Halfway to Paradise? Making Sense of the Semi-Periphery

The purpose of this chapter is to examine critically the concept of the semi-periphery, in the context of the evolution of global capitalism over the last 30 years or so. Since the semi-periphery became a particular focus of world-systems theory (WST hereafter) in the 1980s, the first part of the chapter looks at how this concept fits into the development of development theory, starting from the well-known conflicting paradigms of modernisation and dependency, moving on to the more specific relationship between the latter and the world-systems approach, and from there to the concept of semi-periphery itself. The second part examines the concept in detail, focusing on the work of Arrighi (1990), Chase-Dunn (1989, 1990) and the contributors to Martin (1990); here it is argued that the world-systems approach had considerable difficulty in adapting to the rise of neoliberalism and the political economy of globalisation, and that the origins of this difficulty lies in a flawed understanding of the dynamics of global capitalism. The final part outlines an alternative approach which deploys a different understanding of capital, class and the state in making sense of recent changes in the regions and countries chiefly seen as being semi-peripheral.KeywordsGlobal CapitalismPeripheral ActivityCommodity ChainClass AllianceMonopoly CapitalismThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.