This book examines the changing nature of global inequalities and efforts that are being made to move toward a more egalitarian world society. The contributors are world historical sociologists and geographers who place the contemporary issues of unequal power, wealth and income in a global historical perspective. The geographers examine the roles of geopolitics and patterns of warfare in the historical development of the modern world-system, and the sociologists examine endeavours to improve the situations of poor peoples and nations and to engage the challenges of sustainability that are linked with global inequalities. Overcoming Global Inequalities contains cutting-edge research from engaged social scientists intended to help humanity deal with the challenges of global inequality in the 21st century.

Part I: Historical Development of Inequalities Manuela Boatca (Free University of Berlin) "Commodification of Citizenship: Global Inequalities and the Modern Transmission of Property" Gary Coyne (University of California-Riverside) "The Political Economy of Language Education Policies" Lindsay Jacobs and Ronan Van Rossem (Ghent University) "Political power and the world-system: can political globalization counter core hegemony?" Jeffrey Kentor (University of Utah) "A New Typology of the Global Economy: 1850-present" Daniel Pasciuti and Beverly J. Silver (Johns Hopkins University) "Developmentalist Illusion Redux?" Jason Struna (University of California-Riverside) "Transnationally Implicated Labor Processes as Transnational Social Relations: Workplaces and Global Class Formation" Part II: Geopolitics and Warfare as Arenas of Struggle Patrick Bond (University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban) "Territorial alliance formation and dissolution as building blocs for geopolitical theory" Ray Dezzani (University of Idaho) and Colin Flint (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) "One Logic, Many Wars: The Variety and Geography of Wars in the Capitalist World-Economy, 1816-2007" Part III: Social Movements in Struggle James Fenelon (California State University at San Bernardino) "Indigenous Alternatives to the Global Crises of the Modern World System" Jennifer Givens and Andrew Jorgenson (University of Utah) "Global Integration and Carbon Emissions, 1965-2005" Sahan Karatasli, Sefika Kumral, Ben Scully, Beverly Silver, and Smriti Upadhyay (Johns Hopkins University) "Bringing Labor Back in: Workers in the Current Wave of Global Social Protest" Harold Kerbo (California Polytechnic State University) and Patrick Ziltener (University of Zurich) "Sustainable Development and Poverty Reduction in the Modern World System: Southeast Asia and the Negative Case of Cambodia"