Modern World System Research Articles

Divergent Convergence

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.

For a Revolutionary Feminist World-Systems Analysis

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.

К вопросу о возможности детерминации добычи ископаемой мамонтовой кости как традиционного природопользования

This article is devoted to solving the question of whether it is possible to consider the extraction of mammoth bone as one of the types of traditional nature management of the indigenous peoples of the North. The solution to the problem is considered on the part of three criteria — the formation of a tradition of economic activity within an ethnic group, the focus of economic activity on use for their own needs, a balanced approach ensuring sustainable environmental management. As a result, the author concludes that the extraction of mammoth bone is a type of activity that cannot be called fully consistent with the criteria for traditional nature management. At the same time, in the article, the author proposes to consider broader the concept of traditional nature management in the modern capitalist world, supplementing it with a view from the world-system analysis of the dichotomy of traditional and capitalist society.

In Between Centre and Periphery: Kenya as a Key Scientific Nation in East Africa?

Kenya’s government has identified science, technology and innovation as key for its national development plan and has started to refurbish its research environment. In this article, we use the world system approach to discuss the largely peripheral relations of Kenya’s science systems to the global science system and to identify indications for Kenya becoming a semi-peripheral scientific player itself within Eastern Africa. While the publications are dominantly oriented towards the Global North and while foreign sources fund nearly half of Kenya’s research and development (R&D), the country starts to become an important country for its neighbours. However, Kenya is still facing an unstable system of integrating significantly more graduate students. These are seen as essential to provide for a sustainable knowledge base that is required for the country’s socio-economic goals. We point to the lack of robust and recent data on R&D in Kenya as an impediment to evidence-based policy-making.

A renewed purpose for public serving professionals focused graduate programs in global higher education ecosystem

This explanatory study explored what graduate programs should embrace in educating public serving professionals to become able to respond to paramount challenges unknown at the time of studies. For conceptual frameworks, the study employed (a) principal-agent theory on how predominant philanthropic organizations pushed the creation of globalized higher education industry post-World War II (WWII) and (b) world-systems theory to delineate the spatial penetration of the hegemonic intellectual core. The study found that the post-WWII’s geopolitically driven overseas engagements by US higher education institutions (HEI) orchestrated by well-resourced philanthropic giants such as Ford Foundation made a ground for what we see today: a globalized HEI industry governed by the core with the hegemonic power, termed for the study as a global higher education ecosystem. The study noted that irrespective of if the concerned HEI occupies the position in the core or not, rootedness in the place and its people is the key for public focused programs precisely because of their nature of public-ness. The study then drew three programmatic constructs as referential for late comer HEI to assume meaningful roles for the society they serve through their public serving professionals focused graduate programs: (1) contextualization of globally standardized academic contents into classroom discussions by connecting with cases/situations surrounding given society; (2) positioning the program as a post-entry milestone for public sector professionals to become better prepared state-building force by focusing on the linkage of theories and practices; and (3) HEI specific, unique intellectual identify exploration that is anchored to the place and to its own constituency. The study concluded that today’s graduate programs designed for public serving professionals could frame its objective, as a renewed purpose, to educate academically informed state-builders with the capacity to craft and perform own actions as new realities arise in front of them.

Christian-Buddhist Intercommunication of Late Antiquity

Abstract The paper is devoted to a historical reconstruction of cultural and commercial contacts which took place between Egypt and India at the peak of the maritime Silk Road to the West in antiquity, i.e. from the first to the fifth century AD, and to how these contacts were reflected by the Roman authors of that time. It is shown that in this context the story of Siddhārtha Gautama can have been transmitted to the West from the first to the fifth century AD. This study is based on the world-systems approach to late antiquity and it has the following two complementary dimensions: (i) reconstructing archeological evidences for the contacts of that time; (ii) cross-cultural textual analysis. As a result, it was detected that almost all the main claims of late antique authors about Buddhism and the ways of its expansion are well confirmed by archeology.

Stanley J. Stein (1920–2019)

Stanley J. Stein (1920–2019)

Do Western Sociological Concepts Apply Globally? Towards a Global Sociology

The post-colonial debate challenges the self-certainty of sociology and the suggested universality of its theoretical premises. This has led to calls to provincialize sociological theories and concepts and include perspectives from the South. Thus, we need to ask whether sociological concepts apply globally. Burawoy’s notion of a professional ‘global sociology’ offers a starting point for provincializing sociological concepts without giving up their global applicability. The problems involved in applying the core sociological category of class to Kenya show that classical sociological concepts may be inadequate for analysing societies outside the European and North American context. For the analysis of inequality, we need a more open and empirically founded concept in which the classical notion of class describes just a particular pattern of social structure. For the development of sociological concepts, we always require a broad empirical and intercultural basis in order not to be caught in the trap of Eurocentrism.

When Diaspora Politics Meet Global Ambitions: Diaspora Institutions Amid China's Geopolitical Transformations

Through a case study of China, one of the largest emigration states and a rising global power, this article probes how a homeland state envisions diaspora politics amid geopolitical transformations. Drawing on historical, policy, and interview data, I argue that China's changing positioning toward Chinese emigrants, triggered by the state's geopolitical vicissitudes, has reshaped and repurposed diaspora institutions. I find that since the 2010s, China's diaspora policies have shifted away from soliciting diasporic support for domestic economic growth and national unification and toward liaising externally with migrants to expand Chinese soft power abroad. In consequence, diaspora institutions with more extensive overseas connections and flexible working experiences have taken precedence over formal state agencies specialized in domestic policymaking. This article makes two theoretical contributions to a multilevel understanding of diaspora politics as traversing simultaneously the domestic and global political fields. First, following neo-pluralism, I examine China's diaspora bureaucracy as composed of a diverse set of state entities with distinctive, or even contradictory, interests, orientations, and philosophies. These organizational variations shape diaspora institutions’ different strengths and fluctuating significance in China's shifting geopolitical strategies. Second, by situating emigrants and diaspora institutions in the macrohistorical framework of world politics, this article pushes research on diaspora politics into more profound dialog with world-systems theory. Rather than assuming an asymmetric interdependence between weaker emigration countries and hegemonic immigration countries, I demonstrate how an aspirational homeland state seeks to challenge this established world order and accomplish its geopolitical ascendancy through diaspora re-strategizing and institutional reshuffling.

Financial Influence in Terms of Currency Production and Management: The Continued Dependency between France and Her Former Colonies

Many Countries in sub-Saharan Africa are still having their currency manufactured and mostly managed by France through Bank of France and this is decades after their access to international sovereignty. Using knowledge from the dependency and new world system theories, this study finds that the aim of France, the former colonial power is to keep controlling and influencing financial flows, trades, economic systems which leads to financial dependency in most countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Through this, African countries have not lost only monetary sovereignty but it has also contributed to intellectual and political dependency of those African countries. This situation is awful for the maintenance of the national independence of these liberated countries from imperialist powers. This article makes some suggestions in order to stop financial dependency in the field of currency transactions and to explore new political attempts to create and manage African countries’ own currency. This study also suggests that literatures should not focus only on technical and economic aspects of currency but go beyond for greater contributions to CFA franc zone studies.

World(‐)Systems, West Africa, and the Global Middle Ages

AbstractThough West Africa and West African gold is generally acknowledged to have played a critical role in the high and later medieval world economy, the full extent of the region's global influence remains understudied in Global Middle Ages scholarship. This is not a new development but instead a continuation of a trend begun with the development of world systems theory, a key methodological paradigm used in the production of Global Middle Ages scholarship. By tracing the development of world systems theory and contextualizing it in historiography of West Africa and the Latin West, this essay seeks to offer answers for this analytical lacuna and provide potential strategies for producing more holistic scholarship.

ТРАНСФОРМАЦІЇ СУЧАСНОЇ ЕКОНОМІЧНОЇ СВІТОСИСТЕМИ В УМОВАХ ГЛОБАЛІЗАЦІЇ

The article examines the peculiarities of the formation and further development of the economic component of the modern world system in the conditions of global economic and political transformations. The main scientific approaches to defining the essence and models of globalization are outlined. Authors singled out two main models of globalization – neoliberal and humanistic-noospheric. Neoliberal is recognized as the current one, due to the fact that it is interpreted as technocratic-unipolar under the pronounced hegemony of the USA and Western culture. The division of the world system into the center and the periphery is substantiated. The leading level is countries with a high level of income, which concentrate resource flows, appropriating all the benefits of globalization, and the bottom consists of less developed countries of the periphery, which are resource donors for the group of leaders, existing mainly due to the use and sale of natural resources and consumers of innovations. This group is the largest, it shows slow modernization, some of its regions are overpopulated, and in many places there are zones of political instability and conflicts. The dependence of the country's role and place in the structure of the modern world system on its level of economic development and GDP indicators is described. It was also found that in the process of development, central regions change their specialization, transferring innovations to other regions, which, in turn, seem to "pull" behind the center to a new high-quality level of economic development. The authors also considered the state and prospects for the development of the economic core in the territory of modern China. It has been found that it is inappropriate to talk about the hegemony of this country in the modern world system, since the country's economy does not demonstrate the necessary stability and transition to the postindustrial stage of development with the predominance of the service sector over industrial production. Instead, the current state of the world system demonstrates the formation of a powerful core of the world economy in North America, which is based on the economy of the United States of America.

Na EKO na EBA - o vai e vem da imigração: cotidiano, identidade e demandas de imigrantes africanos estudantes universitários

Abstract Introduction By embracing cultural diversity, human rights, and social justice – in its practice and knowledge production –, occupational therapy has been interested in discussing the theme of Africa, problematizing different contemporary social dynamics. Objective To understand the trajectory, the construction of identity, and the demands of young African immigrant university students. Method Qualitative approach using semi-structured interviews for data collection and thematic content analysis. Results The first category, “Culture, identity, and daily life: crossing the Black Atlantic”, encompasses the perception of young people about otherness and cultural differences/identifications between Brazil and Africa in their daily lives. The second, “'A country of hunters?': prejudice, discrimination and colonial imaginary” dealt with reports of discrimination in everyday life and the imaginary about Africa in Brazil; The last category, “'The house belongs to the other': institutional support/helplessness and coping strategies”, discusses the conditions of reception and permanence of the African immigrant student at the university. Conclusion The trajectory of African students goes through institutional care, and social and relational needs, which overlap in daily life, culture, and academic performance, emphasizing the experience of racial discrimination inside and outside the university that guides otherness in the construction of subjectivity of young people. The appreciation of African themes demonstrates a tendency of the profession to seek new epistems and decolonial theoretical-methodological constructions that produce other looks for human action in the tension of culture and power relations established by the modern world system.

Cross-Border Regionalism in European Integration Strategies: A Conceptual Dimension

At the turn of the millennium, the issues of borders and border territories that arose as a result of the reinterpretation of the place and role of national states and supranational entities became the focus of social analysis. Scientific attention to cross-border strategies of European integration processes is determined both by a new vision of the phenomenon of regionalism and the characteristic features of territorial identities. The relevance of the study of crossborder regionalism lies in the awareness of the increasing specific weight of territoriality in the modern world system and the need to find algorithms to answer the challenges of our time, which are marked by “binding to the territory”. The purpose of the article is the theoretical and methodological study of models and concepts of cross-border cooperation, which are formed under the influence of interconnected processes of globalization and regionalization within the European space. The current conditions of functioning of countries in the context of cross-border cooperation necessitate the substantiation of conceptual approaches to uncovering the essence of the cross-border region as a methodological construct. The application of geopolitical and geohistorical methodology determines the representation of the essential characteristics of cross-border regionalism as well as the determination of the role and place of border regions in European integration strategies. As a result of the study, it was proven that the effectiveness of cross-border cooperation depends on the extent, to which the historical traditions, mentality and social attitudes of the population of the border areas are taken into account in the process of creating Euroregions. It has been found that the minimization of risks caused by the long-term development of societies within various state organizations directly depend on the degree of scientific understanding of the specifics, potential and opportunities of cross-border regions, as well as the variability of value orientations and behavioral stereotypes. It was determined that the “transparency” of borders is a powerful resource for the balanced development of states, increasing the role of cross-border dynamics in the sphere of economy, culture, and ecology. The practical significance of the study is determined by the representation of spatial trends in the coordination of European integration strategies, the development of regional identity, and the decentralization of decision-making. Increasing scientific knowledge about cross-border regionalism will help to better understand the role and place of Ukraine in the modern world and bring it closer to entering the European political space

Economic Policy and Railway Construction under Alexander II (1855–1865)

This article analyses the economic policy of the Russian government between 1855 and 1865 in the context of Immanuel Wallerstein’s World Systems Theory. The mid-nineteenth century saw an expansion of the modern world system, when the industrialised countries of the “centre” pulled the agrarian countries into the world market as the “periphery” supplying raw materials. Following its defeat in the Crimean War, Russia became an object of pressure from the “centre”, which was both diplomatic and ideological in nature (in the form of an increasingly popular principle of free trade). On the other hand, Russian landowners were interested in supplying grain to the world market; this required “export” railways from the interior to the seaports to be constructed. Inclusion in the world system made it possible to attract foreign capital to the construction of roads, but only on condition of rejecting protectionism. In 1857, the government drastically cut customs duties. The import of cheap metal and railway equipment deprived Russian factories of orders. While in the West railway construction was the driving force of industrial development, the Russian industry was deprived of these incentives and increasingly lagged behind the countries of the “centre”. However, abandoning protectionism did not help attract foreign investment. The Principal Society of Russian Railways, created with the participation of French bankers, was unable to spread its shares in the West. Unsuccessful measures to spread these shares in Russia caused a drop in the rate of the credit rouble, and further attempts to stabilise the exchange rate led to heavy financial losses. As a result, the construction of export roads and the final entry of Russia into the world market was delayed by a decade.

Understanding the Global–Local Nexus in the Context of the Olympic Games: Implications for Managing Community Development Through Sport Megaevents

In this study, the authors sought to understand the influence of the Olympic Games on a host community’s globalization and development using world-systems theory and theories of globalization (i.e., glocalization and grobalization). The host community for the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics (Daegwallyeong-myeon in South Korea) was the focus of this investigation. Using a global ethnographic approach, the authors collected diverse data through interviews, observations, archival and media documents, and field notes. Findings identified five key themes: (a) perception of underdevelopment, (b) the Organizing Committee’s institutional management of the global standard, (c) the Organizing Committee’s role as a negotiator between the global standard and the locality, (d) resident perspectives on global standards and regulations, and (e) aspirations to globalize Daegwallyeong-myeon. Through this study, the authors advance the use of world-systems theory and expand the concept of grobalization in the context of sport megaevent management by discussing global–local configurations and local agents’ desires to transform the community through Olympic-driven development and globalization.

Цифровые гуманитарные науки и концепция дальнего чтения Франко Моретти

The article provides an outline of the prospects for the development of the digital humanities in the context of the work of the Italian-American literary theorist and sociologist Franco Moretti (b. 1950). Moretti’s methodology is given the most at­tention, it is presented as a complex of interrelated methods. The theory of cul­tural evolution, world-systems analysis, cultural geography, computational criti­cism of the digital humanities and distant reading are considered in detail. Moretti takes literary forms as an analogue of biological species and shows what cultural niches they occupy, how certain forms survive, how they interbreed with each other, how “unadapted” forms die off and what influences all these pro­cesses. Modern technologies make it possible to work with big data, and this provides new material for research (quantitative aspect), and also changes the ob­ject of research (qualitative aspect). Using cartographic and statistical methods, as well as the method of world-system analysis, Moretti shows that the study of world literature becomes the study of the struggle for symbolic hegemony in the world. The world-system approach in relation to literature and, more broadly, to culture as a whole makes it possible to understand exactly how the unity of world literature is combined with its unevenness and heteroge­neity. Therefore, the researcher’s field of vision includes not only established cultural forms (canon), but also what has been discarded by cultural evolution (the “Great Unread”), and this significantly changes the entire cultural picture of the world. Distant reading problematizes the value of the literary canon, strives for the maximum and exhaustive coverage of the corpus of texts.

Капитализм заканчивается, а

This article attempts to answer the question: is the description of Modernity in terms of “capitalism” justified? The author shows that during the history of the 20th‑21st centuries, the pictures of capitalism drawn by theorists got more and more atypical elements. Among these are the theories of imperialism, dependent development, a single industrial society, and especially the world-system analysis. Also noteworthy is the description “modern” applied to the societies of this period. A situation has arisen where many phenomena fit into the concept of “capitalism”, or “capitalism with numerous prefixes”. Thus, “capitalism” in various guises becomes “too much”. Eventually, capitalism itself has come down to the universal phenomena of violence, inequality and exploitation. The productivity of discussing modernity in a paradigm revolving around the notion of “capitalism” is becoming less and less obvious. Too wide range of practices has become associated with “capitalism with prefixes”, which forced a number of researchers to refuse to identify modernity with capitalism in favor of various concepts based on retro-metaphors (“neo-feudalism”). Numerous concepts of “post-capitalism” have also emerged. The author substantiates that at the theory layer, the difference between the types of what is still interpreted as “capitalism” or already as “post-capitalism” does not have a qualitative character. Of all the aforesaid, the marxian concept of human “prehistory” becomes relevant as a more universal paradigmatic frame for comprehending modern trends. Therefore, the concept of communism will still remain a worldview horizon that gives a meaning to this “prehistory”. In a situation where capitalism ends, but “prehistory” does not, this will make it possible to single out social relations that determine the “prehistory” nature by themselves, and not through the prism of denouncing or apologizing (which is “capitalism” initially) of their political discourses.

Political hegemony and the intellectual production in the world semi-periphery (Contribution to modern sociology of the school of Prof. Tomasz Zarycki)

In the conditions of military aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine, the future of Ukrainian sociology largely depends on the ability to be included in the world processes of the development of science. The openness of the sociological community of Ukraine to prospective development trends in world sociology is necessary. The most favorable conditions for the emergence of stable dialogical relations exist in the relations between the Ukrainian and Polish sociological communities, which is due to the significant common past of our peoples, in many respects common problems and possible common perspectives. In modern Polish sociology, one of the most open to dialogue is the Warsaw sociological school of Prof. Tomasz Zarycki. Research of its participants, and first of all Prof. T. Zarycki, cover a wide range of problems: from changes in the social space of Poland to the peculiarities of the reformation of the ruling class and the production of political knowledge. A special feature of the school is the intense search for an adequate methodology for the study of modern society. This methodological search led to the synthesis of the ideas of Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system analysis and Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, which made it possible to cover the macro-, meso- and micro-levels of social life in a single perspective. The peculiarities of the transformation of the society of state socialism into the society of liberal capitalism in modern Poland are largely determined by the fact that the basis of the political class here was formed from representatives of the intelligentsia. This explains the insignificant weight of the bourgeoisie in the political life of the country, the absence of such a phenomenon as the oligarchy. At the same time, in global conditions, the Polish intelligentsia found itself in a difficult situation, because the country remained on the semi-periphery of the world capitalist system. This leads to the fact that the production of knowledge about society takes place in hierarchical relations, where the rules are set by the countries of the world center.

ПРОЦЕС КОНВЕРГЕНЦІЇ ГЛОБАЛЬНОГО ЕКОНОМІЧНОГО РОЗВИТКУ

The current stage of globalization creates a number of controversial problems, one of which is the growing disparities in economic development between developed and developing countries. Their solution places certain demands on the economic scientific community, which are related to finding adequate answers to the challenges of time. One of the main tasks in this direction is to implement a comprehensive approach to the study of the process of convergence of global economic development. Noting the intensification of scientific research by the European and domestic scientific community in various thematic areas of convergence of global economic development, it should be noted the lack of publications in which this scientific and practical problem was solved taking into account the specifics of different countries belonging to the modern world system. With this in mind, the purpose of the study is to determine the nature and content of the process of convergence of global economic development and identify problems that arise in overcoming the asymmetry between developed and developing countries. In the process of realization of this goal the influence of economic integration on the internationalization of economic life is revealed, the factors that accelerate the process of convergence of global economic development and its manifestations at the level of developed and developing countries are identified. The relationship between economic convergence, global synchronization and the global business cycle has been established. The scientific novelty of the study is to substantiate, based on the creative use of scientific publications of foreign and domestic scientists, ways and directions of achieving real convergence between countries belonging to the core of the world system, its semi-periphery and periphery For results of the study made some generalizations and conclusions that do not confirm the effect of "catching up" development for the vast majority of African and Asian countries, in contrast to post-socialist European countries. It is noted that solving the problem of convergence of global economic development is important for Ukraine. This is the one of the promising direction of further scientific development of the research problem.