Overcoming Global Inequalities by Christian Suter, Christopher K. Chase-Dunn, and Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (review)

In Overcoming Global Inequalities, editors Christian Suter, Christopher K. Chase-Dunn, and Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein bring together eleven essays focused on the history, geopolitics, and social movements surrounding transnational discrimination. This collection of essays critically contextualizes and documents cases of and potential resistance to the global inequalities that have historically been and continue to be structured into the world-system. Though Wallerstein, Suter, and Chase-Dunn have not authored any of the chapters in this collection, their presence is palpable in the world-system theoretical framework that structures the arguments of most of the sections. Wallerstein, in particular, was one of the central theorists in the initial development of cross-disciplinary world-system analysis in the 1970s, an analytical mode which seeks to understand patterns in transnational social change and divisions of labor by focusing on a multi-national, hierarchical "world-system" comprised of core, peripheral, and semi-peripheral countries. The essays in this current collection offer insightful, transdisciplinary contributions at a time when Euro-American hegemony is increasingly contested by the burgeoning economic influence of semi-peripheral nations like Brazil, China, and South Korea. This anthology examines and ultimately intends to contribute to the work of challenging pervasive inequality—both in peripheral countries and for those marginalized within core and semi-peripheral nations.

The first five chapters of the collection provide the historical and contemporary contexts surrounding the establishment and perpetuation of inequalities between the Global North and South. The first of these chapters, written by Manuela Boatca, crafts a compelling case about the contradictory narrative of citizenship. Though framed as inclusionary and beneficial, the rights attached to citizenship are often restricted to people living in the powerful nations of the core, rather than those who are already otherwise disadvantaged and living in the periphery. This commodification of citizenship, she argues, will continue to exacerbate inequality between countries. The third chapter, "Political Prominence and the World-System," grapples with questions of whether countries outside of the dominant core can use political influence to enhance their global standings economically or vice versa, using economic influence to increase political power. The authors, Lindsay Marie Jacobs and Ronan Van Rossem, find that asserting political prominence without having already attained economic power may do more harm than good to a vulnerable noncore nation, because working towards political globalization could actually reinforce global inequalities, rather than increasing transnational economic influence for peripheral nations (34). These chapters throw into sharp relief the magnitude of the social, political, and economic systems creating and maintaining inequalities and the hegemony of Western core nations. Additional chapters in the first section expand the analysis of systemic inequality through examinations of the institutionalization of language study, the detrimental effects of foreign investment on internal violence in less developed countries, and the experience of warehouse workers in light of transnational capitalist developments. From the mobility and privilege attached to national citizenship to the political and economic influence and agency of entire noncore nations, the effects of these systems are pervasive, both at the individual and international levels.

In the second section of the book, the sixth and seventh chapters examine geopolitics and warfare, shifting focus from the manifestations of global inequalities to the spaces in which these unequal international relationships are contested and negotiated. The sixth chapter, "Territorial Alliances and Emerging-Market Development Banking," looks to subimperialism in South Africa, and, more generally, to the nature of the relationships among the semiperipheral states commonly referred to as BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). By designating BRICS as subimperialist, author Patrick Bond charges them with accommodating, and even collaborating in, the expansion of European and American new imperialism. Bond's massive, yet wholly valuable, undertaking explains both the recent economic and political contexts shaping the developing challenge to European and American hegemony. He argues that the role BRICS will play in that challenge is highly dependent on the degree to which these nations shift from a...