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This chapter reflects upon the main reasons for the universal, deep, and long-lasting impact of the Mexican neozapatista movement during the 25 years of its public life, recuperating not only the immediate reasons but the reasons linked with process in the middle and in the long term. We argue that the neozapatista movement changed the correlation des forces in Mexico in 1994, opening the transition of all indigenous Latin American movements to pass from a defensive and marginal position, to a new offensive and protagonic position. In the general context after 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Mexican neozapatism restores hope in social protest and social fight of all the anticapitalistic and antisystemic movements all over the world. With the above basis, it is possible to understand that this Mexican neozapatism was able to define the general agenda of the main demands and targets that were vindicated for the antisystemic movements during the last 25 years, including all the movements of 2011, such as the Spanish Indignados, or the so-called Arab Spring, or Occupy Wall Street, or even the current French movement of the Gilets Jeaunes, among many others. It explains partially the real function of a kind of “avant-garde” of the antisystemic movements all over the world, playing by the Mexican neozapatismo in the last five lusters and even today.

One of the concepts most commonly evoked in order to characterize and explain the zig-zag trajectory of political dynamics in the Islamic Republic of Iran has been the “middle class.” Yet there is no scholarly consensus on a fundamental approach to identification and measurement of the middle class. Rather, the category of the middle class is both a category of analysis – long debated within social theory – as well as a category of practice – routinely deployed in political behavior and social distinction. In order to better conceptualize and understand the formation and role of Iran's middle classes in the country's sociopolitical dynamics, theories of class formation in the global South should be rearticulated away from a reified notion of the middle class as a transhistorical subject. To do so, this chapter is divided into four sections. First, internal debates over the role of Iran's middle classes in the country's recent political history are assessed and data from the 2016 Iran Social Survey is used to test a long-standing demographic assumption on the class dynamics of electoral behavior. Second, the tradition of theorizing the social power of middle classes is reassessed, drawing on the growing scholarly attention to the heterogenous origins and differentiated internal composition of middle classes across the global South. Third, a typology is proposed of four middle classes across the twentieth century shaped by varying state attempts at “catch-up” development. These types are then applied in a revisionist telling of the making and unmaking of middle classes in postrevolutionary Iran. Finally, implications of this framework beyond Iran are sketched out for global waves of protest in the twenty-first century.

This paper discusses data-collection strategies that use digitized historical newspaper archives to study social conflicts and social movements from a global and historical perspective focusing on nationalist movements. I present an analysis of State-Seeking Nationalist Movements (SSNMs) dataset I, which includes news articles reporting on state-seeking activities throughout the world from 1804 to 2013 using the New York Times and the Guardian/Observer. In discussing this new source of data and its relative value, I explain the various benefits and challenges involved with using digitized historical newspaper archives for world-historical analysis of social movements. I also introduce strategies that can be used to detect and minimize some potential sources of bias. I demonstrate the utility of the strategies introduced in this paper by assessing the reliability of the SSNM dataset I and by comparing it to alternative datasets. The analysis presented in the paper also compares the labor-intensive manual data-coding strategies to automated approaches. In doing so, it explains why labor-intensive manual coding strategies will continue to be an invaluable tool for world-historical sociologists in a world of big data.

This chapter aims to contribute to the study of social protests around the world and particularly in Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s, with a focus on an Argentinean case. Throughout these years, Argentina like many other Latin American societies witnessed the growth and development of intense social and political struggles in concert with the armed insurgency. Did workers or other popular social sectors support guerrilla organizations in Argentina? What was the interconnection between working-class and armed insurgent struggle? This chapter examines these liaisons by studying the case of an industrial city that has been identified to be a paradigm of labor radicalization and political violence in Argentina—Villa Constitución. Through the reanalysis of documents and sources as well as interviews, we discuss established interpretations on armed and labor struggles that reveal a broader heterogeneity in the forms of social support to revolutionary violence. Solidarity among workers and armed militants appears in (1) the actions of militant workers at their workplaces, and (2) the armed actions organized by militants in support of worker’s fights.” These two groups reinforced each other's activism. But, by no means can we directly deduct from this that rank and file workers immediately identified their strikes with ideologically revolutionary objectives.

Global cycles of leadership and hegemony have repeated since 1492, leaving to history Dutch, British, and now declining US hegemonies. Theoretical models (Chase‐Dunn and Rubinson 1977; Hopkins and Wallerstein 1979; Arrighi 1994), historical narratives (Wallerstein 1974, 1980, 1989; Kennedy 1989), and statistical analyses (Modelski and Thompson 1988; Boswell and Sweat 1991) portray the cycle of hegemony as a fixed dynamic inherent to the world‐system. Can we expect the future to be any different?

In recent years, small farmers have been coming together more and more in networks and organizations, joining forces to resist the squeeze process that they are being subjected to in a system dominated by agribusiness. In alliance often with consumers and other actors concerned with issues of quality food, the environment, and social justice, these farmers are interested in developing alternative forms of production and consumption. These farmers, who are struggling to achieve self-reproduction and the establishment of sustainable agro-food systems, appear to be mainly concerned with the control of resources. The spread of this kind of experience evokes the issue of repeasantization. In this chapter, I use the case of the French association Réseau Semences Paysannes (RSP) to highlight some recent innovations in alternative agro-food models, as well as paths of research and rural development emerging within this framework.

In theorizing the dynamics of social processes, dialectical thinking informs Marx's historical materialist inquiries and both – dialectics and historical materialist principles – inform his political–economic analysis. In conceptualizing empirical observations during this work, Marx (1973b, p. 101) assumes that the “concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse” and that “With the varying degree of development of productive power, social conditions and the laws governing them vary too” (Marx, 1992, p. 28). This methodological tack strives for the flexibility needed for analyzing patterns in long-term social development (the structure of history) as well as the logic of specific systems in their totality and flux (the history of structures).

This paper aims to analyze the Egyptian revolution as an anti-systemic movement. It illustrates how Egypt’s position in the world-economy has affected its political economy orientation and led to the marginalization of critical masses, who launched the revolution.

The paper follows Wallerstein’s world-system analysis focusing on the anti-systemic movement concept. The paper analyzes the Egyptian case based on Annales school’s longue durée concept, which is a perspective to study developments of social relations historically.

The Egyptian revolution was not only against the autocratic regime but also against the power structure resulting from the neoliberal economic policies, introduced as a response to the capitalism crisis. It represented the voice of the forgotten. The revolution was one of the anti-systemic movements resisting the manifestations of the capitalist world-economy.

This paper aims at proving that the Egyptian revolution was an anti-systemic movement; which will continue to spread as a rejection to the world-system and to aspire a more democratic and egalitarian world. The current COVID-19 pandemic is exacerbating the crisis of the world-system.