Janet Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony remains a landmark in both World-Systems Analysis and global medieval historiography. The claim that the height of Mongol Eurasian hegemony c.1250-1350 formed an inflection point in Afro-Eurasian integration remains compelling after more than thirty five years, but many of the theoretical and empirical details can be revised. Theoretically, the long thirteenth century identified by Abu-Lughod saw the final coalescence of a world-market in a pre-existing Afro-Eurasian world-system, rather than a novel world-system as she had argued. This world-market was formed by the secular trend towards the interregional integration of capital circuits, as Abu-Lughod described, and constituted an Afro-Eurasian Commercial Revolution. Nevertheless the world-market spanned a world-system constituted by tributary rather than capitalist regimes of accumulation, resulting in distinct dynamics and tendencies from those theorised for the modern capitalist world-economy. This argument is developed empirically through analysis of the Mongol world-empire, the definitive development in Abu-Lughod’s vision. Central Eurasian nomadism is presented as a variant type of tributary regime, which shaped the patterns and rhythms of the world-market at the height of commercialisation. Thus Abu-Lughod’s overall vision is renovated but reinforced, establishing new claims to be tested in future research, especially the long history of capital accumulation in the tributary regimes that constituted the medieval Afro-Eurasian world-system, both sedentary and nomadic.
The article analyzes the direction, mechanisms, and causes through which President Trump’s actions contribute to the destruction of the foundations of U.S. influence in the world and to the transformation of the world order. For almost two decades we have been observing such an important phenomenon as the reconfiguration of the World-System, which means that the World-System is in a systemic crisis and in a state of deep transformation which is rapidly changing the political landscape – both domestic and international. This crisis is expressed in the intensification of contradictions, the growth of conflicts, and the spread of other turbulent and destructive political processes that destabilize the global situation, even as the climate crisis deepens. These processes are closely connected with the weakening and destruction of the existing world order and with preparations for the formation of a new one. The article shows the causes and stages of development of this process. It concludes that, with the new administration of Donald Trump, a new phase in the acceleration of World-System reconfiguration has begun under the influence of the chaotic actions of the United States. This phase can be described as radical reconfiguration. As a result, we are caught in a whirlpool of destabilizing events that indicate the fairly rapid erosion of the previous world order. The question being discussed is whether the activities of Trump and Trumpists can be viewed as a kind of revolution from above.
This article interrogates the post-2008 configuration of the capitalist world-system through the dual lens of World-Systems Analysis and Gramsci’s notion of interregnum. It contends that the world-system appears to be entering a non-hegemonic configuration rather than a cyclical transition toward a new hegemon. The 2008–2009 Global Financial Crisis deepened the structural contradictions of U.S.-led capitalism, exposing mounting difficulties in the management of global accumulation and governance despite temporary stabilizing mechanisms (e.g., monetary interventions and the G20). In light of multiple dimensions of power, the study argues that the established hierarchy of the world-system—both its stratification and its underlying power relations—is undergoing a reconfiguration, accompanied by the rise of semi-core powers (China and Russia). The rise of these actors reflects an uneven redistribution of power that increasingly complicates the liberal order without yet consolidating a new systemic equilibrium. Furthermore, semi-peripheral countries increasingly pursue pragmatic alignments that enhance autonomy without transcending global asymmetries. This study argues that the world-system now operates in a fragmented, multipolar landscape marked by competing projects of order, intensified South–South linkages, and proliferating morbid symptoms of crisis. Therefore, the contemporary moment constitutes not a renewal of hegemony but an interregnum—an unsettled phase in which the old order decays and no new historical bloc has yet emerged.
This article examines climate change as a systemic outcome of global inequality rather than a purely environmental failure. Drawing on a world-systems perspective, it argues that the contemporary climate crisis is embedded in the asymmetric distribution of economic, technological, and political power that structures the global order. The analysis focuses on three interconnected arenas—economic, technological, and political—through which climate-related inequalities are produced and reproduced. In the economic arena, the green transition unfolds within deeply uneven global value chains, allowing countries in the Global North to sustain high levels of consumption while externalizing ecological and social costs to the Global South. The technological arena shows how digitalization and low-carbon technologies reinforce new forms of dependency through intellectual property regimes, data extraction, and control over critical minerals. In the political arena, multilateral climate governance remains shaped by Northern preferences, market-oriented mechanisms, and technocratic decision-making, limiting the scope for addressing historical responsibility and redistribution. By situating climate change within these intersecting arenas, the article demonstrates that inequality is not an unintended side effect of climate policy but a politically produced condition that shapes vulnerability and response capacity. The climate crisis thus appears as a manifestation of a broader crisis of the global order, one that cannot be addressed without redistributing power and reorienting global governance toward planetary limits.
The twenty-first century is marked by a profound transformation of the global capitalist system, characterized by simultaneous convergence between the Global North (GN) and the Global South (GS), alongside increasing divergence within the GS. At the center of this process, the Sino-Asian macro-regional formation has emerged as a new pole of accumulation, reshaping global hierarchies while deepening asymmetries within the GS. This article addresses three interrelated questions: how this transformation has unfolded, why Sino-Asia has become a dynamic center of the global system, and what explains the growing divergence within the GS. To do so, it advances a complementary multilevel framework integrating Arrighian World System Analysis (WSA), Latin American Structuralism (LAS), and Historical Institutionalism (HI). The analysis shows that Arrighian systemic cycles of accumulation—particularly the transition from financial to material phases—account for the conditions underlying the rise of Sino-Asia and a more dynamic GS, but are insufficient to explain intraregional divergence. Prebischian LAS addresses this limitation by highlighting the role of industrialization, technological upgrading, and regional integration in shaping differentiated development trajectories. Integrated within a systemic perspective, HI helps identify state capacity as the key mechanism enabling these processes. Taken together, this framework explains the rise of Sino-Asia as a dynamic center of systemic transformation and the persistence of uneven and divergent development within the GS.
