at national and regional scales. In the Sakha Republic (Iakutiia), TTP formation is entangled with wider territorial politics and economic trends, which have led to the precarious but powerful advancement of Indigenous rights. This article explores this evolution by comparing the creation of two neighboring TTPs, formed eight years apart under distinct political and legislative conditions. A combination of local efforts, subnational legislative and economic initiatives, and reaction to federal overstep have compelled the improvement and systematization of Indigenous rights in the republic.

Center–periphery Relationships of Pharmaceutical Value Chains: A Critical Analysis based on Goods and Knowledge Trade Flows

ABSTRACT This article provides new evidence on center–periphery relationships in the pharmaceutical value chains from the new-structuralist perspective. Our contribution examines the foreign insertion of countries into pharmaceutical value chains. It is based on extensive indicators, such as world trade in gross terms, production and employment structure, and also on intensive indicators, such as trade in value-added, price per kilo of pharmaceuticals imported and exported, pharmaceutical industry wage shares, and intellectual property rights’ flows. We show that pharmaceutical value chains are concentrated in regions, whose centers are basically the US in America and Switzerland and Germany in Europe. Moreover, there are several countries from the global peripheries that are weakly integrated into pharmaceutical value chains, such as Brazil, Russia, Saudi Arabia. Finally, some countries, such as Mexico, India, Hungary, Poland, and even China, have undergone a maquiladora process in their roles in the international division of labor: they have become large exporters of pharmaceuticals with low prices per kilogram and a high content of imported added value, paying low salaries and maintaining deficits in intellectual property rights’ charges.

Post-Foucauldian Discourse and Dispositif Analysis in the Post-Socialist Field of Research: Methodological Remarks

Post-Foucauldian discourse and dispositif analysis, a methodological approach inspired by the work of Michel Foucault and developed in Western Europe, over the last decade has gained an increasing amount of attention from Eastern European researchers. Yet, this interest has not been accompanied by sufficient reflection on the post-Foucauldian perspective’s adequacy for studying power, governance, and subjectification in post-socialist societies. In particular, there is little criticism that would take into account the current discussion on Foucault’s ambivalent attitude towards neoliberalism. The goal of this article is to examine this line of criticism of Foucault’s late works and to point to its importance for dispositif analysis carried out in Eastern and Central European societies (e.g., Poland) in comparison to analyses carried out in Western Europe (e.g., Germany). I propose a number of methodological recommendations that aim at adapting post-Foucauldian research instruments to facilitate analyzing power relations in the post-socialist context; these include: an interdisciplinary combination of discourse analysis and an analysis of macroeconomic and macrosocial factors; an analysis of the practices of normalization in post-socialist societies with reference to the Center-Periphery relationship; introducing elements of semiology, anthropology of the contemporary and cultural identity analysis to dispositif analysis.

The Fractured Centre: ‘Two-headed government’ and threats to the peace process in Myanmar

AbstractThis article analyses the evolving nature and dynamics of the relationship between the centre and the periphery by examining how semi-democratic reforms have shaped and influenced the peace negotiation process between the government and ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) since 2011. We demonstrate that while the 2008 constitution has reduced restrictions on political, economic, and cultural activities in Myanmar, it has also inevitably produced a ‘two-headed government’ after the main opposition party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), took charge in 2016 and was forced to share power with the military. This ‘two-headed’ government is the result of the historical distrust between the NLD and the army, combined with the NLD's lack of a clear strategy in dealing with EAOs. This has enabled the army to assert its well-articulated and hardline approach—without itself having an effective strategy or the capacity to end the country's armed insurgencies or bring the peace process forward. We show that the split at the centre has produced inertia and weakened the ability of the central government to formulate and implement effective policy, and further undermined the prospects for national reconciliation. Situating this case study within the wider literature of centre–periphery relationships and democratic transition, this article offers a nuanced and comprehensive analysis of how specific institutional arrangements at the centre in semi-democratic settings affect relations in both the centre and the periphery, as well as centre–periphery relationships.