“Geo-Politicizing” the World-System’s Intermediate Spaces: Semi-Centers and Semi-Peripheries,Geo-Strategies of Subordination and Autonomy in Latin America and Southern Europe After the Cold War

Abstract

This paper aims to shed some light on a key yet obscure and imprecise concept, used primarily in world-systems analysis: the semi-periphery, and how it is applied in various cases in Latin America and Southern Europe. It evaluates the concept’s theoretical importance and reviews various empirical efforts to discern between countries’ circumstances by the horizontal tripartite division of the world-economy’s areas. It then analyzes its evolution – especially in the most recent decades after the Cold War – and verifies how heterogeneous the semi-periphery is. It then proposes to divide the category by distinguishing semi-centers from semi-peripheries. For this, it is necessary to politicize and “geo-politicize” the concept – that is, to include structural political and geopolitical elements upon its definition and analysis, which until now has based itself fundamentally on the geoeconomic structure. Doing so will also allow us to distinguish between subordinate and autonomous semi-peripheries.

semi-periphery; semi-center; world-systems analysis; subordination geostrategies; autonomy geostrategies