scholarly journals Semiperipheries in the World-System: Reflecting Eastern European and Latin American Experiences

2006 ◽  
pp. 321-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuela Boatca

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.

Author(s):  
Christopher Chase-Dunn ◽  
Marilyn Grell-Brisk

The world-system perspective emerged during the world revolution of 1968 when social scientists contemplated the meaning of Latin American dependency theory for Africa. Immanuel Wallerstein, Terence Hopkins, Samir Amin, Andre Gunder Frank, and Giovanni Arrighi developed slightly different versions of the world-system perspective in interaction with each other. The big idea was that the global system had a stratified structure on inequality based on institutionalized exploitation. This implied that the whole system was the proper unit of analysis, not national societies, and that development and underdevelopment had been structured by global power relations for centuries. The modern world-system is a self-contained entity based on a geographically differentiated division of labor and bound together by a world market. In Wallerstein’s version capitalism had become predominant in Europe and its peripheries in the long 16th century and had expanded and deepened in waves. The core states were able to concentrate the most profitable economic activities and they exploited the semi-peripheral and peripheral regions by means of colonialism and the emergent international division of labor, which relies on unequal exchange. The world-system analysts all focused on global inequalities, but their terminologies were somewhat different. Amin and Frank talked about center and periphery. Wallerstein proposed a three-tiered structure with an intermediate semiperiphery between the core and the periphery, and he used the term core to suggest a multicentric region containing a group of states rather than the term center, which implies a hierarchy with a single peak. When the world-system perspective emerged, the focus on the non-core (periphery and semiperiphery) was called Third Worldism. Current terminology refers to the Global North (the core) and the Global South (periphery and semiperiphery).


2020 ◽  
pp. 35-41
Author(s):  
A. Mustafabeyli

In many political researches there if a conclusion that the world system which was founded after the Second world war is destroyed of chaos. But the world system couldn`t work while the two opposite systems — socialist and capitalist were in hard confrontation. After collapse of the Soviet Union and the European socialist community the nature of intergovernmental relations and behavior of the international community did not change. The power always was and still is the main tool of international communication.


2021 ◽  
pp. 154-167
Author(s):  
A. V. Khokhlova

The article considers a transformation of the Western European motif of the ‘wild hunt’ in V. Korotkevich’s story King Stakh’s Wild Hunt. The author gives an overview of folklore motifs typical of the ‘wild hunt’ phenomenon in the Western and Eastern European traditions. With origins in folklore, the ‘wild hunt’ motifs find their way into works of many writers in the late modern to contemporary period: the ‘wild hunt’ is localised on the edge of the mythological space and retains a fixed set of meanings. Most commonly, the ‘wild hunt’ features at the intersection of two domains. The first one is a complex of motifs inherited from the ancient myths and legends of the Germanic ‘Wütendes Heer.’ The second consists of the attributes of actual hunting. Taking a cue from The Hound of the Baskervilles — an obvious inspiration behind the story — and making use of the motifs traditionally associated with the legend, Korotkevich deconstructs the medieval myth, reducing it to an adventurous technique, only to reinstate it with new and unique meanings. The ‘wild hunt’ becomes a symbol of the ignorance, fear and despondency that have the world in their grip.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 50-52
Author(s):  
Natalia Aleksandrovna Tarasova ◽  

The article deals with the new project — the Internet portal Dostoevsky and the World, launched by the Pushkin House for the 200th anniversary of the writer’s birth. The work offers the basic information on the project. The Internet resource that would host the most representative examples of the reception of Dostoevsky’s personality and work in various epochs and in various countries is a great way to familiarize the modern reader with the wide scope of interest in Dostoevsky in the past and present. The project focuses on the non-academic reception, philosophical and aesthetic interpretations, the attitudes of public fi gures, writers, stage and movie directors, publicists, etc. The collection of case studies of Dostoevsky’s reception by today’s cultural fi gures, as well as the publication of the previously unknown writer-related sources of the past years, are of particular importance.


Author(s):  
Walter D. Mignolo

This chapter outlines a map of the border of the empires whose tensions contributed to the fabrication of a homogeneous notion of Latin America in the colonial horizon of modernity. These conflicting homogeneous entities are part of the imaginary of the modern/colonial world system. They are the grounding of a system of geopolitical values, of racial configurations, and of hierarchical structures of meaning and knowledge. To think “Latin America” otherwise, in its heterogeneity rather than in its homogeneity, in the local histories of changing global designs is not to question a particular form of identification but all national/colonial forms of identification in the modern/colonial world system. These are precisely the forms of identification that contribute to the reproduction of the imaginary of the modern/colonial world system and the coloniality of power and knowledge implicit in the geopolitical articulation of the world.


Author(s):  
Jeroen Duindam

The turbulent decades around 1800 did not spell the end of dynasty, but they carried the message that alternative forms of power might in the long run gain ascendancy. While royal legitimacy was now openly contested, republics remained the exception until 1918. ‘The dynastic impulse in the modern world’ considers the breakdown of empires that led to the creation of new states, many of them monarchies. It shows how modern autocrats mimic forms of dynastic representation, promoting their families, and designating their own successors. Finally, it highlights the remarkable continuities of dynastic practice in ‘political families’ and family businesses around the world.


Author(s):  
Robert W. Hefner

In recent years, scholars and policy analysts have grappled with the question of the relation of Islamic education to politics, public ethics, and modern social change. This chapter examines the origins, social role, and varieties of Islamic education, and their transformation in modern times. The chapter shows that, although Muslim educators in a few parts of the late-modern world have been resistant to efforts at educational reform, the great majority have responded positively and energetically. They have done so in response to both the hopes and aspirations of Muslim parents and youth, and the recognition that moral and intellectual progress in Muslim-majority societies requires a dialogue with and integration of the sciences of the world with the sciences of revelation.


2004 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 585-608 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Cox

It is an empire without a consciousness of itself as such, constantly shocked that its good intentions arouse resentment abroad. But that does not make it any the less of an empire, with a conviction that it alone, in Herman Melville's words, bears ‘the ark of liberties of the world.If all history according to Marx has been the history of class struggle, then all international history, it could just as well be argued, has been the struggle between different kinds of Empire vying for hegemony in a world where the only measure was success and the only means of achieving this was through war. Indeed, so obvious is this fact to historians – but so fixated has the profession of International Relations been with the Westphalian settlement – that it too readily forgets that imperial conquest, rather than mere state survival, has been the principle dynamic shaping the contours of the world system from the sixteenth century onwards. Empires, however, were not just mere agents existing in static structures. They were living entities that thought, planned, and then tried to draw the appropriate lessons from the study of what had happened to others in the past.


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