Global Inequality and World Revolutions: Past, Present and Future

Chase-Dunn and Nagy examine how global inequalities have been shaped and contested by past rebellions, revolutions, and transnational social movements to suggest the shape of an effective progressive response to the dilemmas of the twenty-first century. They discuss transnational social movements of the past and in the current era in the context of the inequality trends revealed by Thomas Piketty’s research on within-country inequality. Global governance structures and institutions have been restructured by social movements and world revolutions over the past several centuries. The rebellions, protests and counter-hegemonic regimes that have emerged since the 1990s need to be compared with earlier world revolutions to assess the prospects for the future emergence of a more coherent effort to transform the capitalist world-economy into a democratic and collectively rational global commonwealth. Chase-Dunn and Nagy point out the lack of attention to the role that social movements have played in the causation of the inequality trends and deal with the possibilities for social movements to challenge the growing inequality trends of the past several decades once again.