2025-09-15
Toufic Sarieddine
Washington has imposed an arms embargo to punish growing Sino-Cambodian military cooperation, yet Cambodia’s subsequent arms imports from China and the latter’s dominant investments via the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) have pushed it deeper into Beijing’s orbit. In this context, this article addresses scholarship on China-U.S. hegemonic rivalry by examining China’s hegemonic features vis-à-vis Cambodia using the features of peripheralization and economic dominance per world-systems analysis in order to gauge whether U.S. hegemonic unipolarity has unraveled therein, with China emerging as hegemon. We find that, through BRI investment and the ruling Hun family network, China has achieved significant gains in economic dominance via facilitated copper and rice exports and increased tech imports by Cambodia, resulting in substantial trade surplus and production dominance. However, this economic influence remains incomplete due to Washington’s continued role as Cambodia’s primary export destination and the persistent use of the U.S. dollar, illustrating the complex, contested nature of hegemonic transitions in small state contexts.
2025-09-15
Peter Wilkin
This paper examines the challenges to the dominant Western geoculture of the modern world-system posed by the ongoing war on Gaza. Historically, the West’s geocultural power has seen it successfully construct, maintain, and defend a self-image as one in which it represents an international community which adheres to universal liberal values: human rights, international law, and the use of force in international relations only when sanctioned by law. However, the ongoing war on Gaza (which is best viewed as a war undertaken by the West, not simply Israel) has exposed the West’s actions to unprecedented critical scrutiny. The paper argues that the traditional mechanisms by which the West has built and maintained its geocultural dominance (media, education, intellectual culture) have been undermined in the digital age by the proliferation of new media forms. In short, the West has struggled to control the narrative that Israel is defending civilization against barbarism. The reality, as many critics have noted, is the opposite—the West defends barbarism against civilization.
2025-09-15
Ryan Gunderson, William Charles, Claiton Fyock
Sri Lanka has the highest number of recorded amphibian extinctions and most of the island’s remaining amphibian species are threatened with extinction. From a critical political-economic perspective that integrates previously disconnected lines of analysis in herpetological conservation, development, land use change, and colonial and neocolonial histories, we argue that these extinctions and extinction risks should not be understood as a localized event, but, instead, in relation to global networks that emerged from the international development of capitalism. Mass deforestation of the Southern Highlands, the region of Sri Lanka with the highest diversity of endemic and endangered amphibians, began following the commodification of land to establish plantations under British colonial rule. The core-periphery power relations installed during colonization remain in the neocolonial period, undergirding the forces driving deforestation to this day. Higher-income countries and multinational corporations have financially benefited from Sri Lanka’s “development” at the expense of many Sri Lankans and the island’s diverse amphibian populations and their habitats, a relationship consistent with the theory of ecologically unequal exchange.
2025-04-17
William K. Carroll
To place the ongoing disaster of climate breakdown in political-economic context and explore future possibilities, this article mobilizes three concepts central to historical materialism which form a “trifecta of power”: accumulation, imperialism, and hegemony. These are applied to the current regime of obstruction, comprised of an amalgamation of the deeply seated project of fossil capitalism and the emergent project of climate capitalism. Three alternative projects—Green New Deal, Degrowth, and Buen Vivir (“living well”) —move us toward real solutions, but need to be braided into a wider transformative project that addresses the trifecta of power that reproduces capitalism as a way of life. Eco-socialism provides such a synthesis. It offers a just, viable economic alternative to capitalism capable of addressing the climate emergency. It provides an alternative hegemonic project capable of unifying a post-capitalist historical bloc. It challenges the geopolitical economy of ecological imperialism and opens toward a world order organized for cooperation, solidarity, and peace. These gains stem from three important elements in the historical materialist theory informing eco-socialism. First, a comprehension of the dialectical relation between forces and relations of production as central to socio-ecological transformation. Second, an emphasis on the imperative to replace the anarchy of the market, capital’s governing mechanism with democratic planning. Third, identification of the social forces that can be brought together to form an historical bloc capable of leading the transformation. Our current trajectory is perilous, but there is still time to correct course.
2025-04-17
Crelis Rammelt, Raimon C. Ylla-Catala
The Marxist theory of unequal exchange challenges the idea that trade never results in outright losses. As a biophysical process, ecological unequal exchange reveals global disparities in resource flows. Using material flow analysis, alternative indicators, and new country clusters, this study updates earlier research and identifies a new phase of intensified disparities since 2015, with rising net outflows of resources from low-income countries (LICs) to high-income countries (HICs). From 1970 to 2024, HICs accumulated 290 gigatons (Gt) of raw material equivalents (RMEs) as net imports, while upper-middle-income, lower-middle-income, and low-income countries net-exported 164 Gt, 53.1 Gt, and 9.6 Gt, respectively. In a relative sense, LICs consume 13.3 percent less RMEs than they extract domestically, while HICs consume 25.4 percent more. This study challenges assumptions about global divisions of labor: not all HICs are net-importers of RMEs, nor are all LICs net-exporters. However, net-exporter HICs earn more than net-exporter LICs, and net-importer HICs spend less than net-importer LICs. On average, LICs export 6 tons of RMEs to earn what HICs earns from 1 ton; for net-exporter LICs, this ratio rises to 12.7 tons. The more a country exploits the environment, domestically or abroad, the more it earns.
2025-04-17
James Parisot
The goal of this paper is to rethink the timeline through which scholars have conceived of the history of capitalism and imprisonment. Scholars including Oliver C. Cox, Fernand Braudel, and Giovanni Arrighi, among others, have presented a story of capitalism centered around the Italian-city states, followed by the Netherlands, Britain, and the United States. Yet discussions on the origins of capitalism and imprisonment, eventually resulting in the invention of the penitentiary as an institution of reform, usually start around the sixteenth century. Incorporating insights from both of these angles, this paper shows the historical ways that different centers of capitalist power developed prisons in the context of the broad contours of the history of capitalism from fourteenth century Italy to nineteenth century England.
2025-04-17
Jeremy Santora
Lex Capitalocenae addresses a lacuna in the Transition Debate by reconstructing the origins of international law in the formation of the capitalist world-ecology in the long sixteenth century (c. 1450–1650). In doing so, this paper bridges a rift in Marxist legal scholarship between the commodity form theorists who emphasize the importance of doctrine and the social property form theorists who stress the determinative role of legal practices. Unacknowledged in this exchange is Wallerstein’s historical-geographic account of the transition and its development by Moore into a political Marxism on a world-scale. Through this perspective, I empirically narrate the centrality of legal transformations surrounding property, territoriality, and Naturalism. The formation of capitalism as a world-ecology, as a way of organizing human and extra-human life, cannot be understood without accounting for the emergence of its legal infrastructure and its dualistic source code—Civilization and Nature—amidst the long sixteenth century. It was only through the failure of the Spanish imperial project that concepts of property, territoriality, and Natural law were revolutionized to create the juridical basis for the capitalist world-ecology and its political structure of nation-states. This geohistorical reconstruction of law, life, and the rise of capitalism allows us to better grasp contemporary debates over planetary law in the climate crisis.
2024-08-30
Nicholas Theis, Mauricio Betancourt, Amanda Sikirica
Ecologically unequal exchange has enjoyed several decades of rich theoretical and empirical scholarship. Quantitative assessments of the theory in sociology typically sample lower income nations to see whether more trading to high income nations contributes to environmental problems in the former. In this paper, we explore ecologically unequal exchange theory, as well as related traditions, to draw attention to how these theories develop relational understandings of global advantage and disadvantage in socioecological terms. Thus, we argue that relational methods, like social network analysis, among other approaches, better align with the underlying theoretical framework in the research area. More specifically, ecologically unequal exchange’s emphasis on “extractive peripheries” calls for those geographic zones to be the primary site of analysis as opposed to bifurcating nations based on income. We specifically propose social network tools and methods, such as position/role analyses, because they can directly analyze trade data to construct categories of nations, such as extractive export sites. Generally, we argue that these methods better approximate the underlying theory, while acknowledging the utility of the longstanding approach, calling for methodological diversification in general and embracing relational methods in particular.
2024-08-30
Neema Langa
Current cross-national research suggests that increased economic dependence by peripheral countries on core ones is associated with poor maternal health outcomes and greater socioeconomic inequalities in the periphery. However, not enough attention has been given to analyzing how this economic dependence—via foreign direct investment (FDI), importation, and exportation between peripheral and core nations—specifically influences periphery utilization of postnatal care. Utilizing a world-systems framework, this study examines data from the Tanzania Demographic Health Survey (TDHS) and World Development Indicators (WDI) from the World Bank to shed light on the detrimental impacts of economic dependence on Tanzania’s postnatal care utilization between 2010–2016. Findings show that data constructed around socioeconomic status, rural/urban residence, and region disclose noteworthy negative correlations for importation, exportation, foreign direct investment, and Tanzanian postnatal care utilization over 2010–2016. Even after controlling for these factors, it was observed that marginalized women in Tanzania continued to have significantly lower utilization of both mother's and newborn postnatal care during this period. Higher and statistically significant inequalities in the use of newborn postnatal care were also found for rural women with less than secondary education compared to urban women with the same education level. These findings highlight the need to consider economic dependence on core countries when crafting policies and strategies for addressing disproportional effects on postnatal healthcare utilization among underserved women in Tanzania.
2024-08-30
Rallie Murray
Editors' introduction to the Journal of World-Systems Research 30 (2) Summer/Autumn issue.
2024-04-17
Charlotte Spear
Studies have noted a dependency on sex work to “make do” in economies ravaged by foreign debt (Harrison 1991; Obregón 2018), necessitating a framing of the dynamics of sex work through a globalized system of enforced debt. This paper explores sex workers’ rights in post-quake Haiti and contemporary Jamaica, through an examination of Makenzy Orcel’s The Immortals (2020) and Nicole Dennis-Benn’s Here Comes the Sun (2017). Like global debt systems, the exploitation of sex workers relies on a politics of dependency and constructed narratives of victimhood. This results in the refusal to recognize sex work as autonomous labor, meaning sex workers do not possess the protections of labor rights (Mgbako 2019). A literary examination of these debates exposes global debt’s modes of subject creation and the powerful resistance inherent in resubjectifying sex workers as conditionally agential rights claimants. This therefore reflects the Warwick Research Collective’s (WReC) suggestion that world-literature registers the “single but radically uneven world-system” in its form and content (2015). By exposing the tensions in subject-making at the heart of both debt economies and sex workers’ rights debates, Orcel and Dennis-Benn create feminized spaces to narrate sex workers’ negotiations of patriarchal-capitalist structures that peripheralize them.
2024-04-17
Federica Lupati
Orality has always been the main channel through which culture and knowledge has passed onto generations of Indigenous peoples in Brazil. Yet, today, the need to resist cultural assimilation or, even worse, annihilation, has led to the creation of new, written materials where Indigenous people can speak for themselves by relating their history, defending their identity, and their cultural territory. Among these, Brazilian geographer, poet, and activist Márcia Wayna Kambeba of the Omágua/Kambeba people uses literature as a space where decolonial thought and traditional knowledge meet to build a philosophical, political, and poetic view on indigenous identity in general and on the experience of Indigenous women in particular. Drawing from previous studies on Brazilian Indigenous literature, decolonial theory, and decolonial feminism, this paper discusses Kambeba’s works and underpins the relevance and need to examine the specificity of the experience of Brazilian Indigenous women writers as fundamental participants in the periphery of the world-literature to discuss the postcolonial configurations of identities in present-day Brazilian society.
2024-04-17
Madeleine Sinclair
This article considers how a contemporary wave of Caribbean short story writers re-work the language of folkloric irrealism as a tool of critique against the structural inequalities ingrained in the patriarchal capitalist world-system. Building on the Warwick Research Collective’s (2015: 72) examination of how irrealist aesthetics correspond to the “violent reorganization of social relations engendered by cyclical crisis,” it considers how transplanted folk figures attend to the distinctly gendered geographies of unevenness produced by the expansion of capitalist modernization. This article first unpacks the significance of the short story as a distinct vector for folkloric re-inscription, tracing the form’s dialogic interconnection with folk orality and its unique responsiveness to registering the processes of uneven development in Caribbean societies. Secondly, it offers close readings of selected short stories from collections including Nalo Hopkinson’s Skin Folk (2018), Breanne Mc Ivor’s Where There Are Monsters (2019) and Leone Ross’s Come Let Us Sing Anyway (2017). Tracking a resistant aesthetic of folkloric corporeality, it considers how these writers re-animate oral poetics to critique the interrelated problems of global racial capitalism and what Silvia Federici describes as capitalism’s new war waged against women’s bodies in the current phase of accumulation (Federici 2018).