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The danger of deflation has been rather frequently mentioned recently among numerous concerns over the European and partly American economies. Analysts cite the Japanese economy which has been suffering from deflation for the last two decades despite the large investments in economy and the government's efforts to increase inflation. Similarly, notwithstanding many trillions of dollars, euros, pounds and yen that were invested in economies over the past few years, the inflation in the Western countries still remains low. On the whole, there are reasons to maintain that European countries suffer from 'the Japanese disease', and this disease can progress or even become chronic. The USA, albeit to a lesser extent, has signs of the disease as well. As a result, the financial infusions can become permanent, as it happened in Japan. The present paper defines reasons of the problem, explains the irregularity of the inflation-deflation processes in the world and also offers some forecasts on this basis that the crisis-depressive phase of development in the global economy will continue for a relatively long time. Based on our analysis of available resources and the theory of long cycles, we suppose that the new crisis will begin in 2020–2021. We also suppose that in the next 5–10 years, the global economy will continue being in the crisis-depression phase with rather sluggish and weak rises. The paper also offers some forecasts for the forthcoming sixth Kondratieff wave (2020 – the 2060/70s), identifies its possible technological basis and discusses possible consequences of the forthcoming technological transformations.

The chiefdom concept is one of the most productive in social anthropology and political evolution. It helps to deeply understand the process of complication of society's structure and the development path from stateless society to early states. However, even when states spread everywhere, chiefdoms still remained political and administrative actors. At present one can find some features of chiefdoms in developing countries (e.g., in some regions of Africa) and in different kinds of organizations especially in illegal and terrorist ones. Thus, using chiefdom theories one can clarify a few basics of such kind of organization as well. Therefore, it makes sense to show how such chiefdom-like structures preserve and develop the features of ancient polities within them. Thus, in the modern world, along with states, one can find numerous alternative social and political organizations, which, to a greater or lesser extent, have some features that are similar to certain ancient polities. How and why is this possible? We hope that this paper will shed some light on this question. However, it requires and deserves further study.

The globalizing world needs more and more the globalizing social knowledge. That is why we experience such an acute defi cit in productive metaconcepts and macromethods that could make it possible for us to study the development of both polities and suprapolitical systems in the global temporal and spatial perspective, that would provide us with a reliable methodology of the connection between the micro- and macrolevels, between the local and the global, with an instrument allowing to compare political systems in an objective way using various parameters, to detect macrotrends within the enormous historical diversity, to identify causal hierarchies affecting processes of political globalization, and so on.

The formation of the Afroeurasian world-system was one of the crucial points of social evolution, starting from which the social evolution rate and effective-ness increased dramatically. In the present article we analyze processes and scales of global integration in historical perspective, starting with the Agrarian Revolution. We connect the main phases of historical globalization with the processes of development of the Afroeurasian world-system. In the framework of the Afroeurasian world-system the integration began a few thousand years Before the Common Era. In this world-system the continental and supracontinen-tal links became rather developed long before the Great Geographic Discoveries and thus, they could quite be denoted as global (albeit in a somehow limited sense). As some researchers are still inclined to underestimate the scale of those links in the pre-Industrial era, it appears necessary to provide additional empiri-cal support for our statement. It also turns necessary to apply a special method-ology (which necessitated the use of the world-system approach). We analyze some versions of periodization of history of globalization. We also propose our own periodization of globalization using as its basis the growing scale of interso-cietal links as an indicator of the level of globalization development.

In this article we analyze processes and scales of global integration in historical perspective, starting with the Agrarian Revolution. We connect the main phases of historical globalization with the processes of the development of the Afroeurasian world-system. In the framework of the Afroeurasian worldsystem the integration began several millennia BCE. In it the continental and supracontinental links became so developed long before the Great Geographic Discoveries and thus they could well be denoted as global (albeit in a somehow limited sense). Among some researchers there is still a tendency to underestimate the scale of those links in the pre-Industrial era; thus, it appeared necessary to provide additional empirical support for our statement. It also turned necessary to apply a special methodology (which necessitated the use of the world-system approach). We analyze some versions of periodization of globalization history. We also propose our own periodization of the globalization history basing on the growth of the scale of intersocietal links as an indicator of the level of globalization development.

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The fact that up to the 1960s world population growth had been characterized by a hyperbolic trend was discovered quite some time ago. A number of mathematical models describing this trend have already been proposed. Some of these models are rather compact but do not account for the mechanisms of this trend; others account for this trend in a very convincing way, but are rather complex. In fact, the general shape of world population growth dynamics could be accounted for with strikingly simple models like the one which we would like to propose ourselves: dN/dt = a (bK – N) N (1); dK/dt = cNK (2), where N is the world population, K is the level of technology/knowledge, bKcorresponds to the number of people (N), which the earth can support with the given level of technology (K). Empirical tests performed by us suggest that the proposed set of two differential equations account for 96.2– 99.78% of all the variation in demographicmacrodynamics of the world in the last 12,000 years. We believe that the patterns observed in pre-modern world population growth are not coincidental at all. In fact, they reflect population dynamics of quite a real entity, the world system. Note that the presence of a more or less well integrated world system comprising most of the world population is a necessary precondition, without which the correlation between the world population numbers generated by hyperbolic growth models and the observed ones would not be especially high. In fact, our findings could be regarded as a striking illustration of the fact well known in complexity studies — that chaotic dynamics at the microlevel can generate a highly deterministic macrolevel behavior. Against this background it is hardly surprising to find that the simplest regularities accounting for extremely high proportions of all the macrovariation can be found just for the largest possible social system — the world system.

Globalization: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow is distinguished by its focus on the systemic aspects of globalization processes. Political, economic, geographic, ecological, social, cultural, ethnic, religious and historical processes are analyzed and their single and joint impacts on globalization are discussed. The purpose is to complement more objective or 'technical' globalization narratives with more direct accounts of social and emotional issues.

This is the second issue of the new series titled Globalistics and Globalization Studies. Globalistics may be regarded as a sort of systemic and more or less integrated 'core' within Global Studies. At present Global Studies function in two main dimensions – in the research of global political, economic, cultural and social processes, on the one hand, and in the realm of teaching – manifesting themselves in the creation of various Global Studies programs and courses for university students who learn to see the world in its entirety and variety. The second dimension is immensely important as the contents of such programs and courses may determine how the world will be comprehended by those people who may decide its fate in a decade or two. This dualistic nature of Global Studies has determined the general direction of our anthology that comprises both the theoretical dimension of Global Studies and their application to the teaching process. The anthology consists of three parts presenting a wide range of views on the meaning of the contemporary epoch, the past and the future of some important global processes as well as the problems and successes in the teaching process of Global Studies. Part 1. Globalization in Historical Retrospective. Part 2. Globalistics, Global Studies, and Global Processes. Part 3. Teaching Global Studies. In the present anthology one can fi nd perceptions of globalization by a number of famous scholars from different countries of the world (Ervin Laszlo, Christopher Chase-Dunn, and others), but one can also get to know rather peculiar visions of globalization by Russian scientists and educators.

Turchin's article achieves significant progress in the modeling of demographic cycles as a basic feature of complex agrarian systems' dynamics. He suggests an extremely simple model accounting for an unusually high percentage of the political-demographic variation, including some features for which earlier models failed to account. Rather than modeling the recovery phase of the demographic cycle as starting immediately after the demographic collapse, which is not observed in reality, the recovery phases of Turchin's model are, more accurately, separated from those of collapse by significant periods of internal warfare that blocks recovery growth. Such intercycles, systematically observed in the agrarian political-demographic dynamics, represent a problem that Turchin has managed to solve in a very elegant and compelling way.

The chiefdom concept is one of the most productive in social anthropology and
political evolution. It helps to deeply understand the process of complication of
society's structure and the development path from stateless society to early
states. However, even when states spread everywhere, chiefdoms still remained
political and administrative actors. At present one can find some features of
chiefdoms in developing countries (e.g., in some regions of Africa) and in different
kinds of organizations especially in illegal and terrorist ones. Thus, using
chiefdom theories one can clarify a few basics of such kind of organization
as well. Therefore, it makes sense to show how such chiefdom-like structures
preserve and develop the features of ancient polities within them.
Thus, in the modern world, along with states, one can find numerous alternative
social and political organizations, which, to a greater or lesser extent, have
some features that are similar to certain ancient polities. How and why is this
possible? We hope that this paper will shed some light on this question. However,
it requires and deserves further study.