Suchergebnisse

A book with a foreword by Pat Clawson of the National Defense University and editor of ORBIS, and dedicated to Ronald Reagan and Target Ozxal, announces its U.S. far-right wing political pedigree literally up front. However the book is chock full of information, alas most already well known to anyone even remotely familiar with the problematique under review; but it also offers some incisive analysis. The twelve contributed chapters by fourteen authors and coauthors are divided into three parts dedicated to examining and analyzing the general history and mutual background of the Caspian Sea region; to the ?ve littoral states of Azerbaijan, Russia, Iran, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan; and to three 'external' interested states, the United States, Turkey, and Georgia. Nonetheless, the review by each author goes well beyond the nominative boundaries assigned to him or her and trespasses over into the topics, territories and their relations assigned to other authors. Quite prop-erly so, in view of the mutually complex real-life interrelations in the Caspian Sea Basin, so that no topic or state could be adequately understood in itself other than in relation to the others. Indeed, we are witnessing the contemporary continuation of the nineteenth century "Great Game" for the control of Central Eurasia. However, the oil connection also reaches well beyond Caspian Sea and must make this book pertinent also to readers of this journal.

This essay is my personal and intellectual tribute to Immanuel Wallerstein. It takes the form of my also personal intellectual account of our ?rst independent, then joint, and again increasingly separate journeys through the maze of the world [-] system with and without a hyphen. Imagine our relations as a horizontal Y shaped rope. It began with strands that, in the 1960s, ran parallel, becoming intertwined during the 1970s and 1980s until the strands (or at least some) separated again in the 1990s, going off in increasingly different directions like a horizontal Y. Why? My answer is both circumstantial and personal, in which the personal choices and trajectories are driven primarily by world and local political circumstance. Of course, my account re?ects my own perspective on this story. However it also includes other colleagues and friends of Immanuel's and mine, in particular our co-authors in several books and edited volumes, Giovanni Arrighi and Samir Amin, with whom I can check this account. Others, alas, are no longer with us.