WORLD-SYSTEMIC CRISIS AND CONTENDING POLITICAL SCENARIOS
29Th Conference of the Political Economy of the World System (PEWS)
Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA)
April 14-17, 2005
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
PURPOSE
This year's PEWS conference will focus on the changing political dynamics of the current world-system and will explore the potential for change embedded in them. With this goal in mind, the conference will address the specificity of the political in the contemporary global order. On the one hand, participants will examine institutional settings and their political fields (inter-state system, state formations, imperialisms) and, on the other, they will analyze forms of resistance and the conflicts they produce (anti-systemic movements and struggles). These investigations from above and below will serve as means of identifying and imagining possible scenarios for change embodied in contemporary global conditions, a theoretical practice that Immanuel Wallerstein has called Utopistics.
The conference will begin with a plenary that will provide an overview of the politics of the late modern world-system. Issues to be covered include: 1) the articulation of the capitalist world-economy, institutions of global governance, and the inter-state system; 2) the crisis of U.S. hegemony and the drive to empire-building; 3) the relations of systemic crisis to the rise of violence and the proliferation of religious and racial/ethnic strife around the world; and 4) the possibilities for emerging subaltern social actors to constitute antisystemic movements and create a more egalitarian, democratic, and decolonized world-system.
The opening plenary will be followed by panel discussions organized around interconnected themes. We welcome papers addressing the political dimensions of crisis in the late modern world-system. Particular issues to be addressed include: 1) the relationship between world-hegemony, global governance, and empire; 2) comparative studies of state formations in different world-regions (Latin America, Africa, Middle East, Europe, East Asia) that provide some insight into the global patterns and local contradictions in political institutions at this historical juncture; and 3) analyses of the emergence of subaltern movements and their potential to achieve far-reaching social transformation. The conference will close with another plenary session in which the question of the politics of the late modern world-system and possible scenarios for systemic change will be revisited in light of conference discussions.
The conference will take place April 14-17, 2005 at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Send your proposals to Agustin Lao-Montes and/or Joya Misra to : lao@soc.umass.edu; misra@soc.umass.edu; or Sociology Department, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003. The deadline to submit abstracts is December 15, 2004.