World-Systems Research Research Articles

Erratum: Review Of: Creolizing the Modern

Erratum: Review Of: Creolizing the Modern

Erratum: Introduction to the Symposium

Volume 29 (1) of the Journal of World-Systems Research initially included the article "Introduction to the Symposium: Parasitism and the Logics of Anti-Indigeneity and Antiblackness" by Marilyn Grell-Brisk. When first published the article was missing a key citation. Accordingly, a slightly revised version of the review has been restored to its original publication site.

Editorial Note

The editor's introduction for the Summer/Autumn 2023 issue of Journal of World-Systems Research.

Erratum: Review Of: Creolizing the Modern

Volume 29 (1) of the Journal of World-Systems Research initially included a review of the book Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania Across Empires by Anca Parvulescu and Manuela Boatcă. Due to editor error the review was uploaded with Anca Parvulescu's name misspelled. Accordingly, a slightly revised version of the review has been restored to its original publication site, and the editors apologize for any confusion.

Editorial Note

The editor's introduction for the Winter/Spring 2023 issue of Journal of World-Systems Research.

Editorial Note

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

Editorial Note

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

Remembering Immanuel Wallerstein

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

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

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

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 global mobile labour force in the modern/colonial world-system: analysing migrant integration in Germany

Following the ‘European refugee crisis’, European states have initiated different migration and integration policies that often perpetuate and reinforce nation-state otherisation, capitalist exploitation, colonial legacies, and gendered and racialised oppression. Using an interdisciplinary approach based on decolonial theory, world-systems research, Marxist analysis, critical state theory, critical race theory and feminist critiques, this article finds that a rigorous investigation of a complex world-system and its deep structures, including modernity/coloniality, capitalism, the nation-state, racism and sexism, can shed light on the formation of a global mobile labour force that manifests itself in place- and context-specific ways. Based on this assertion, this article analyses processes of migrant integration in Germany’s domestic work force and points to its colonial, gendered and racialised dynamics. The article concludes by reviewing Napuli Langa’s account of and involvement in the migrant resistance movement in Germany which began in 2012. This resistance movement highlights alternative ways of living together in and against the modern/colonial world-system that goes beyond (neo)liberal inclusionism.

Perspektywa wykorzystania badań nad systemem-światem w analizie stosunków międzynarodowych w XXI wieku

This article outlines the research programme on World-Systems Analysis school, which is connected with works of Immanuel Wallerstein and periodicals Review. A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center and Journal of World-Systems Research . This scientific community has set up influential theories and research position in economic history and sociology of development. My text examines the crucial research problems and theoretical assumptions of WSA approach. Besides this, condition and perspectives of WSA within contemporary social sciences is analysed.

Moving toward Theory for the 21st Century: The Centrality of Nonwestern Semiperipheries to World Ethnic/Racial Inequality

While there has been much attention to the economic, political, and transformative potential of the semiperiphery, scholars have failed to explore the ways in which this zone of the world-system causes, contributes to, and exacerbates world ethnic/racial inequality. By 2015, a majority of the world’s population is concentrated in 41 nonwestern semiperipheries that generate 40 percent of the world Gross Domestic Product. For those reasons, this essay decenters analysis of global ethnic/racial inequality by bringing the nonwestern semiperiphery to the foreground. Part I examines the ascent of nonwestern semiperipheries over the last half century, calling into question the popular “global apartheid model” which posits “white supremacy” as the singular cause of global ethnic/racial inequality. In Part II, we conceptualize, and present empirical data to support, ten conjunctures between the nonwestern semiperipheries and world ethnic/racial inequality. Part III offers a “theoretical retrenchment” in which we call for new approaches that bring the nonwestern semiperiphery to the foreground of theory and research about global ethnic/racial inequality. We argue that future theory building must pay particular attention to the rise of the Asian semiperiphery where two-fifths of world population is concentrated. Drawing upon previous world-systems research, we aggregate and update lists of countries in the core, semiperiphery and periphery in 1960, 1980 and 2015.

The Yue Yuen Strike: Industrial Transformation and Labour Unrest in the Pearl River Delta

In April 2014, approximately 40,000 workers stalled production at Yue Yuen (YY) Gaobu, a shoemaker, in Guangdong, China. We identify three reasons for the strike: First, China’s rise is leading to a wave of capital relocation to lower wage countries. Accordingly, YY Gaobu faces increasing pressure, which contributes to a deterioration of working conditions to save costs. Second, the Chinese Communist Party’s anti-corruption campaign is creating new spaces for YY workers to push their demands. Third, there are increased worker protests regarding social insurance payments. Therefore, the strike is paradigmatic, because class composition (middle-aged migrant workers) and demands (social insurance) differ from earlier conflicts. Drawing on the theoretical framework of World-Systems Analysis and in-depth field research, we conclude that the strike will have a lasting effect on Chinese labour relations, because of its focus on social insurance.

Automotive FDI and Dependent Development: The Case of Slovakia’s City-Regions in the Bratislava-Zilina Corridor

Since the fall of State Socialism in 1989, the worlds largest automakers have established 13 light vehicle assembly plants in the Central European nations of Czechia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. Although it missed much of the 1990s boom, the central location of Slovakias city-regions, along with their skilled, but relatively inexpensive labor force, have resulted in that nation becoming a prime production base for the export of automobiles to developed Europe during the 2010s, as well as to North America. Drawing upon World Systems Theory and research on the CE auto industry, this article examines Automotive Industry related foreign direct investment ( i.e., Auto FDI) in Slovakias Bratislava, Trencin, Trnava, and Zilina City-Regions ( i.e. the Bratislava- Zilina Corridor). It finds that although Auto FDI may have helped boost Slovakias Gross Domestic Product and per capita Gross National Income to semi-periphery levels, it also has made the economies of the four city-regions in its Bratislava-Zilina Corridor overly dependent on foreign transnational corporations from the highly cyclical automotive industry. Basing its conclusions upon World System theorist depictions of semi-periphery nations, it then concludes that while Slovakias economic levels may qualify as middle income/semi-periphery, the structural role its major city-regions play within the worlds automotive industrial division of labor has not yet achieved this position. Rather, their status now more closely resembles what might be labeled the upper perimeter of the periphery , where core-peripheral-like power relations have remained much more prominent than in many other semi-periphery nations, particularly as compared with the original Asian NIEs and todays BRICs.

The Hallmarks of Crisis: A New Center-Periphery Perspective on Long Cycles

Our analysis, based on a variety of standard econometric techniques, aims to be a fairly comprehensive test of the hypotheses about long cycles, associated with the name of Kondratiev/Kondratieff. Our work tries to link the issue of long cycles with the issue of economic convergence and divergence in the world system, because there are very strong cyclical ups and downs of relative convergence in the world system, observable not just in the “national” growth rates and “national” economic cycles. Already the Japanese economist Kaname Akamatsu, who lived from August 7, 1896 to December 20, 1974, and who was a great admirer of Kondratiev/Kondratieff, hinted at this connection. His most well-known tribute to Kondratiev/Kondratieff (Akamatsu, 1961) specifically links the rise and decline of the global peripheries to the larger Kondratiev/Kondratieff cycle. His contribution, which is hardly ever mentioned nowadays in the framework of K-cycle research, is the starting point of our analysis. In fact, these “Akamatsu cycles”, analyzed in this work, are even stronger and seem to be more devastating than the “national Kondratiev/Kondratieff waves” and world systemic waves themselves, leading to the discovery of what might be even termed a “double-Tsunami wave structure”. Both our re-analysis of world industrial production growth data since 1741 as well as the global conflict data since 1495, presented in this article, cautiously support the earlier contentions of world system research with evidence, tested by spectral analysis and auto-correlation analysis. Using the well-known and now updated Maddison data base at http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/maddison-project/data.htm, Kondratiev/Kondratieff cycles of around 60 years duration at a nation state level are most clearly visible in Argentina, Canada, and Russia, with evidence on the existence of longer cycles of more than 35 years also in Belgium; Chile; Greece; Netherlands; India; New Zealand; Spain; and USA; while for the other countries of the Maddison data set, earlier negative spectral density analysis results reported in the ample literature surveyed in this article could not be falsified. By contrast, the evidence about strong long term cycles of convergence seems to be very convincing. Future research is recommended to realize that convergence processes in most nations of the world are discontinuous and of a cyclical nature, thus supporting the pessimism inherent in the writings by the world systems scholar Giovanni Arrighi on the subject.

Naval Stores Extraction in Eastern North Carolina: The Historical Basis of Spatial Inequality within a Core Nation

Within world-systems research there is an overwhelming tendency to treat nation-states as homogenous wholes. With some notable exceptions. this approach downplays the existence and operation of core-periphery relations on the sub-national level and the resultant inequality between different regions of nation-states. This study uses various complementary literatures in an integrative fashion to address this lacuna within the world-systems approach. We argue that uneven geographical development within core nations can at least partially be explained by the historical appropriation of natural capital; a universal process in which site-specific geographic factors and the larger political-economic context of the world-system interact. over time. to produce linked regions of relative accumulation and deprivation. To demonstrate the utility of this approach. we examine eastern North Carolina "s history as the principal producer of naval stores for Great Britain "s navy during Britain "s ascension toward hegemonic status in the world-system during the eighteenth century. We highlight how those initial extractive activities functioned as a "de-generative sector, hindering the region "s overall development. We argue generally for a synthetic approach to development theory and corresponding empirical examinations of modern and historical inequalities.

Is globalization a driver of economic growth and social development?

This article starts from the assumptions that the world can learn a lot from the empirical and theoretical debates and research results of dependency and world systems research. The European ‘political class’ seems to react more slowly to the implications of the global economic crisis. The policy package currently offered by the Commission still relies on open economies as pillar number 1 of any conceivable strategy. A rediscovery of this radical ‘dependency perspective’, first introduced by the Argentine economist Raul Prebisch and other Latin American thinkers during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and more fully developed in the so-called Latin American ‘dependency debate’ of the late 1960s and 1970s; and the current empirical ‘world systems theory’ mean a fundamental break with the existing dominant thinking on the subject of economic and social convergence. Continuing critical perspectives, initiated by Polanyi, and developed in Hungary by Andor, Inotai and Szentes, and above all in the quantitati...

Introduction: The World-Historical Imagination

This article is the editor's introduction to the special issue of the Journal of World-Systems Research, entitled The World-Historical Imagination: Giovanni Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Century in Prospect and Retrospect.

People, Place, and Time: How Structural Fieldwork Helps World-Systems Analysis

Some of the most insightful work in the political economy of the world-system area has been produced by researchers whose extensive fieldwork offers them deep familiarity with people and locales. Few other methods are as useful to understand the impacts of structural change on daily life and the ways agents resist, alter, and shape emerging structures. Yet such structural fieldwork is marginalized by the over-reliance of pedagogical materials on social constructionist, social psychological, or interactionist perspectives and also in world-systems research and writing by the privileging of long durée historical or quantitative cross-national methods. This paper introduces the concept of structural fieldwork to describe a qualitative field methodology in which the researcher is self-consciously guided by considerations emerging out of macro-sociological theories. We identify four advantages of structural fieldwork: the illumination of power’s multiple dimensions; examination of agency and its boundaries or limitations within broad political and economic structures; attention to nuances of change and durability, spatial and temporal specificities, and processes of change and durability; and challenging and extending social theory. These advantages are illustrated in select examples from existing literature and by discussion of the two author’s fieldwork-based research. The paper concludes that explicit attention to fieldwork may strengthen political economy and world-systems research and also de-marginalize political economy informed by structural fieldwork.