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About Annual Meeting
Thirty-five years ago Peter Evans identified the crucial structural/relational insight of world-system analysis that claims a “single ongoing division of labor… based on differential appropriation of surplus produced [such that] positions are hierarchically ordered, not just differentiated” (1979:15-16). A vexing issue becomes how to shift and sort places into the strata. According to Wallerstein, these are historically defined, based on “unequal exchange,” a “middling” level in terms of forces of production. So the SP strata simultaneously has a global competitive edge over the core in terms of lower labor costs and an advantage over the periphery via its existing economic base (infrastructure, human and other forms of capital) to implement advanced production processes. A portion of my own empirical research focuses on attempting to empirically capture the relational aspect of the international division of labor via quantitative network analysis that attempts to “model” the world-system, examining international commodity trade. This essay will use the empirics of that analysis as a starting point, and focus on a conceptual discussion of some crucial issues about social change in the 21st century. Are the BRICS best considered S-P, more emerging core states? Where does China “fit”? Are the peripheral states of Europe S-Ps? In attempting to answer some of these questions, I hope to return to some basic issues about what “semi-peripherality” might mean in the future, how it is different from the past, and whether it is still relevant as a category.