Borderlines in a Globalized World: New Perspectives in a Sociology of the World-System

Scholars of different schools have extensively analysed world systems as networks of communication under the fashionable heading "globalization". This collected research pushes the argument one step further. Globalization is not a homogenization of all social life on Earth. It is a heterogeneous process that connects the global and the local on different levels. Globalization is a metaphor for different border structures, new borderlines, and conditions of membership, which emerge in a global world-system. As a world-system expands it incorporates new territories and boundaries of the world-system. These frontiers or boundary zones are the locus of resistance to incorporation, ethnogenesis, ethnic transformation and ethnocide.