ABSTRACT

Economic Cycles and Social Movements: Past, Present and Future offers diverse perspectives on the complex interrelationship between social challenges and economic crises in the Modern World System. Written with a balance of quantitative, qualitative and theoretical contributions and insights, this volume provides a great opportunity to reflect upon the ongoing conceptual and empirical challenges when confronting the complex interrelations of various economic cycles and social movements. By engaging wide-ranging ideas and theoretical points of view from different disciplines, different countries and different perspectives, this study breaks new ground and offers novel insights into the way the capitalist world economy functions as well as the way social and political movements react to these constraints. Different chapters in this volume bring about novel interdisciplinary approaches to study business cycles, economic changes and social as well as political movements, offer new interpretations and, while examining the complexity of socioeconomic cycles in the long run, present epistemological challenges and a wide variety of empirical data that will increase our understanding of these complex interactions.

chapter 1|12 pages

Introduction

chapter 3|13 pages

The Crisis of the Neoliberal Order?

On the Structural Crisis of the Modern World-System

chapter 5|12 pages

The Dialectics of Political Economy

chapter 6|24 pages

Brazil

From the Vicissitudes of Systemic Rebalancing to the Crossroads of Conservatism 1

chapter 7|31 pages

Space, Transport, and the World-Market

Maritime Transportation, Freight Rates, and the Global Control of Foreign Trade Flows in the Capitalist World-System 1

chapter 10|9 pages

A Source for Greater Peripheral Sovereignty or a New Axis of Dependency Relations?

China and Latin America in the Context of the Readjustment of Forces in the World System: The Case of China–Ecuador Relations 1

chapter 11|13 pages

Rethinking Core and Periphery in Historical Capitalism

‘World-Magnates’ and the Shifting Centers of Wealth Accumulation

chapter 12|16 pages

Alternatives to Western Economic Models?

Latin-American “Buen Vivir/Good Living” and the Opening of the Social Sciences