World-Systems Theory

World-systems theory is a school of historical and economic sociology developed by Immanuel Wallerstein beginning in the 1970s, extending dependency theory's core insight that global inequality must be explained at the level of the world economy as a whole rather than one country at a time. It treats the modern capitalist world-economy, rather than the individual nation-state, as the basic unit of analysis, and divides it into three tiers: a wealthy, industrialized core; a poor, resource-exporting periphery; and an intermediate semi-periphery moving between the two. Capitalism, in this account, systematically redistributes surplus value from the periphery toward the core, reinforcing core dominance and perpetuating uneven development. Wallerstein drew on the historian Fernand Braudel's long-run approach to economic history and on earlier dependency theorists, and the framework has since been extended by scholars including Giovanni Arrighi and Christopher Chase-Dunn to earlier historical world-systems as well as the modern one. World-systems theorists use the framework to explain the rise and fall of great powers and recurring patterns of global inequality, and it remains an active research tradition in historical sociology and international political economy. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/