International Relations. A self-Study Guide to Theory

World-systems analysis is a theoretical perspective of international rela-
tions that began in the early 1970s. It developed from a critique of the posi-
tivist accounts of social sciences found at the heart of IR. You will notice that 
representatives of the approach carefully avoid the term “theory”. World-
systems analysis claims not to be a theory about the social world but is in-
stead understood to be “a protest against the ways in which social scientific 
inquiry was structured for all of us at its inception in the middle of the nine-
teenth century” (Wallerstein 2000: 129). As such, it is based on a fundamen-
tal critique of the a priori assumptions of positivist social science. The argu-
ment is that a positivist social science leads to the exclusion of the most im-
portant questions of social reality. Recall our discussion from the second unit 
in Part I on the implications that different philosophies of science have for 
the study of international politics. By learning about world-systems analysis, 
a particular non-positivist approach to IR that basically refers to the work of 
Immanuel Wallerstein, we can now investigate such questions in more detail. 
The intellectual roots of this perspective are found in the works of Frantz 
Fanon, Fernand Braudel, Ilya Prigogine, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Joseph 

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Schumpeter, and Karl Polanyi. However, world-systems analysis is a school 
of thought that encompasses further scholars and world-systems analysts, 
such as Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, Christopher Chase-Dunn and Peter J. 
Taylor (you will find a list of their works in the bibliographical guide in the 
section headed “consolidation”). 
The intellectual context for the development of world-systems analysis is 
Wallerstein’s engagement with four debates in the social sciences (Waller-
stein 2004: 11-22):
The first of these relates to the discussions on underdevelopment as a 
consequence of capitalist development. The concept of core-periphery, as 
developed in the 1960s by Raúl Prebisch, the first executive secretary of the 
UN Commission for Latin America (ECLA), and the dependency theory (as 
formulated by Andre Gunder Frank) both had major impacts on Wallerstein’s 
thought. In contrast to the dominant liberal economic theory, which claimed 
that comparative advantages – and therefore international trade – enhanced 
welfare for all, the concept of core-periphery views international trade as be-
ing an “unequal exchange” with surplus value flowing in one direction only, 
i.e. from the periphery (the Third world) to the core (the developed world). 
For the dependency theory, the free trade promoted by the core states and 
their multinational corporations renders the periphery ever more dependent 
and results in a “development of underdevelopment”.
The second debate that influenced Wallerstein’s thinking was the debate 
on Marx’s concept of an “Asian mode of production”. His observation of the