Still Partners and Still Dissident After All These Years? Wallerstein, World Revolutions and the World-Systems Perspective

SUMMARY

This essay owes its origins to the provocative title of a recent article by Immanuel Wallerstein: The Rise and Future Demise of World-systems Analysis (1998a). Demise? What might this mean? The title evokes, of course, Wallersteins pathbreaking 1974 essay that spoke of The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System. Twenty-?ve years later, Wallerstein is bold enough to speak of the demise of the perspective, a perspective that now encompasses a global group of scholars. For world-systems scholarship has, since 1974, thrived in book series, journals, universities and professional organizationscreating in the process a world-systems diaspora scattered around the planet.