The main editorial goal of the Journal of World-Systems Research is to develop and disseminate scholarly research on topics that are relevant to the analysis of world-systems. We especially want to include works that proceed from several different theoretical stances and disciplines. These include, but are not limited to, civilizationists, evolutionary approaches, international political economy, comparative, historical and cultural analysis. We seek the work of political scientists, historians, sociologists, ethnographers, archaeologists, economists and geographers.

We especially encourage works that take theory seriously by confronting problems of conceptualization and making definitions of concepts explicit, by formulating hypotheses, constructing axiomatic theories and causal models. Theoretical research programs that combine theory construction with comparative research are badly needed to take the world-systems approach beyond the stage of a perspective.

We also want to encourage the application of comparative, quantititave and network-analytic methods to world-systems research, though we will certainly also publish pieces that do not use these methods. Any empirical study that is deemed relevant to world-systems analysis may be published even if it uses a very different conceptual framework.

And finally we also want to publish discussions of future trajectories and options for the modern world-system and considerations of what can be done to create a more humane, peaceful and just world society.

The purposes of JWSR are :

to produce a high quality publication of world-systems research articles
to publish quantitative and comparative research on world-systems
to publish works of theory construction and codification of causal propositions
to publish data sets in connection with articles
to publish reviews of books relevant to world-systems studies
to encourage authors to use the hypermedia advantages of electronic publication to present their research results.

Governance:

JWSR is a self-published refereed journal under the control of the Editor and the Editorial Board. The Associate Editors are consultants who help to procure and evaluate articles for publication.

Copyright Policy:

The contents of JWSR are for use by scholars and researchers and cannot be copied for commercial purposes. Authors retain the full copyrights to their papers. Permissions to reprint must be obtained from the authors. Authors are asked to cite the JWSR versions of their papers if related versions are published elsewhere. The Editor of JWSR reserves the right to reproduce articles in future hard copy, ascii, Portable Document Format (PDF), or html editions of JWSR.