Uneven And Combined Development Research Articles

Multiple Modernities in Civilizational Perspective: An Assessment of the Global Civilization(s) Initiative

Abstract This paper starts from the supposition that civilization is an important concept for thinking about world order, and one that is increasingly coming back into play in world politics. It opens with a close look at the Global Civilization Initiative (GCI): what does it say, what does it imply, about what is it silent, and what are its policy contexts? It offers the theory of Uneven and Combined Development (UCD) as a way of looking at multiple modernities in terms of civilizational pluralism. This is followed by a historical unfolding of UCD since the early 19th century, showing how it has generated both single and multiple modernities cast in civilizational terms. The penultimate section focuses on the risks and opportunities that a world order of civilizational pluralism would create specifically for China. The conclusions summarize the main points of argument, and set out a more detailed global vision of what the GCI might aim to achieve if played well.

The difference multiplicity makes: The American Civil War as passive revolution

Abstract This article examines and further develops the relationship between the theory of uneven and combined development (UCD), recently taken up by International Relations (IR) scholars to furnish a social theory of ‘the international’, and the Gramscian concept of ‘passive revolution’, which refers to a molecular process of top-down revolution and state formation that preserves ruling-class power by transforming its social base. To this end, the paper: (1) advances a productive distinction between ‘societal’ and ‘(geo)political’ multiplicity, increasing the transdisciplinary potential of UCD and challenging dominant state-centric approaches to IR; (2) demonstrates that UCD is central to creating the conditions for passive revolution; and, (3) argues that UCD illuminates the distinct spatial dimensions of passive revolution, for which the succession of ‘classes’ in time requires the expansion of capitalist social relations in space. To illustrate these claims, the article demonstrates how the American Civil War is best understood as an inter-societal conflict, exacerbated by the coexistence of two social formations within a single state, leading to war. It then shows how, upon victory, the North’s abolition of enslaved labour and the subsequent attempt to re-subsume the South within a single sovereign polity constituted a radical instance of passive revolution.

Combination beyond ideational diffusion: origins and vectors of Bahrain’s Arab nationalism through uneven and combined development

One cannot easily situate the Gulf Arab states homogenously within the literature on Arab nationalism in the scholarship of the International Relations of the Middle East (IRME). Despite the recent historiography of ‘other histories’ of Arab nationalism in the Gulf, the extant research on the international relations of the Gulf has rarely theoretically interrogated how Arab nationalism derived from and evolved through the progression of rentier economy in the Gulf under British Colonialism as a peculiar historical process of late-capitalist social formation. To advance such a theoretical endeavour, this paper applies the concept of uneven and combined development (UCD) to the case of Bahrain under British colonialism. It argues that combined capitalist development in the Gulf under British colonialism fully activated Arab nationalism through the social mechanism of oil commodification. This historical process of combination created a vector for Bahrain’s early capitalist development and generated changing class relations and internal contradictions associated with the origins of Bahrain’s Arab nationalism. Most importantly, ‘combination’ transformed an early diffused national consciousness in the era of al-Nahda into a nationalist ideology in modern times, of which its agenda presents Bahrain’s peculiar experience among other non-peculiar cases in the Middle East.

The Theory of Uneven and Combined Development and the Sociopolitical Transformations in Syria and Libya

: This article explores the constitutive impact of the ‘international’ on the sociopolitical transformations in Syria and Libya through the lens of the theory of Uneven and Combined Development (UCD). The conventional and numerous critical analyses of Syrian and Libyan sociopolitical change suffer from a Eurocentric and stagist understanding of development. This paper argues that development problems can be better conceptualized with an interactive framework made possible by the UCD theory. In this context, we focus on how the expansion and consolidation of capitalism through the dynamics of UCD have concretely shaped the process of sociopolitical transformation in Syria and Libya to shed light on how the international and the local have articulated to produce the socioeconomic and political outcomes in these two states. We conclude by arguing that the theory of UCD provides an alternative conceptualization in explaining the specific development trajectories in both countries.

The uneven and combined development of racial capitalism and South Africa’s changing race-class articulations

Surprisingly little uneven and combined development (UCD) work focuses on Africa. This article both widens the geographical scope of UCD literature and attempts to address a major blind spot in this literature: the importance of race and gender in understanding the UCD of world capitalism and global political economy. Helpful in this process, we argue, is an engagement with the work of Black Marxism and Marxist Feminism and the literature on Racial Capitalism. We draw on the work of Stuart Hall on race and class, and the importance of understanding their changing articulations, indeed of the need to look at multiple articulations – of the state and state power with forms of production; racialised ideologies; and systems of reproduction. We use a case study of South Africa to illustrate our argument. South Africa, previously on the periphery of the global system, was changed profoundly by the discovery of vast gold deposits and the construction of a forced labour system to secure its profitable extraction. South Africa’s specific form of racial capitalism challenges not only linear conceptions of development, but also binaries between free and forced labour, and Eurocentric conceptions of social reproduction.

Uneven and combined development in anthropology

In this brief essay, we suggest that contemporary efforts at reworking Leon Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development (UCD) are enriched by an historical ethnographic lens focused on “real people doing real things,” which grounds and de-fetishizes the abstractions of capitalist development. We sketch three ways to develop UCD to better apprehend contemporary capitalism: tracing the effects of unevenness and combination within social formations; pointing to the ways those processes fracture historical consciousness; and underscoring the political implications for dividing populations and for creating novel combinations of people and socio-political experience.

Green Shoots of Revival: Political Leadership and the Differentiation of Space in a “Zero Pollution Village” in Rural Zhejiang, China

ABSTRACT This article uses a case study of a “Zero Pollution Village” (ZPV) initiative in Zhejiang, China, to illustrate how the Chinese state attempts to achieve rural revitalisation by harnessing the principles of uneven and combined development (UCD) and relying on the leadership of returned migrants known as “country sages” (乡贤, xiangxian). The ostensible goals of the initiative are to improve solid waste management and develop ecotourism, creating a model suitable for replication elsewhere. Village residents and the “country sages” aim to maximise returns on human, natural, social, and material resources at the scale of the village and household. The case shows how UCD can become a driver of both positive and negative changes which are manipulated by the state in pursuit of hybrid capitalist-socialist development. The research is based on research visits and follow-up interviews from 2019 to 2022.

Understanding International Economic Institutions and China through Uneven and Combined Development

For many decades, we are witnessing the economic rise of China and the increasing integration of China into existing international economic institutions. However, this paper argues that prevalent international relations theories are insufficient to explain this conjuncture of international political economy. Instead, this paper proposes the theory of uneven and combined development (UCD) to further integrate the international dimension of historical unevenness that is resulting from the historical conditions of global capitalism. The argument of this paper proceeds in two steps: First, the liberal, realist and orthodox Marxist theories’ analytical assumptions are discussed to understand the rise of China and its integration into international economic institutions, mainly the World Trade Organization. Second, the UCD theory is applied to reveal historical unevenness and intersocietal interactions through global capitalism. It is argued that the historical unevenness both determined the integration of China into international economic institutions and has caused instability within global capitalism through the trade war between US and China.

The cultural dilemmas of uneven and combined development (UCD): ‘the biggest agony of the Turkish spirit’

Recent studies of international historical sociology have focused more on the interaction between the political and economic aspects of the world system compared to its cultural dimensions. In this article we want to address this lacuna with particular reference to the theory of Uneven and Combined Development (UCD here after). UCD is an attempt to develop a non-Eurocentric, non-linear, and historical understanding of international relations. It aims to provide a non-Eurocentric historiography and historical sociology that goes beyond binary oppositions of East and West, tradition and modernity, and emphasizes non-Western agency in shaping historical developments. The cultural implications of UCD has recently been revived in world literature and cultural studies. We seek to contribute to this research by illustrating how UCD can help us understand the cultural implications of societal interaction through the use of Turkish literature, notably Peyami Safa’s work. We want to focus on the theme of the interaction between the West and the East in his work within the context of the theory of UCD as an example of how it manifests itself in the cultural field. Accordingly, the article is structured as follows. The first section discusses the key features of UCD as they relate to our topic, and the second section goes on to examine processes of Westernisation as they have occurred in Turkey and attempts to demonstrate how UCD is reflected in the literature of the period. The third section aims to show how the concept of UCD can help us better understand the implications of societal interaction in Peyami Safa’s work by addressing the various issues that are raised in Justin Rosenberg’s approach to analysing world literature. The final section concludes with general observations concerning the potential utility of UCD-based methodologies in constituting the foundation of non-Western IR theories.

Debating Uneven and Combined Development/Debating International Relations: A Forum

This forum arises from an online event on the theory of uneven and combined development (UCD). Following an introduction which proposes a ‘special affinity’ between UCD and International Relations (IR), four presenters at that event discuss their ‘view from outside’ UCD, including perspectives from Global Historical Sociology, Realism, Decolonial theory and Gramscian Marxism. Meanwhile four members of the audience add their views on UCD and disciplinarity, the need for pluralism in UCD methodology, UCD and ‘whiteness’, and its potential contribution to ecological theory and practice. Débattre du développement inégal et combiné/Débattre des relations internationales

Prelude to America’s Downfall: The Stagflation of the 1970s

Since the end of the Bretton Woods system and the stagflation of the 1970s, the transatlantic core, under the leadership of the United States of America, has been trying to expand its model of free market capitalism embracing every part of the globe, while addressing its domestic overaccumulation crisis. This article follows a historical methodological perspective and draws from the concept of Uneven and Combined Development (UCD), which helps us consider the structural reasons behind the long and protracted decline of the American economic power. In this respect, according to the UCD concept, there is no global power that can enjoy the privilege for being at the top of the global capitalist system forever in a world which develops unevenly and in a combined way. Power shifts across the world and new powers come to challenge the current hegemonic power and its alliance systems. The novelty of the article is that it locates this decline in the 1970s and considers it as being consubstantial with the state economic policy of neo-liberalism and financialisation (supply-side economics). However the financialised capitalism of the transatlantic assemblage lack industrial base producing, reproducing and recycling real commodity values. Further, the article shows that this attempt to remain at the top of the global capitalist system forever has not been successful, not least because the regime which the recovery of the core had rested upon, that of neo-liberal financialisation represents a major vulnerability of the transatlantic assemblage eroding the primacy of the United States of America in it.

Uneven and combined development: a defense of the general abstraction

This article responds to criticisms of the current revival of Uneven and Combined Development (UCD), particularly those aimed at the idea of a ‘general abstraction’ of UCD. Three main charges have been pressed: that UCD is not a real theory; that its transhistorical extension has reduced it to an unhistorical reification; and that its language of ‘advanced’ and ‘backward’ betrays its enduring Eurocentric foundations. The article argues not only that UCD can be defended, but also that it is the general abstraction which enables UCD to make its strongest contributions to solving problems of theoretical insufficiency, ahistoricism and Eurocentrism in social thought more generally. Finally the article ends by speculating on the reason why the much-maligned general abstraction of UCD should turn out to be of such significance.

Results and prospects: an introduction to the CRIA special issue on UCD

This paper introduces the Special Issue on Uneven and Combined Development (UCD). It begins by briefly outlining the idea of UCD and reviewing its history – from its origins in the writings of Leon Trotsky to its contemporary renaissance in the field of international studies. A second section then introduces the contributions to this Special Issue, showing how they amount to a powerful new wave of UCD studies.

Uneven and combined development, international political economy, and world-systems analysis

Rosenberg and Boyle's ‘Understanding 2016: China, Brexit and Trump in the history of uneven and combined development’ (2019) is an insightful analysis. It leverages the theory of uneven and combined development (UCD) derived from Trotsky's work on the puzzle of why the proletarian revolution emerged in underdeveloped Russia. The analysis fulfills many of the requirements for reinvigorating IPE set out by dissatisfied senior scholars who lament the narrowing of the study of IPE. But UCD is not unique in this regard. It shares many attributes with world-systems analysis (WSA). I argue that instead of searching for philosophical excuses for ignoring others, we should speak to similarities as well as differences, and seek insights from other perspectives. WSA insights on China, the west, the nature of combination and inequality, and the periphery, are then reviewed. I conclude that scholars of UCD and WSA should be considering one another’s work.

The 19th century in the Lombard Alps: The unfulfilled promise of industrialization

AbstractThe article aims to contribute to the discussion on the causes and the trajectories of the process of industrialization and economic development between the 18th and the 19th centuries. Focusing on the case study of the Lombard Alpine area, it will test the usefulness of the concept of uneven and combined development (UCD) in order to better understand the process of economic growth. The Alpine case study is particularly interesting because, in some Lombard Valleys, it involves a shift from a very advanced economy in the Early Modern period to a demographic and economic collapse from the mid‐19th century onward, when in contrast, other mountain territories in the Italian area were moving towards industrialization.

Imposing evenness, preventing combination: charting the international dynamics of socio-technical imaginaries of innovation in American foreign policy

The Socio-Technical Imaginaries (STI) approach in Science and Technology Studies (STS) has illuminated the central role of social imaginaries in shaping the politics of technology. Its emphasis on the multilinear forms of socio-technical development is a useful corrective to universalist explanations of technological change. However, STI lacks a clear account of how inter-societal interaction shapes the imaginaries of any given political community. Synthesizing STI with the theory of Uneven and Combined Development (UCD) can correct this shortcoming. UCD offers an ontology of universals and accompanying methodology of incorporated comparison, enabling STI to integrate inter-societal causality into its theoretical framework. A combined UCD and STI framework is examined in this paper through a focus on imaginaries of technological innovation in contemporary American foreign policy. Responding to the ‘whip of external necessity’, US foreign policy seeks to upend technological diffusion and impose global regulatory evenness on national forms of technological innovation.

States as colonial projects: Unevenness, combination and race through the lens of Abya Yala

This article argues for an ‘expanded’ account of the modern state that places race and coloniality at the center of its analysis to enable a conversation between uneven and combined development (UCD) and critical race theories (CRT). Following a decolonial reading of both literatures and adjacent fields, I question UCD’s reproduction of Eurocentric epistemological assumptions through narratives of capitalist ‘modernisation’ that erase Indigenous and racialised peoples from the histories of modern state formation. This leads to an invitation to engage in cross-pollination between traditions by placing the concept of ‘interaction’, as recently developed by UCD scholars, in dialogue with ‘relational’ processes of colonisation and racialisation theorised by CRT and thinkers from Abya Yala. I argue that this combined perspective is better equipped to reflect on conflicts over land, territories, self-determination, and ultimately survival, by speaking of the experience of modern state formation in colonial central Mexico. I look at the formation of Iberian imperial governance in the sixteenth century as a Lettered City, a complex network of bureaucratic and Inquisitorial rule based on the prominence of the written word. In this context, Indigenous Nahua politicians, intellectuals and community leaders transformed and conditioned the state apparatuses by employing precolonial documents and producing many others to secure political and territorial autonomy. I conclude by suggesting that this approach can start a conversation on alternative genealogies of colonialism and state formation that emerge from Indigenous and racialised histories of struggle, negotiation and adaptation.

Rewiring unevenness: the historical sociology of late modernisation beyond the west/east duality

Echoing the theory’s original application by Leon Trotsky, the empirical scope of the recent scholarship deploying uneven and combined development (UCD) has been largely confined to the consequences of unevenness between modern Europe and the non-European world. This article seeks to enrich the causal portfolio of UCD by ‘rewiring’ that primary unevenness of the modern period via ‘Eastern circuits’ of secondary unevenness. It argues that primary unevenness and its resultant European whip of external necessity should be conceptualized beyond the singular linear cause-and-effect trajectory running from the ‘West’ to the ‘Rest’. For fastening the empirical dynamism of unevenness to static ‘civilizational’ scales does disservice to the neo-Trotskyist ambition toward empirically recovering the multilinearity of development. The alternative offered here has two steps: historiographical and conceptual. Firstly, the article builds a case for a historiography that frames unevenness as a geographically and temporally changing dynamic of intersocietal relations with its causal consequences modified by the on-going historicity of late modernisation. This makes it possible to differentiate between early late developers (such as the Russian Empire and Meiji Japan) and late late developers. This differentiation empirically reveals a series of multi-directional and causally relevant relationships resulting from secondary unevenness among late developing countries. It is at this second step, and with the aim of capturing the causal significance of the Eastern circuits, the article utilises a mid-range concept (the politics of comparison) by bringing UCD in communication with the field of new imperial history.

Uneven and combined development and the geopolitics of capitalist money

Global monetary hierarchies have recently been posed by Kai Koddenbrock as a challenge to the concept of uneven and combined development (UCD) and its corollary of societal multiplicity and interactivity, suggesting that this approach obscures transnational or global-systemic dynamics. International money and finance represent an arguably autonomous and theoretically unaccounted for dynamic within the UCD framework that escapes the frame of multiplicity. Although international finance and money have not been wholly absent from UCD accounts of the dynamics of capitalist globalisation and its geopolitics, these have tended to be conceptualised as an outgrowth of the processes of industrialisation that are seen to be the primary driver of UCD. Does this represent a theoretical challenge or a lacuna? Money and finance were central to some of the earliest critical attempts to make sense of the conflagrations of the early twentieth century as products of capitalist development. I argue that clarifying and expanding the role of money and finance provides necessary foundations for a critical theory of international relations grounded in UCD.

International origins of Austria-Hungary

This article examines the emergence of Austria-Hungary from the perspective of uneven and combined development (UCD), which unifies social and geopolitical modes of explanation. It argues that UCD can explain the ‘paradoxical’ role of Hungary, a relatively backward society that was at the forefront of the 1848 revolutions and the political reorganisation of the Austrian Empire in 1867. However, it maintains that potentials of UCD have not been realised even in recent UCD interpretations of the Monarchy due to declinist assumptions. The article argues that the international management of UCD via the Concert of Europe inflated Austrian power, but could not prevent sociopolitical change, laying the ground work for its later deflation. The Austrian Empire also faced the challenge of revolutionary Hungary. The article demonstrates that its intersocietally generated peculiarities resulted in the gentry initiating the transition to capitalism to counter the geopolitical threat of industrialising Austria and arrest its social decline. Despite defeating Hungary and introducing capitalist social relations, the strength of Austrian dynasticism prevented the emergence of a hegemonic bloc and political stabilisation. It was this political weakness rather than economic backwardness that might better explain its expulsion from Germany in 1866. The article then turns to a comparison of the political economies of Prussia/Germany and Austria-Hungary and questions the overemphasis on Austro-Hungarian backwardness. By offering a new interpretation of Austria-Hungary, the article contributes to a rethinking of nineteenth century international relations and the long-term causes of World War 1.