Compassion as Commodity

While it was common for Victorian working-class women to be employed outside of the home, a paid occupation spelled the end of gentility for their bourgeois counterparts. Yet many of these ladies found respectable alternatives to make a living. For o...

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Containers of “Meat, Blood, and Madness”

In the capitalist world-system, the gendered dynamics of power often deny women autonomy to their own bodies, force upon them the responsibilities of care work and motherhood while criminalizing abortion to further subjugate the feminized body. The s...

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Reading Hunger and Exhaustion in Clarice Lispector’s A Hora de Estrela

Coined by Karl Marx in Capital (1867), the “metabolic rift” or “ecological rift” model describes the cycle of extraction, exportation and exhaustion present in agricultural production and, in particular, highlights the unsustainability of this ecolog...

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The Impact of Economic Dependence on Economic Growth in Egypt

The dearth of empirical research on economic dependence in Egypt since the 1980s underscores the significance of this study, which investigates the relationship between economic dependence and economic growth in Egypt from 1977 to 2021. Utilizing the...

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Border Disputes in the Global Periphery amid Declining U.S. Hegemonic Influence

Contrary to popular expectations about a post-oil future, oil remains an important commodity in the global political economy and the world-system, in which peripheral economies rely on the export of raw material to earn foreign exchange. We argue tha...

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Rethinking “World Wars” Through a World-Systems Lens

What are the key characteristics of the current instabilities of the capitalist world-system, and how does it compare to previous periods that led to world wars? What factors are driving the similarities and differences between the present systemic c...

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AI and the Epistemologies of the South

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Ecological Unequal Exchange

The Marxist theory of unequal exchange challenges the idea that trade never results in outright losses. As a biophysical process, ecological unequal exchange reveals global disparities in resource flows. Using material flow analysis, alternative indi...

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Wallerstein after ’68

This article examines the intellectual foundations of Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis, focusing on the formative period of the late 1960s and 1970s. It traces how Wallerstein’s evolving engagement with Marxism—shaped through dialogue an...

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Global Capital and Amphibian Extinctions

Sri Lanka has the highest number of recorded amphibian extinctions and most of the island’s remaining amphibian species are threatened with extinction. From a critical political-economic perspective that integrates previously disconnected lines of an...

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Collapse and Transformation? Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Energy Crisis of “Showcase” Peripheries in World-Ecological Perspective

The rise of oil-fueled accumulation in the global North produced an energy regime that by the mid-twentieth century was being extended to the semiperipheral and peripheral zones of the world-system. There it took the form of petroleum-driven developm...

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Sixth Century Global Climatic Disaster, the Origins of Islam, and its World-System Consequences

We suggest viewing the origins of Islam against the background of the sixth century global climatic disaster and the Arabian socio-ecological crisis that was one of its parts. Most socio-political systems of the Arabs reacted to the socio-ecological...

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The Popular Anthropocene in Global Climate (Dis)Governance

The climate emergency is posing an existential threat to millions of species on Earth—including humans. Despite advances in climate science and the consolidation of global climate governance—which establishes processes, rules, and agreements that def...

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Shamanic Thinking in the Capitalocene

The paper interweaves the concepts of two contemporary thinkers in order to describe the ongoing socio-environmental crisis. Based on the books Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital by Jason W. Moore (2015) and The Fa...

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Refusing Ecocide

To place the ongoing disaster of climate breakdown in political-economic context and explore future possibilities, this article mobilizes three concepts central to historical materialism which form a “trifecta of power”: accumulation, imperialism, an...

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