ABSTRACT
The terminology of "core" and "periphery" allows to address substantive issues of interest to the study of world politics, of world systems, and of civilizations: issues of geographic differentiation, inequality, and uneven change. Civilizations considered in their political aspect ordinarily have one or the other of two political structures: the states system and the universal empire. A theory of peripheries must largely account for their secular decline. The ideas of core-periphery distinctions and inequalities are important to theories of civilizations and of world systems. Egyptian civilization was frequently united under a world state; core shifts are indicated by movements of the capital. The most frequent core forms are: the single dominant or hegemonic state; several competing states; and the universal-empire metropole. In the transition from semipenphery to core, history seems somewhat more favorable to naissance than to renaissance, but renaissances do happen.
