The Institute for Research on World-Systems

The stratification of societies in the modern world system of societies is essential; however, it is not developed substantially. Therefore, with the aim to elaborate a coherent system of aspects, criteria, and measurements of stratification of modern societies, the author applies theoretical decomposition of the aspects of intersocietal stratification into criteria, develops its measurements, and argues the relevance of interpreting them as stratifying ones. As a result, ten aspects and twenty-five criteria with the respective measurements of stratification are discriminated.

To stratify modern societies in the process of intersocietal selection, it is necessary to define the empirical indicators of such stratification. Therefore, to construct the classification of indicators of intersocietal stratification, the author reviews the existing indicators, develops new ones, and structures them into a coherent scheme. As a result of the research, a complex of forty empirical indicators of intersocietal stratification in the process of intersocietal selection has been elaborated.

Little systematic research has been done on the social composition of the hundreds of thousands of people that attend the World Social Forum, or how their background characteristics and political affiliations might shape their political views. This paper addresses these questions through an analysis of original survey data of 640 participants of the 2005 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. We found that most WSF participants were young, from Brazil and neighboring countries, expressed radical views, and actively participated in social movements. Most also belonged to relatively privileged social groups; most were highly educated (a proxy measure for class), and “white” was the most common racial identity. Results from our logistic regression analysis indicate that there were statistically significant differences among respondents’ political goals and preferred strategies for social change based on their world system position, race, and membership in different types of organizations; there were not statistically significant differences in respondents’ political views based on their gender, age, or years of education however.

This paper uses the results of a survey of participants at the World Social Forum that was held in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2005 to examine North/South issues and differences within the progressive sector of global civil society. Our purpose is to reflect on the problems of overcoming contradictions among and within counter-hegemonic transnational social movements in order to promote more effective cooperation in global social justice projects.

East, West, Central and South Asia originally formed somewhat separate cultural zones and networks of interaction among settlements and polities, but during the late Bronze and early Iron Ages these largely separate regional systems came into increasing interaction with one another. Central Asian nomadic steppe pastoralist polities and agricultural oasis settlements mediated the East/West and North/South interactions. Earlier research has discovered that the growth/decline phases of empires in East and West Asia became synchronous around 140 BCE and that this synchrony lasted until about 1800 CE. This paper develops the comparative world-systems perspective on Central Asia and examines the growth and decline of settlements, empires and steppe confederations in Central Asia to test the hypothesis that the East/West empire synchrony may have been caused by linkages that occurred with and across Central Asia.

Abstract: This paper uses quantitative estimates of the sizes of cities and empires to tentatively identify upward sweeps in which uniquely large cities and empires emerged in the Central Political/military network since the Bronze Age, and it formulates a causal model to explain both the cyclical rise and fall of cities and empires and the upward sweep

The density and contours of networks of transnational and international economic integration are hypothesized by many theorists to be causally related to the patterns of cooperation and conflict. [1] The usual notion is that trade creates ties of symmetrical interdependence, which are likely to inhibit conflict. We seek to test this hypothesis in the 19th and early 20th century run-up to World War I. We examine the relationship between the structure of conflict and the contours of trade ties during the 19th century wave of globalization and deglobalization. How were the international trade ties related to the patterns of conflict and alliance that emerged during World War I? Germany was linked by trade, immigration and elite family connections with both Britain and the United States, and yet both World Wars I and II pitted the Germans against Britain and the U.S. But were the trade ties of Germany with its enemies large and significant relative to the total international trade, or were they insignificant elements that had little bearing on the proclivities of nation-states to fight one another? We replicate and improve upon earlier studies that used correlational analysis of nation-state dyads (e.g. Barbieri 2002) and wel also employ formal network analysis to test the earlier finding of a positive relationship between trade ties and enmity.

] This is a draft of a paper to be presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, in Montréal, Canada, at 10:30 am on August 11, 2006 at the session on World Systems organized by Farshad Araghi. It is a product of the Global Elites Research Group based at the Institute for Research on World-Systems, and has included among its members for 2005-06 Kenneth Barr, Anders Carlson, Christopher Chase-Dunn, Rebecca Giem, Shoon Lio, Yvonne Hsu, Linda Kim, Jonathan Krause, Kirk Lawrence, Richard Niemeyer, Thomas Reifer, Christopher Schmitt, Nuray Terzi, and Jessica Tiu. The group has been supported by the Sociology Program of the National Science Foundation Grant

This is a study of contemporary global party formation in world historical perspective. Recent efforts to organize progressive forces are intended to have a democratizing effect on global governance and the operation of the world economy. The activists want to avoid the mistakes of the past while organizing an effective effort move in the direction of a more just global system. This new project needs to be understood in world historical context with attention to the implications of the history of transnational social movements, world revolutions and the evolution of global governance over the last four centuries.

This paper uses a nested interaction networks approach to interpret patterns of social change in the late prehistoric U.S. southwest in comparative and world historical perspective.