Borderlines in a Globalized World: New Perspectives in a Sociology of the World-System (Social Indicators Research Series, 9)

Scholars of different schools have extensively analyzed world systems as networks of communication under the fashionable heading `globalization.' Our collected new research pushes the argument one step further. Globalization is not a homogenization of all social life on earth. It is a heterogeneous process that connects the global and the local on different levels. To understand these contemporary developments this book employs innovative concepts, strategies of research, and explanations. Globalization is a metaphor for different borderstructures, new borderlines, and conditions of membership, which emerge in a global world-system. As a world-system expands it incorporates new territories and new peoples. The process of incorporation creates frontiers or boundaries of the world-system. These frontiers or boundary zones are the locus of resistance to incorporation, ethnogenesis, ethnic transformation, and ethnocide. Front Matter....Pages I-XVIII Front Matter....Pages 1-1 The Continual Reconstruction of Multiple Modern Civilizations and Collective Identities....Pages 3-12 Globalization: A World-Systems Perspective Reflecting on Some Non-Rhetorical Questions....Pages 13-34 World-Systems, Frontiers, and Ethnogenesis....Pages 35-66 After History....Pages 67-82 Front Matter....Pages 83-83 Globalization and the Evolution of Membership....Pages 85-98 Enacting Globalization....Pages 99-124 Immigration and the Open Society....Pages 125-140 A Transformation of National Identity?....Pages 141-172 Front Matter....Pages 173-173 The Collapse of the Moral Boundaries of Peripheral Countries....Pages 175-188 Beyond "East" and "West"....Pages 189-215 Socio-Economic Restructurings of the Local Settings in the Era of Globalization....Pages 217-228 Back Matter....Pages 229-239