Product Description: The World Social Forum quickly became the largest political gathering in human history and continues to offer a direct challenge to the extreme inequities of corporate-led globalisation. It has expanded its presence and continues to be an exciting experiment in global and participatory democracy...read more

Product Description: Although the United States is currently the world's only military and economic superpower, the nation's superpower status may not last. The possible futures of the global system and the role of U.S. power are illuminated by careful study of the past...read more

Product Description: Although the United States is currently the world's only military and economic superpower, the nation's superpower status may not last. The possible futures of the global system and the role of U.S. power are illuminated by careful study of the past...read more

Product Description: The authors argue that the idea of "socialism" as collective rationality and popular democracy is far from dead. They describe a spiral of capitalism and socialism - of economic expansion and social progress - that creates repeated opportunities for positive transformation at the global level...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The fall of communism, the emergence of 'the information age,' and the expansion of economic globalism are the points of departure for this new edition of Chase-Dunn's landmark book. The author shows how these seemingly new developments fit with earlier patterns of global formation and change, extending the influential model that drew wide attention to this award-winning book...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Spanning ten thousand years of social change, this book examines the ways in which world-systems evolve. A comparative study of stateless societies, state-based regional empires, and the modern global capitalist political economy, it reveals the underlying processes at work in the reproduction and transformation of social, economic, and political structures.Christopher Chase-Dunn and Thomas Hall show that stateless societies developed in the context of regional intersocietal networks that differed significantly from larger and more hierarchical world-systems. The processes by which chiefdoms rose and fell are similar to the ways in which states, empires, and modern hegemonic core states have experienced uneven development. Most world-systems exhibit a pattern of political centralization and decentralization, but the mechanisms and processes of change can vary greatly.Looking at the systematic similarities and differences among small scale, middle-sized, and global world-systems, the authors address such questions as: Do all world-systems have core/periphery hierarchies in which the development of one area necessitates the underdevelopment of another? How were kin-based logics of social integration transformed into state-based tributary logics, and how did capitalism emerge within the interstices of tributary states and empires to eventually become the predominant logic of accumulation? How did the rise of commodity production and the eventual dominance of capitalist accumulation modify the processes by which political centers rise and fall?Rise and Demise offers far-reaching explanations of social change, showing how the comparative study of world-systems increases our understanding of early history, the contemporary global system, and future possibilities for world society.

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Product Description: Do investments by multinational corporations in less developed countries enhance or hinder economic development in those countries? This volume presents a re-evaulation of twenty-seven of the most important studies which were carried out to answer this question...read more

Product Description: What is the role of socialist states in the capitalist world economy? How do the dynamics of capitalism distort and limit national economic planning as an instrument of socialism? Answers to such questions, based on the world-system perspective, are propounded and attacked in original essays...read more