Globalization as Evolutionary Process

The term globalization has gained widespread popularity; yet most treatments are either descriptive and/or focused on changes in economic interconnectivity. In this volume the concept is seen in broader terms as leading international experts from a range of disciplines develop a long-term analysis to address the problems of globalization. The editors and contributors develop a framework for understanding the origins and trajectory of contemporary world trends, constructing testable and verifiable models of globalization. They demonstrate how the evolutionary approach allows us to view globalization as an enterprise of the human species as a whole focusing on the analytical problem of global change and the rules governing those changes. The emphasis is not on broad-based accounts of the course of world affairs but, selectively, on processes that reshape the social of the human species, the making of world opinion and the innovations that animate these developments. Chapters are clustered into four foci. One emphasizes the interpretation of globalization as an explicitly evolutionary process. A second looks at historical sequences of such phenomena as population growth or imperial rise and decline as processes that can be modeled and not purely described. The third cluster examines ongoing changes in economic processes, especially information technology. A final cluster takes on some of the challenges associated with forecasting and simulating the complexities of globalization processes. This innovative and important volume will be of interest to students and scholars across the social sciences concerned with the phenomenon of globalization.

George Modelski is Emeritus Professor at the Department of Political Science, University of Washington, USA. Tessaleno Devezas is Associate Professor at the Department of Electromechanics of the University of Beira Interior, Covilhã, Portugal. William R. Thompson is Donald A. Rogers Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington, USA.

Preface Joao Caraca. Foreword Nebojsa Nakicenovic 1. Introduction: A New Approach to Globalization George Modelski, Tessaleno Devezas and William R. Thompson Part 1: Evolutionary Models 2. Globalization as Evolutionary Process George Modelski 3. The Portuguese as System Builders: Technological Innovation in Early Globalization Tessalino Devezas and George Modelski 4. Modeling Long-term Processes of Political Globalization William R. Thompson 5. Is Globalization Self-Organizing? Joachim Karl Rennstich 6. Theories of Long-Term Change and the Future of World Political Institutions Fulvio Attina Part 2: Models of Long-Term Change 7. Compact Mathematical Models of World System Development, and How they can Help us to Clarify our Understanding of Globalization Processes Andrey Korotayev 8. Modeling Periodic Waves of Integration in the Afroeurasian World System Peter Turchin 9. Discovering Oscillatory Dynamics of City-Size Distributions in World Historical Systems Douglas R. White, Natasa Kejzar and Laurent Tambayong 10. Nature, Disease and Globalization: An Evolutionary Perspective Dennis Pirages 11. Globalization in History and the History of Globalization: The Application of a Globalization Model to Historical Research Catia Antunes Part 3: Global Change and the Information Age 12. Three Globalizing Phases of the World System and Modernity Shumpei Kumon and Yasuhide Yamanouchi 13. Accelerating Socio-Technological Evolution: From Ephemeralization and Stigmergy to the Global Brain Francis Heylighen 14. Growth of the Internet, Long Waves and Global Change Tessaleno C. Devezas, Harold A. Linstone and Humberto J.S. Santos 15. The Value to Globalizing Informatics Research of an Evolutionary View: One Anthropologist's Perspective David Hakken Part 4: Forecasting and Simulating Globalization 16. Forecasting Globalization: The Use of International Futures (Ifs) Barry Hughes 17. Forecasting Globalization Using World Models Rafael Reuveny 18. Evolution, Modernization and Globalization: Computer-Based Analysis of Social Complexity Jurgen Kluver and Christina Kluver Part 5: Assessment 19. Assessment: What Has Been Learnt? George Modelski, Tessaleno Devezas and William R. Thompson