Suchergebnisse

In dem Artikel argumentiere ich, dass die Weltsystemanalyse entscheidend dazu beigetragen hat, die theoretischen und methodologischen blinden Flecken der Soziologie aufzudecken und einen umfassenden Rahmen für die Untersuchung globaler Ungleichheiten zu formulieren. Damit nahm sie sowohl die Kritik an Eurozentrismus und methodologischem Nationalismus, die von transnationalen und postkolonialen Ansätzen vorgebracht wurde, als auch die Debatten über die Zunahme globaler Ungleichheiten um mehrere Jahrzehnte vorweg. Ich führe diese analytische Vorrangstellung auf mehrere Faktoren zurück: erstens auf die methodologische Verschiebung der Weltsystemanalyse als einer Form von früher globaler Soziologie vom Nationalstaat zur gesamten kapitalistischen Weltwirtschaft; zweitens auf die Beziehung zwischen der methodologischen Verschiebung und der epistemologischen Kritik und ihrer Rolle in Wallersteins frühem Ansatz zu globalen Ungleichheiten. Schließlich gehe ich auf das Verhältnis zwischen der Selbstdefinition der Weltsystemanalyse als einer Form des Protests gegen die Mainstream-Sozialwissenschaft (und nicht als einer Theorie) und den theoretischen und politischen Verflechtungen mit postkolonialen und dekolonialen Ansätzen ein, um zu zeigen, wie sie gemeinsam zur Prominenz des Themas der globalen Ungleichheiten beigetragen haben.

Drawing on several critical cartographers' approach to counter-mapping as method and on Boaventura de Sousa Santos' "sociology of absences," I discuss their combination - counter-mapping as a method for the sociology of absences - as a means of enhancing sociological reflexivity through a transdisciplinary lens. Such a lens reveals the very constitution of those academic disciplines that deal with the social world as shaped by the colonial and imperial context of their emergence. I argue that counter-mapping can serve as a decolonial strategy to the essentialization of nation-states and world regions in social scientific and political discourse and propose a relational perspective capable of revealing the constitutive entanglements through which a global capitalism grounded in colonial expansion interlinked all areas of the world. The focus lies on the entanglements that counter-mapping as a method uncovers between semiperipheries such as Eastern Europe and Latin America, constructed as fixed and unrelated locations on imperial maps.

While I agree, and have previously argued myself that closer attention should be paid to semiperipheries in terms of their transformative potential, I consider the claim that nonwestern semiperipheries exacerbate and even cause racial/ethnic inequality misleading. In the following, I thus want to caution against what I think are three weak links in the authors' argument: mistaking visibility for causation, conflating the concept of race with the reality of racism (and its many historical and geopolitical configurations), as well as throwing the baby (white supremacy) out with the bathwater (Western knowledge).I will limit my comments to two aspects. The first one is methodological and concerns the unclear unit of analysis that underlies the authors' claim for the centrality of non-Western semiperipheries to ethnic/racial inequality. The second aspect is more substantive and targets the relationship between racism and the emergence, functioning, and reproduction of the modern/colonial world system.

This paper claims that, since many of the concepts relevant to our analysis of systemic change were coined in and about the core, the potential with which solutions to world-systemic crisis are credited in the long run should be assessed differently depending on the structural location of their origin. In the periphery, such concepts as conservatism, socialism and even liberalism took forms that often retained nothing of the original model but the name, such that strategies of applying them to (semi)peripheral situations ranged from "stretching the ideology" to "discarding the (liberal) myth" altogether. In a first step, "the hypothesis of semiperipheral development" (Chase-Dunn and Hall), according to which the semiperiphery represents the most likely locus of political, economical, and institutional change, is amended to say that, at least for the late modern world-system, the strength of the semiperiphery resides primarily in the cultural and epistemic sphere. In a second step, this contention is illustrated with the help of major challenges that the Eastern European and Latin American (semi)peripheries have posed to the world-system's political fields and institutional settings both in the past and to date—with different degrees of success corresponding to their respective structural position. In light of these examples, it is argued that a comparative analysis of continuities among political epistemologies developed in the semiperiphery can help us understand the ways in which similar attempts can become antisystemic today.

Die Autorin vertritt die These, dass die US-amerikanische Modernisierungstheorie lediglich ein verhältnismäßig spätes Moment in einer Reihe globaler Designs darstellt, die der Herausbildung des modernen Weltsystems als ideologische Untermauerung gedient haben. Als Beweismaterial analysiert sie den Dependenzansatz und die Modernisierungsdebatte in Rumänien. In beiden Fällen wird die Brauchbarkeit von Dichotomien wie 'Zivilisation und Barbarei', 'Moderne und Feudalismus' in Frage gestellt und die historischen Umstände, die dieses Vokabular auszublenden half, ausgearbeitet. Vor diesem Hintergrund werden die Konsequenzen für eine angemessene Konzeptualisierung der Moderne abgeleitet und theoretischen Ansätze auf ihre Zukunftsfähigkeit hin überprüft. Die Pluralität der Moderne resultiert der Verfasserin zufolge aus ihrem relationalen Charakter, d.h. aus der Tatsache, dass sie seit ihrer Entstehung ein diametral entgegengesetztes 'Anderes' gebraucht und erschaffen hat. (ICG)

The article furthers the claim that many of the weaknesses of Marxist theory that constituted the starting point of critical approaches from Latin American dependency theory to world-systems analysis had been addressed in very similar terms as early as the 1900s. The focus is on intellectual debates in early twentieth-century Romania, especially as engendered by the theory of "forms without substance" as an alternative project of modernization for the periphery and the follow-up confrontation between the socialist Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea and the Poporanist Constantin Stere on the issue of social and economic development.

Die Autoren betrachten den Zusammenhang von sozialem Wandel und Gewalt aus einer makrosoziologisch-gesellschaftstheoretischen Perspektive und möchten mit ihren einleitenden Anmerkungen ein Problembewusstsein für die Phänomenologie und Definitionsproblematik der Gewalt wecken. Nach ihrer Einschätzung sind es sowohl neue Formen von Gewalt als auch neue Wahrnehmungsweisen bereits bekannter Gewaltausprägungen, die für eine zunehmende Intensivierung der Gewaltforschung und der damit einher gehenden Ausweitung der Begriffsgrenzen verantwortlich sind. Die Autoren zeigen jedoch, dass gerade die Verschränkungen zwischen den Sensibilisierungsprozessen und den Selbstbildern der westlichen modernen Gesellschaften die wissenschaftlichen Analysen von Gewalt häufig vor falsche Dilemmata stellen. Sie skizzieren einige Theorieansätze und plädieren für eine Versachlichung des Gewaltdiskurses in Wissenschaft und Forschung. (ICI2)

"During its 500-year history, the modern world-system has seen several shifts in hegemony. Yet, since the decline of the U.S. in the 1970s, no single core power has attained a hegemonic position in an increasingly polarized world. As income inequalities have become more pronounced in core countries, especially in the U.S. and the U.K., global inequalities emerged as a "new" topic of social scientific scholarship, ignoring the constant move toward polarization that has been characteristic of the entire modern world-system. At the same time, the rise of new states (most notably, the BRICS) and the relative economic growth of particular regions (especially East Asia) have prompted speculations about the next hegemon that largely disregard both the longue duree of hegemonic shifts and the constraints that regional differentiations place on the concentration of capital and geopolitical power in one location. Authors in this book place the issue of rising inequalities at the center of their analyses. They explore the concept and reality of semiperipheries in the 21st century world-system, the role of the state and of transnational migration in current patterns of global stratification, types of catching-up development and new spatial configurations of inequality in Europe's Eastern periphery as well as the prospects for the Global Left in the new systemic order. The book links novel theoretical debates on the rise of global inequalities to methodologically innovative approaches to the urgent task of addressing them."--Provided by publisher.

Introduction to Special Issue on Coloniality of Power and Hegemonic Shifts in the World-System