JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH Editors’ Introduction Jackie Smith Jennifer Bair Scott Byrd George Weddington We are pleased to offer this especially rich and timely issue of the Journal of World-Systems Research. Readers will find not only a special symposium on Race in the Capitalist World-System, compiled by William I. Robinson, but also a special collection of papers on Ireland in the World- System edited by Aidan Beatty, Maurice Coakley, and Sharae Deckard. The juxtaposition of these sections highlight the ways Ireland has served as a “testing ground” for techniques of capitalist exploitation of people and the natural environment, shaping the development of racist ideologies and practices in the world-system. As the media headlines feature daily reports of racial tensions and protests in numerous countries, and as xenophobic, Islamophobic, and racist discourses permeate electoral campaigns in the United States and other core countries, it is critical for us all to reflect on how the organization and operation of the global political economy contributes to these trends. In addition, as political leaders grapple with how to manage the deepening global financial and ecological crises, it is very instructive, as our special issue editors point out, to offer a “radical reappraisal” of Ireland’s economic development. Contributors to the symposium and to our special issue on Ireland add a great deal to efforts to better understand the processes that reproduce all forms of racism and other exclusions, and their work points in the direction of much-needed strategies for re-structuring human relations and the world-system more broadly. Moreover, the articles in our special issue on Ireland in the World- System demonstrate how focused attention on a particular world region can illuminate broader New articles in this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 United States License. This journal is published by the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh as part of its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press. ISSN: 1076-156X | Vol. 22 Issue 1 Page 1-2 | http://dx.doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2016.638| jwsr.org Vol. 1 | DOI 10.5195/JWSR.1 http://www.library.pitt.edu/ http://www.pitt.edu/ http://www.library.pitt.edu/articles/digpubtype/index.html http://upress.pitt.edu/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Journal of World-System Research | Vol. 22 Issue 1 | Editors’ Introduction 2 jwsr.org | http://dx.doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2016.638 processes related to the world-system’s operation, enhancing our understandings of its impacts in other parts of the world. Continuing the theme of how racial hierarchies drive the capitalist world-system, our regular research articles feature a contribution from Jonathan Leitner, who offers a rich historical perspective on the emergence of capitalism in the northeastern United States. His analysis documents how geographic conditions and proximity to New York City created labor mobility that empowered tenants, and how this, along with the region’s ability to trade with regions depending slavery and other more exploitative labor relations, contributed to the region’s core emergence. Nicolas Grinberg then offers us a perspective on global commodity chains that draws insights from the New International Division of Labor theory. His analysis of the global semiconductors industry illustrates how the operation of global hierarchies contribute to capitalist accumulation. Our book review section features a special symposium on food and food politics in the world- system. This themed section includes reviews of six books: Jennifer Clapp’s Food (reviewed by Jill Harrison); Alana Mann’s Global Activism in Food Politics: Power Shift (reviewd by Philip McMichael); Stefan Ouma’s Assembling Export Markets: The Making and Unmaking of Global Food Connections in West Africa (reviewed by Andre Nickow); Nora McKeon’s Food Security Governance: Empowering Communities, Regulating Corporations (reviewed by Laura Raynolds); Lambek, Claeys, Wong and Brilmayer’s edited volume, Rethinking Food Systems Structural Challenges, New Strategies and the Law (reviewed by Tomaso Ferrando), and Philip McMichael’s Food Regimes and Agrarian Questions (reviewed by Gerardo Otero). We hope you enjoy this issue, which reflects the work not only of the authors and our editorial teams, but also our reviewers, whose invaluable contributions to the journal are greatly appreciated. As we close, we remind you that the Journal of World-Systems Research is an open access journal, which makes us part of a global movement to protect and preserve what is known as the knowledge commons. We encourage readers to support open access publishing through financial support, by serving on editorial boards, conducting reviews, and publishing your work in open access journals like ours. For more information see the Public Library of Science’s (PLOS) “The Case for Open Access.” We encourage readers to support this journal, and you can do so by making a donation (see www.jwsr.org), or by volunteering to help as a reviewer, copyeditor, or translator. If you’re interested in volunteering, please send an email to: jwsr@pitt.edu. Also, given the international scope of our audience, we would like to include reviews of non-English language books in future issues. If you know of any foreign-language books that you think would be of interest to JWSR readers, or would like to offer your services to review books in a foreign language, please contact us at jwsr@pitt.edu. https://www.opendemocracy.net/jackie-smith/defending-global-knowledge-commons https://www.plos.org/open-access/ http://www.jwsr.org/ mailto:jwsr@pitt.edu mailto:jwsr@pitt.edu