World Systems Analysis

"Resources of Resistance seeks to address urgent questions surrounding the concept and roles of resources within the postcolonial world and capitalist world-system by drawing new, vital and provocative connections across a range of disciplines.

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This article analyses the redefinition of global discourse in semi-peripheral settings; it proposes a model for the semi-peripheral recontextualization of critical discourses originating from the western core of the global intellectual system. The process of redefinition of global discourses in semi-peripheral settings appears to involve their parallel appropriation by actors whose positions can be reconstructed through Bourdieu’s field concept, in particular through the usage of his theory of cultural capital in the field of contemporary Polish sociology. The model presented in the article emphasizes a strong homology between the political field and the broader field of social sciences in peripheral countries. It appears that they are usually structured according to specific peripheral pro- vs anti-centre cleavages. Peripheral fields of power, which are organized around this binary logic, tend to produce specific, often contradictory, parallel redefinitions of western critical theory. Meanings become politically defined and distant from their original context. One of the paradoxical effects of these mechanisms is that the concepts which originally emerge as critical theory, in a semi-peripheral context, are often used in legitimization of and as apology for a neoliberal social order.

""Understanding the measurement and determinants of human rights attitudes has significant social and policy implications for advocacy and activist organizations. The strongest contributions to academic understandings of human rights attitudes come from political psychology. This field, however, often disagrees on the measurement and determinants of human rights attitudes. Most academic work analyzes human rights attitudes by surveying respondents in Western, democratized nations and uses college-aged samples. Newer work uses sociological theories to explore differences in human rights attitudes using internationally representative samples and relies on existing international surveys. This paper offers a critical review of academic work analyzing human rights attitudes, advocates for the use of existing surveys to make international comparisons, and moves towards sociological theories that emphasize social location, group and self-interests, expanded views of political beliefs and behaviors,
and the growing importance of new forms of citizenship in the world society.""

We live in the twilight of neoliberalism: the ruling classes can no longer rule as before, and ordinary people are no longer willing to be ruled in the old way. Pursued by global elites since the 1970s, neoliberalism is defined by dispossession and ever-increasing inequality. The refusal to continue to be ruled like this - "ya basta!" - appears in an arc of resistance stretching from rural India to the cities of the global North.  From this network of movements, new visions are emerging of a future beyond neoliberalism. We Make Our Own History responds to these visions by reclaiming Marxism as a theory born from activist experience and practice.  This book marks a break both with established social movement theory, and with those forms of Marxism which treat the practice of social movement organising as an unproblematic process. It shows how movements can develop from local conflicts to global struggles; how neoliberalism operates as a social movement from above, and how popular struggles can create new worlds from below.

In recent years, economies in the area known as Mesoamerica have been increasingly characterized by world-systems models of production and exchange.  This study examines the underlying mechanisms of such models through an instrumental and statistical analysis of small obsidian projectile weaponry dating to the Late Postclassic period (A.D. 1250-1520) from the Maya Lowlands of Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico.  Several questions remain unanswered, including whether Maya ethnopolitical factions and alliances played a strong role in in the movement of exotics.  This regional study generated geological provenance data from 798 small obsidian points and 2,656 debitage fragments using both PXRF and visual sourcing.  The resulting source designations were analyzed using Social Network Analysis (UCINET), revealing at least four distinct subnetworks of obsidian point procurement in the Maya Lowlands belonging to nine different ethnopolities.  Such information reveals the complexities of Postclassic trade, and stresses the importance of local political geography in world-systems approaches.