Articles in vol. 21(2) and later of 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 Patrick Manning Joshua McDermott David Ruvolo We lead off this issue with a paper that speaks directly to one of today’s most pressing political concerns. Peter Wilkin’s “The Rise of ‘Illiberal’ Democracy: The “Orbánization” of Hungarian Political Culture” examines the rise of the political right in Hungary. Instead of treating the rise of authoritarian politics as a deviation from a pro-democratic global norm, he asks why we should even expect a stable liberal political culture to develop in countries like Hungary, which have emerged from four decades of domination by the USSR only to find themselves locked into neoliberal policy frameworks dictated by the capitalist world-system. Wilkin argues that this world-system itself “foster[s] intolerance and other anti-enlightenment and socially divisive tendencies.” In other words, the actual practices of globalized capitalism drove social and cultural polarization and prevented the articulation of compelling political alternatives. Such processes, according to Wilkin “have reduced Hungary’s elite political debates to the choice of either neoliberalism or ethno-nationalism, neither of which is likely to generate socially progressive solutions to its current problems.” In “Rents, Power and Governance in Global Value Chains,” Dennis Davis, Raphael Kaplinsky, and Mike Morris uncover some of the specific dynamics of global capitalism that centralize power and undermine democratic governance. They provide a model for analyzing the ISSN: 1076-156X | Vol. 24 Issue 1 | DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2018.791 | jwsr.pitt.edu 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-Systems Research | Vol. 24 Issue 1 | Editors’ Introduction 2 jwsr.pitt.edu | DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2018.791 governance of global value chains (GVCs). Their framework highlights how different types of rent (defined as gifts of nature, innovation, exogenously defined rents such as regulatory barriers, and market power) are created and managed by different types of governance: legislative governance, executive governance and judicial governance. These forms of governance are deployed by a key set of GVC stakeholders, including corporations, civil society organizations, states, and supranational institutions. Via case studies of different value chain contexts, they argue that the capacity of non-corporate stakeholders to govern GVCs is contingent upon the extent to which their governance objectives coincides with the interest of the corporate sector, thus raising questions about the capacity of states and civil society actors to influence the generation and distribution of value along GVCs. In “From Promoting Political Polyarchy to Defeating Participatory Democracy: U.S. Foreign Policy towards the Far Left in Latin America” Timothy M. Gill traces U.S. intervention in Latin America since the 1960s. This interventionism shifted from an initial phase of empowering authoritarian right-wing regimes against democratically elected governments, to the promotion of moderate neoliberal democratic regimes, to active opposition to popular socialist regimes, such as those in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua. Even very large and politically effective left movements in Latin America proved incapable of overcoming U.S. hegemony, and this both undermines the legitimacy of representative democracy while fueling right-wing forces. Beth Williford’s paper, “Buen Vivir as Policy: Challenging Neoliberalism or Consolidating State Power in Ecuador,” offers some hope that possibilities remain for advancing transformative political projects. Ecuador’s adoption of buen vivir in its Constitution challenged the capitalist logics of individualism and wealth accumulation, instead valorizing the promotion of community well-being and efforts to re-define relationships between humans and the environment. Although state policies have continued to exploit the country’s natural resources, Williford argues that the Ecuadorean government was able to buck neoliberal prescriptions by expanding social welfare and increasing corporate taxes, dramatically reducing poverty and enhancing other measures of wellbeing. Moreover, social movements have enjoyed new possibilities for developing public consciousness and advancing new political imaginaries. Turning to another part of Latin America, Diego Hurtado and Pablo Souza’s “Geoeconomic Uses of Global Warming: The “Green” Technological Revolution and the Role of the Semi- Periphery” reveals the constraints faced by non-core countries that hope to grow by becoming leaders in innovative green technology industries. Examining Argentina’s wind energy sector, these authors identify the institutional, organizational, and cultural impediments that prevented Argentina from gaining a competitive foothold in this emerging industry, and thus reducing its Journal of World-Systems Research | Vol. 24 Issue 1 | Editors’ Introduction jwsr.pitt.edu | DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2018.791 dependency on core country technologies. Core countries’ technological advantages persist despite the obsolescence of older technologies, perpetuating prevailing world-system hierarchies. Our final paper by Ion Matei Costinescu, “Interwar Romania and the Greening of the Iron Cage: The Biopolitics of Dimitrie Gusti, Virgil Madgearu, Mihail Manoilescu, and Ştefan Zeletin” employs the concept of biopolitics to examine intellectual traditions of key Romanian social theorists, shedding light on what he calls “coloniality in action.” Changes in conceptions of agrarian conditions and in the prescriptions for social reforms illustrate how human labor has been mobilized in the work of “… transforming peasants into agents of socio-economic modernization and national consolidation.” Constinescu uses the metaphor of the iron cage to show how ideas of scientific progress and instrumental rationality developed over time to reinforce the economic and political logics of global capitalism. New Section on World-Historical Information With this issue, the Journal of World-Historical Information merges with the Journal of World- Systems Research. JWHI first appeared in 2013, supported by the World History Center at the University of Pittsburgh as part of a campaign to encourage world-wide collaboration in the development of datasets and analysis at the world-historical level. Its hallmarks were the publication of datasets along with articles; cross-disciplinary studies including history, social sciences, and information science; and reviews of online datasets. While some of the contributions have been significant, it became difficult to develop sufficient content to sustain the journal as a free-standing operation. How fortunate it was that JWSR had moved its editorial offices to the University of Pittsburgh in 2015, and that a close collaboration had sprung up among the editors of the two journals. In late 2016 we discussed the possibility of JWHI joining JWSR in order to expand our journal’s historical content and to realize greater possibilities for sharing diverse forms of world-historical data. The Political Economy of World Systems Section of the American Sociological Association, which governs JWSR, approved this merger, and we’ve incorporated members of the JWHI editorial board into the JWSR board: these include Ahmet Izmirlioglu, Patrick Manning, Ruth Mostern, and Vladimir Zadorozhny. Patrick Manning is the editor of our new section on “World-Historical Information,” and David Ruvolo will join Joshua McDermott as co-Managing Editors. This regular section of the journal is to include articles, dataset reviews, and research reports, and the entire JWHI archive is also available on the JWSR site. This merger provides an opportunity for greater interconnection among historical sociologists and world historians. It is also an opportunity to expand the publication of datasets, including those linked to JWSR articles. And, it well help us build the tradition of formal review of online resources in history and social sciences. On behalf of the group that has built and sustained JWHI since it http://jwhi.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/jwhi Journal of World-Systems Research | Vol. 24 Issue 1 | Editors’ Introduction 4 jwsr.pitt.edu | DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2018.791 was designed in 2011, editor Patrick Manning conveys his pleasure with this merger, which enables the mission of studies in world-historical information to be sustained, now in the context of a more fully interdisciplinary discussion among world-systems students and scholars. We encourage readers to contact us (jwsr@pitt.edu) with submission proposals and recommendations of datasets and related historical content for review. Book Review Section We are particularly excited to share with our readers a thematic review symposium on “Cities in the World-System.” This symposium features ten reviews of titles that examine how cities are implicated in the political economy of the world-system from their role as key nodes of financialization to their status as laboratories for alternative visions and forms of politics. The books include reviewed here are wide-ranging, providing both an intimate account of a particular ethnic enclave in a British city and an introduction to the analytical possibilities being created through the development of a world city database. In keeping with one of the broad objectives of JWSR, our review symposium includes titles that focus on cities outside the United States, and indeed, outside the global North. We are also fortunate to draw on an international community of scholars in soliciting reviews. In this symposium alone, we are featuring reviews authored by scholars writing from Australia, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Germany and the United Kingdom as well as the United States. In addition to the symposium, we also have four additional reviews: Kristin Plys reviews India, Modernity and the Great Divergence by Kaveh Yazdani; Ian Robinson reviews Jeffrey Rothstein’s When Good Jobs Go Bad: Globalization, De-unionization, and Declining Job Quality in the North American Auto Industry; Sabine Dreher reviews The Global Political Economy of Raul Prebisch, edited by Matias Margulis; and, Gene Anderson reviews Philippe Beaujard’s Les mondes de l’océan Indien (an English language translation of which will soon be out). In our next issue, we will be featuring another review symposium—this one including books that engage the theme of counter-hegemony in the current conjuncture. Please be in touch with our book review editor, Jennifer Bair, if you have suggestions for review symposia topics or particular titles you’d like to see reviewed in JWSR or if you’d like to be added to our list of potential reviewers. mailto:jwsr@pitt.edu Journal of World-Systems Research Editors’ Introduction Vol. 1 | DOI 10.5195/JWSR.1