April 11-14th, 2019: 43rd Annual Conference on the Political Economy of the World-System

April 11-14, 2019 - Conference Theme: De-Linking: Critical Thought and Radical Politics

Delinking as a counterstrategy in a structurally unequal world-system has featured prominently in different social science approaches to radical emancipatory  politics, from dependency theory and world-systems analysis to decolonial thought. Understood as self-reliance or autonomous development of the peripheries (Amin 1992), as anti- or deglobalization (Bello 2004), as a choice between dewesternization and decolonization (Mignolo 2007) or, more recently, as a comprehensive move to “depatriarchalise, de-racialise, de-tribalise, decolonise, de-imperialise and democratise” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2017), the notion of delinking has mobilized critical thought and political imaginations alike. At the same time, an overemphasis on delinking entails the risk of overlooking linkages and multi-directional interactions beyond the modern world-system, or the uneven dynamics of inter-imperiality (Doyle 2014). The 43rd annual conference on the Political Economy of the World-System revisits approaches to (de)linking and the concept’s past and present (re)formulations as economic, sociopolitical, epistemic and cultural paths to pluriversality and a polycentric world. It welcomes both theoretical and empirical treatments of processes of linking and delinking as well as methodological reflections on the terms’ potential for the political economy of the world-system.

Conference organization:
Manuela Boatcă, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany

Further information here.