Suchergebnisse

A growing body of scholarship acknowledges the increasing influence of global forces on social institutions and societies on multiple scales. We focus here on the role of globalization processes in shaping collective action and social movements. Three areas of global change and movements are examined: first, long-term global trends and collective action; second, research on national and local challenges to economic globalization, including backlash movements and the types of economic liberalization measures most associated with inducing oppositional movements; and third, the emergence of contemporary transnational social movements. In each of these arenas we address debates on diffusion, intervening mechanisms, and the outcomes of collective mobilization in response to global pressures.

Abstract: The world(-)systems* perspective provides a useful framework for discerning the continuities and discontinuities (emergent properties) of long historical waves of global integration (globalization) and social resistance to (capitalist) globalization. The capitalist world(-)system has experienced long cycles of economic and political integration for centuries and these have been interspersed by periods of social resistance to capitalist globalization, in which disadvantaged, exploited and dominated groups contest the hierarchies that global capitalism and hegemonic states have constructed. In the contemporary period the intensification of capitalist globalization has been accompanied by a strengthening of social resistance and the emergence of new social movements that resist neoliberal globalization and attempt to build alternatives. Careful study of these long waves of globalization and resistance can provide us with important insights that are relevant to the task of building a more humane and democratic global commonwealth in the 21st century. Research and teaching on the role of the new social movements and the historical dialectic between globalization, resistance, and democratization should be a central aspect of the new critical Global(ization) Studies.

This is a study of the growth of cities in four regions over the past 4000 years. We discuss changes in the relationship between political/military power, economic power andcity systems with special attention to the rise of European hegemony and the subsequent rise of East Asian world cities.We compare East Asian urban growth with the original heartland of cities in West Asia and North Africa, as well as Europe and the subcontinent of South Asia. This reveals the trajectories of city growth and decline and the relative importance of the different regions over time.And we reexamine the hypothesis of synchronicities of city growth and decline across distant regions as the Afro-eurasian world-system became more and more integrated.

The three hegemonies of the modern world-system have been the Dutch in the seventeenth century, the British in the nineteenth century and the hegemony of the United States in the twentieth century. Sociologists and political scientists have carefully studied the process of hegemonic rise and decline.Recent research by Rennstich (2001) retools Arrighi's (1994) formulation of the organizational evolutions that have accompanied the emergence of larger and larger hegemons over the last six centuries. Modelski and Thompson (1996) argued that the British successfully managed to enjoy two "power cycles," one in the eighteenth and another in the nineteenth centuries. With this precedent in mind Rennstich considers the possibility that the US might succeed itself in the twenty-first century. Rennstich's analysis of the organizational, cultural and political requisites of the contemporary new lead industries – information technology and biotechnology – imply that the United States has a large comparative advantage that will most probably lead to another round of U.S. pre-eminence in the world-system. But important resistance to genetically engineered products has arisen as consumers and environmentalists worry about the unintended consequences of introducing radically new organisms into the biosphere. This paper will examine the agricultural biotechnology industry as a new lead industry and will consider its possible future impact on the distribution of power in the world-system. This will entail an examination of the loci and timing of private and publicly funded research and development, biotechnology firms that are developing and selling products, and the emergence of national and global policies that are intended to regulate and test genetically engineered products. The recent history of environmental impacts of genetically engineered products will be reviewed, as well as the contentious literature about the supposed risks of agricultural biotechnology. Several scenarios regarding the timing of the onset of biotech profitability and their potential impact on US economic centrality will be developed, and data on both the business history and the emergence of resistance will be employed to examine the likelihood of these possible scenarios.

An understanding of the contemporary constellation of right-wing national and transnational social movements needs to compare the recent movements and the global context with what happened in the first half of the twentieth century to figure out the similarities and differences, and to gain insights about what could be the consequences of the reemergence of populist nationalism and fascist movements. This article uses the comparative evolutionary world-systems perspective to study the global right from 1900 to the present. The point is to develop a better understanding of twenty-first century fascism, populist nationalism, and authoritarian practices and to help construct a praxis for the New Global Left.1

Abstract: World-systems are human interaction networks that display oscillations of expansion and contraction, with occasional large expansions that bring formerly separate regional systems into systemic intercourse with one another. These waves of expansion, now called globalization, have, in the last two centuries, created a single integrated intercontinental political economy in which all national societies are strongly linked. This paper investigates the "pulsations" of regional interaction networks (world-systems) in Afroeurasia over the past 3000 years. The purpose is to determine the causes of a fascinating synchrony that emerged between East Asia and the distant West Asian/Mediterranean region, but did not involve the intermediate South Asian region. The hypothesized causes of this synchrony are climate change, epidemics, trade cycles, and the incursions of Central Asian steppe nomads. This paper formulates a strategy of data gathering, system modeling, and hypothesis testing that can allow us to discover which of these causes were the most important in producing synchrony as the Afroeurasian world-system came into being. To be presented at the conference on "Nature, Raw Materials and Political Economy" held in honor of Stephen Bunker's contribution to political ecology, Madison, November 2, 2002. Thanks to Tom Hall for helpful comments. V. 10-30-02, (7707 words) This paper is available on the web at http://irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows11/irows11.htm

This paper discusses research that is designed to examine the historical trajectory of structural globalization as an attribute of the whole world-system. Did the globalized world economy arrive all at once in a rapid and recent transition from national to global economic networks? Or is the process of international integration a long-term trend that has been going up for centuries only to be noticed recently because it has reached such a high peak? Or, alternatively, is globalization a cyclical phenomenon in which the world-system alternates between periods of national autarchy followed by periods of international economic and political integration?