Barbara Harlow:

It is not very comforting to anyone in countries of the South to say that the present world-system is in structural crisis and that we are in a transition from it to some other world-system over the next 25–30 years. They will want to know what will happen in the meantime.1

Immanuel Wallerstein propounded his rhetorical question in a keynote address delivered at Cornell University in October 2004, a speech reviewing the untold futures of his signature critique of “combined and uneven development”; he concluded with a perhaps equally rhetorical turn to his audience in the final admonition that we must “fight both defensively and offensively. And if we do it well,” Wallerstein went on, even if somewhat inconclusively, “we may, but only may, come out ahead in the lifetimes of some of the younger members of this audience.”2 Crises, like the combined and uneven developments...

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