Of Social Spaces, Citizenship, and the Nature of Power in the World Economy

In the last decade or so, the critique of historical essentialism that had hitherto been carried out primarily by social and cultural theorists, literary critics, and urban materialist geographers has yielded broad explorations of the spatial dynamics of power.2 Everywhere in the social sciences, spatial metaphors are gaining in currency, and talk is increasingly of boundaries, locations, positions, situations, place-images, and mapping. As a result, power has appeared less as a moment in time, and more as a territory, a site-specific logic of organization and displacement. In the of international political economy as well, concerns for what Edward W. Soja has called the socio-spatial dialectic of capitalism have caused an avalanche of studies of the world economy as a structured field of practice, which have cut across a broad spectrum of theoretical literature, encouraged a reassessment of past contributions to the study of the world economy, and helped shape ongoing assessments of political possibilities.3 In the midst of a profound crisis, which has broken the sense of historical continuity provided in the postwar period by US hegemony, when Pax Amencana appeared to