Immanuel Wallerstein’s Lasting Legacies

It is remarkable how Immanuel Wallerstein's work resonates with certain students, whether undergraduate or graduate. In courses I teach, such as Senior Capstone in International Affairs and a graduate-level course on globalization, the concepts and framework that Wallerstein developed decades ago have an almost uncanny explanatory power for the economic and political trends that are examined. As an interdisciplinary macro-sociological analytical framework that also accounts for meso-and micro-level entities and processes, the world-systems perspective appeals to some of my more discerning students-including those exposed to neoclassical economics and to realism in political science-who go on to apply world-systems analysis to their final papers. In