Sociology

The growing influence and role of the People’s Republic of China (PRC or China) in the modern world-economy is the basis of ongoing polemics in world-systems analysis and in other academic and non-academic fields of study. Twenty years ago, in The Long Twentieth Century, Giovanni Arrighi (1994) astutely theorized that the bifurcation of financial and military power that occurred during the financial expansion of the late twentieth century was not only anomalous of all other such expansions but it paved the way for a possible Sino-centered world-system. In, Adam Smith In Beijing, he went a step further and outlined the rise of China in light of the United States’ waning hegemonic rule (2007). While the growing Chinese economy and a complementary expanding role in the global economy, propelled Arrighi’s to contemplate a systemic shake-up, he saw the catalyst for the subversion of the modern world-system ostensibly as China’s demographic size (Arrighi 2007; 1994, p. 371-386). It is true that population size has been shown to have impacts on economic growth and development. However, this paper asserts that China has the potential to transform the logic of the modern capitalist world-system not only because of its demography but also its distinctive approach to its involvement in the world-economy, particularly its interactions with those countries of the Global South.
To illustrate this point, we examine China’s engagement with Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) where it has spent billions of dollars on foreign direct investment and foreign aid along with a growing trade relationship.  I will demonstrate that demographic size alone cannot account for any substantive reorganization of the world-system; that China has taken specific actions, primarily economic on the surface but with political underpinnings that could potentially create rippling system-wide change. In providing considerable economic aid to SSA with the only caveat being the adoption of a 'One China' policy, the PRC is influencing an entire continent’s economic outlook. So far, initial empirical evidence shows positive growth patterns instead of further peripheralization in the SSA countries where China is heavily involved. In addition to their economic outlook, China is impacting the foreign policy of a bloc of nations that make up the second most populous continent in the world, while simultaneously undermining Western neoclassical ideas of development. Yet, despite all of this, China appears to maintain and buttress the existing core-periphery hierarchy and power structures of the world-system. Is this the case that ‘the more things change, the more they remain the same?’

Introduction

In the ‘Preface’ of the first edition of Guy Standing’s The Precariat: A New and Dangerous Class, the author raises the issue of the dramatic increase in the EuroMayDay protesters between 2001 and 2005 and immediately proclaims a connection to the various ‘social movements’ occurring across the globe. In Standing’s logic, the large numbers of EuroMayDay protesters in 2005 could be connected to the May Day protests in Japan that same year. In the 2011 edition of the book, Standing continues that line of reasoning and links the May Day protests of Europe and Japan beginning in 2005, to that of the Arab Spring (demonstrations in the Middle East) starting December 2010, the indignados (in Spain and Portugal) starting May 2011, the tentifada actions (in Tel Aviv) starting July 2011, and the Occupy Movement (demonstrations/protests in the United States) starting September 2011. These protest movements were the expression of what he calls ‘globalization’s child’ - an amalgamation of people across the globe who were “a floating, rudderless and potentially angry [group], capable of veering to the extreme right or extreme left politically and backing populist demagoguery that plays on their fears or phobias” if they were not given agency (Standing [2011] 2014, p. 6). 

These groups from different countries, and belonging to mostly different socio-economic backgrounds shared one thing in common – their “minimal trust relationships with capital or the state” (Standing [2011] 2014, p. 14).  Standing names them the precariat. He saw the precariat as possessing the characteristics of a class-in-the-making but not yet a class-for-itself. In Marxist terms, it was a class-in-itself but not yet for-itself. The purpose of this paper is to push Standing’s discussion of the precariat and precariat class formation further by conceptualizing global class formation in this era of precarity.  First, the paper will discuss the history of the idea of the precariat (although the word is a neologism the concept is not new) and the fact that the precariat has always existed as part of the structure of capitalism. Then we will illustrate how what Standing calls the precariat has become more prominent and observable in highly developed economies because of the growing fundamental contradiction in capitalism which activate the inherent tensions between capital and labor. Finally, through Katznelson’s concept of class formation we will illustrate the challenges in creating a global precariat class if that is at all possible.

This article examines the contemporary rise of China and its new role on the global stage within the context of semiperipheral mobility. Unlike earlier discourse on the rise of China that revolved around questions of hegemonic ascent, the focus here is on the impact of China's advancement within the structural confines of the modern capitalist world-economy. What happens when a country like China, which makes up close to 20% of the world's population, moves from peripheral state to semiperipheral state in a short period of time? Immanuel Wallerstein had argued that stratification of the world-economy took the shape of a three-layered structure with majority of the world's population at the bottom, a decidedly smaller middle stratum, and a small percentage at the top of the hierarchy. Through an examination of global economic stratification from 1990 through 2015, China's movement into the semiperiphery is shown to dramatically change the shape of this three-layered structure. This change that sometimes causes the distribution to appear quad-modal or multimodal is primarily because of the movement of more of the world's population into the middle stratum of world-economy. This massive movement toward the middle is unprecedented. Furthermore, this new shape of the stratified world economy, will create an increasing amount of pressure on the countries in the middle that may translate into open military aggression and/or at the same time, a rise in regional and multilateral organizations such as the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, and the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas.

Commodified citizenship—pay x number of dollars and you can have all the rights of citizenship without any of the traditional duties and obligations—has been on the rise in developing countries since the early 1990s. This article is a case study of such a program on the island nation of Dominica. Ostensibly established as a means to aid the country in its efforts to move away from a monoagricultural economy, this article demonstrates that in reality, the government has become fully dependent on the commodified citizenship program, which has become its primary source of quick liquid revenue. Furthermore, we argue that the program can be an excellent tool for the transnational capitalist class which needs to work around political restrictions on their cross-border movements. With a growing effort to impede movement across countries and re-entrenchment of national border across the world, efforts to penetrate national border boundaries and established systems of exclusions through the visa processes have prompted creative and alternative routes for cross-border mobility. The contention here is that commodified citizenship is just one such creative alternative route and is especially ingenious as it is fully legal and uses the very institutions that seek to hinder mobility.

ABSTRACT
The central concern of this paper is with Sub-Saharan Africa’s (SSA) standing in the stratified world economy. Country standings are determined for the period 1965 through 2015, based on the Arrighi and Drangel method of calculating world-system position. We find that the region as a whole remained in the bottom of the global economic hierarchy and was particularly sensitive to macroeconomic-historical changes and pressures. Of note too is the clear link between the SSA countries that are performing well in the semiperiphery of the global economic hierarchy and those with a concentration of natural resources.

Abdelmalek Sayad est un des premiers sociologues à avoir su créer une approche originale sur la migration dans le monde francophone. Son œuvre constitue une des principales références dans le domaine de l’expulsion des étrangers délinquants. Ce travail montre dans quelle mesure la sociologie de Sayad permet d’appréhender la problématique de l’expulsion des étrangers en Suisse, où cette question demeure un sujet d’actualité depuis plusieurs années. Après une présentation détaillée de la sociologie de Sayad, le cas de la Suisse est analysé. Un exercice qui permet de mettre en exergue aussi bien les limites que les apports de cette approche théorique originale.

Dans les négociations controversées entre l’UE et la Turquie, une figure donne l’impression de faire l’unanimité, celle du passeur contre lequel plusieurs mesures parfois spectaculaires, telles que l’intervention de l’OTAN, sont prévues. Celles-ci nous obligent à reposer certaines questions : qui sont ces passeurs ? Comment opèrent-ils ? Malgré tous les efforts, pourquoi parle-t-on toujours d’un business florissant ou en plein essor ? Sans prétendre répondre à ces questions de manière détaillée, ce texte vise à rappeler quelques faits importants en ce qui concerne les passeurs dans le cas de la Turquie.

In Western Europe young generations tend to abandon the traditional political tools in favour of social media in order to express their opinion and take part in the debate. That is also the case in the Balkans, in Turkey and in the Arab world.
In the Balkans, social media play a role of facilitator in order to shape a project initiated by civil society while the situation in Turkey is a little more complex as social media are as much used by political authorities, who are limiting and controling their access, as by young generations. The South and the East of the Mediterranean Sea are a good example of the creation of a whole new society around an independent, apolitical and nonreligious project after the Arab Spring, even though it faces a lot of difficulties to be implemented in terms of democratic change at a systemic level.