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. JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH Editors’ Introduction Jackie Smith Jennifer Bair Caitlin Schroering This issue of the Journal of World-Systems Research is an extremely rich collection of diverse content, much of which points to the role of peripheries and semi-peripheries in world-system stability and change. R. Scott Frey, Paul K. Gellert, and Harry F. Dahms are guest editors of a special collection of research articles on unequal ecological exchange, which examine inequities between cores and peripheries in the global distribution of environmental goods and bads. These essays will help advance our thinking about environmental conflicts, as our guest editors elaborate. Environmental and land struggles and inequality are further explored in the research articles by Hanne Dominique G. J. Cottyn and Ryan P. Thombs. Cottyn uses a frontier perspective to analyze the historical incorporation of indigenous lands into Bolivia’s land rights regime. She shows how frontier/indigenous groups “negotiated” the terms of the incorporation of their land into that national land rights regime and preserved communal land rights. The “uneven trajectory of land commodification” is shown as a contested process in which peripheral actors have some agency. Thombs reveals a “renewable energy paradox” whereby renewable energy use has the most impact on reducing emissions in low-income countries, while its impact on emissions reduction in high-income countries is minimal, due to high rates of consumption. Thombs provides ISSN: 1076-156X | Vol. 23 Issue 2 | DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2017.748 | 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/ http://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/jwsr/article/view/733 http://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/jwsr/article/view/698 http://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/jwsr/article/view/711 Journal of World-System Research | Vol. 23 Issue 2 | Editors’ Introduction 224 jwsr.org | DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2017.748 a clear and useful set of policy prescriptions to help expand the use of renewables in low-income countries while reducing consumption in rich countries. In addition to our usual peer-reviewed content, we include two special features that grew from panel sessions organized by the Political Economy of the World-System (PEWS) section of the American Sociological Association (ASA) at the 2015 ASA convention in Chicago. Then Section Chair William I. Robinson organized a special panel on Race in the Capitalist World-System, which became a special symposium published in JWSR (Vol. 22[1] 2016). Continuing to explore this critical and complex theme, we feature a more developed and elaborated version of the essay by Wilma Dunaway and Donald Clelland, who offer a critical assessment of prevailing notions of race and ethnicity and the processes through which they are reproduced. Dunaway and Clelland have marshalled a great deal of evidence to challenge racial binaries in our analyses of the capitalist world-system. They see semiperipheries as essential to the reproduction and expansion of global capitalism and its inequalities and argue that semiperipheral ethnic exploitation defies classification according to existing racial categories. We’ve enlisted a diverse array of experts to engage in a dialogue with Dunaway and Clelland, and their contributions show that we’ve touched on a powerful set of ideas that offer much room for scholarly investigation and dialogue. While our readers may not see a decisive “victor” in this debate, these contributions certainly enhance and enrich our thinking about the operation of power in the world-system and the role of race and other categories of difference in reproducing world-system inequalities. The second special feature here that grew from the 2015 ASA meeting is a tribute to a pioneer and leading thinker in world-systems research, JWSR’s founding editor Christopher Chase-Dunn. This tribute to Chris has been organized and curated by Jeffrey Kentor and Andrew Jorgenson, and readers will gain insights into Chris’s personal and intellectual trajectory that will enrich and inform readers’ understandings of how world-systems scholarship has developed. Indeed, Chris is a prolific, energetic, and creative scholar, who has done much to advance the field of world- systems scholarship, as our contributors show. Chris has dedicated his career to the work of understanding the world so we can figure out how to change it, and we are especially grateful for his work to build the JWSR as a platform for world-systems scholars to exchange ideas freely among a worldwide audience of people, regardless of whether they have access to a resourceful library. Our book review section includes five reviews: Aldon D. Morris’s The Scholar Denied: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology is reviewed by Michael Schwartz; Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancioğlu’s How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism is reviewed by Sung Hee Ru; William Carroll’s Expose, Oppose, Propose: Alternative Policy Groups and the Struggle for Global Justice is reviewed by Marisa Von Bülow; Neil M. Coe and Henry Wai-chung Yeung’s Global Production Networks: Theorizing economic development http://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/jwsr/issue/view/64 http://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/jwsr/article/view/598 Journal of World-System Research | Vol. 23 Issue 2 225 jwsr.org | DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2017.748 in an interconnected world is reviewed by Marion Werner; and, Mark Hibben’s Poor states, Power and the Politics of IMF Reform: Drivers of Change in the Post-Washington Consensus is reviewed by Mulatu Amare Desta. Please keep an eye out for a major symposium on “Cities and the World- System,” which will appear in the next issue of JWSR, and will feature reviews from leading scholars, including Saskia Sassen and Leslie Sklair, among many others. A final reminder regarding our book review section: if you know of foreign-language books that you believe would be of interest to JWSR’s readership, or if you would like to offer your services to review books in a foreign language, please contact our book review editor, Jennifer Bair. As we conclude our introduction we want to recognize two of our recent authors who have received awards for their articles in JWSR. Tanya Golash-Boza received honorable mention in the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Article Award of the Race, Class, and Gender Section of the ASA for her article, “Parallels Between Mass Incarceration and Mass Deportation: An Intersectional Analysis,” published in Journal of World-Systems Research 22(2) (2016). And Irene Pang received the PEWS Section Terence K. Hopkins Student Paper Award for her article, “Banking Is for Others: Contradictions of Microfinance in the Ghanaian Market,” Journal of World-Systems Research 22(2) (2016). Congratulations to these authors for such outstanding work. We are proud to bring such high quality scholarship to our global readership. The Journal of World-Systems Research remains one of the leading open access peer reviewed scholarly journals, and we are working to create a sustainable structure for the journal while supporting the Open Access movement more broadly. We invite readers to support the journal with financial contributions (see the “donate” link on our website) or by assisting with copyediting or translating (email jwsr@pitt.edu to volunteer). We also remind you that Open Access Week 2017 is October 23-29th. Please take some time to recognize the week by increasing your own understanding of the importance of open access publishing, helping colleagues and students learn about this vital movement, promoting the work of journals like the Journal of World- Systems Research (or submitting your own work for consideration!), or by attending or organizing an event on your campus. In its current form, the information economy leads to the increased enclosure of the knowledge commons, and scholars and readers play a critical role in helping keep access to information open and free. As one of the very first open access scholarly journals, JWSR is committed to helping our readers be part of the movement to keep our research free and open to readers. http://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/jwsr/article/view/616 http://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/jwsr/article/view/616 http://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/jwsr/article/view/640/0 mailto:jwsr@pitt.edu http://www.openaccessweek.org/ http://www.openaccessweek.org/ https://www.opendemocracy.net/jackie-smith/defending-global-knowledge-commons Journal of World-Systems Research Editors’ Introduction Vol. 1 | DOI 10.5195/JWSR.1