During the Renaissance, central–northern Italy was both Europe’s intellectual and artistic hub and its most prosperous economy. From the seventeenth to early nineteenth century, the Italian economy drifted from center to periphery, in a long economic decline. During that decline, Italy was fragmented and subject to foreign occupations. Structural divides got deeper and a distance between citizens and public authorities emerged. We summarize the fruits of Italy’s “modern economic growth” since political unification through four periods in Italy’s transition from poverty to abundance: a) 1861–1896 slow growth and divergence from Western Europe’s leading economies, b) secular movement from “periphery” to the “center” of the developed world; 1896–1995 was a century of almost uninterrupted, if uneven, convergence with the world’s richest countries, c) 1995–2007 was a period of losing ground: slow growth and relative decline, d) 2008–2019 from relative to the absolute decline of the Italian economy.

The Moscow/St. Petersburg binary shapes Russia’s symbolic geography. Moscow is the self-styled inheritor of Kyivan Rus’, the medieval Slavic state located in what is now Ukraine (where, at the time of writing, the Russian Federation is waging a bloody war of conquest). By “absorbing” the Kyivan heritage, the state now governed from Moscow has at times effected Ukraine’s symbolic erasure, moving the “center” of East Slavic culture five hundred miles to the east. And yet Moscow’s supposed centrality derives meaning largely from the peripheralness of anothercapital, St. Petersburg, foundedin 1704 by the coercively westernizing emperor Peter the Great. For two centuries Petersburg—a center situated on a geographic periphery, the capital of an outward-looking empire—was everything Moscow was not: new, bureaucratic, “western,” symbolically masculine, ethnically hybrid. This opposition has worked to dilute the meanings attached to “provincial” places, i.e., virtually all places located outside the two capitals butnotin exotic non-Russian borderlands like the Caucasus. Taking as examples Tatiana Tolstoya’s “Fakir” (1986, Moscow) and Evgeny Zamiatin’s “The Cave” (1920, Petersburg), this chapter examines how the Russian worldview—particularly Russians’ anxious perception of themselves as provincials—can inform World Literature debates around centers and peripheries.

This chapter introduces the theoretical framework of state-building as lawfare. The chapter starts by outlining the building blocks of peripheral state-building: legal pluralism, nested sovereignty, gender cleavage, and armed conflict. Legal pluralism is an issue of fragmented social control. State–society struggles for social control are complicated because both the state and society are internally divided. The concept of nested sovereignty captures how the state is divided in imperial and federal settings. The central societal cleavage of state-building lawfare is gender. Both political and societal cleavages that drive state-building lawfare in the periphery are actualized and intensified by armed conflict. Building on this foundation, the chapter then theorizes state-building lawfare from above. In particular, it outlines when and why central and peripheral authorities promote non-state legal systems, as well as how conflict changes the political rationale of promoting legal pluralism. After that, the chapter interrogates state-building lawfare from below – focusing on individual choices between state and non-state legal systems. It also speculates about how conflict transforms the driving forces behind these choices – in identities and social norms – as well as resources, interests, and hierarchies, with a special focus on gender relations.

From the 1920s onward, James Joyce and Latin American literature have been inextricably connected. Anglo-American criticism has traditionally seen this connection as a case of influence radiating from an iconic figure of European Modernism to the periphery. However, a close analysis of how prominent writers from Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar to Gustavo Sainz and Ricardo Piglia received and engaged with Joyce’s work reveals a less centralizing literary map. In their critical and creative writings, Joyce appears not as a model to be emulated but as an irreverent Irish writer that occupied an eccentric position within the Western literary tradition. Responding to changing political and social landscapes and diverse national contexts, these Latin American authors have marshalled and refashioned Joyce’s eccentricity to express their local conditions and cultural specificity in a cosmopolitan literary style.

Taking its inspiration from the ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities, this paper studies the representation of (imperial) space in the epigrams of the Garland of Philip. It analyses the ways in which geographical space is imagined and depicted in these poetical texts. Distant regions are no longer seen as completely unfamiliar and outlandish, but populate the imaginary map of an ever growing world. Italy and in particular Rome become part of the Greek landscape. The contribution examines different strategies that these texts employ to impose order on this vast world, such as stereotypical connections with myth or ‘classical’ Greek history. In the process, some place names are loaded with cultural significance and become Greek lieux de mémoire (P. Nora). This integration of a huge empire into the ways in which Greeks understood the(ir) world can thus be seen as an important example of an intellectual response to empire.

Rather than dwelling on routinely marked distinctions between realist and science fictional modes, this chapter identifies an emergent strand of writing about climate change that it calls ‘critical climate irrealism’. It builds on Michael Löwy’s ‘critical irrealism’ where the irreal – as in the fantastic, oneiric, or surrealistic – erupts within a predominantly realist text. ‘Critical irrealism’ describes fictions that do not follow realism’s ‘accurate representations of life as it really is’ but that are nevertheless critical of social reality. Critical irrealism is a notable feature of what World Literary Studies calls literature emerging from the ‘periphery’: territories that suffer from the violent extraction of labour and resources by the ‘core’ of the capitalist world system. This chapter argues that a comparable, and sometimes intersecting, process can be seen in contemporary fiction that uses the weird, the Gothic, the uncanny, and other modes of irrealism to engage with climate change. But it also suggests that climate change’s non-local effects and distorted temporalities complicate the core/periphery model. In bringing together ‘critical irrealism’ with a sense of ‘climate crisis’, ‘critical climate irrealism’ describes an important new trend, where the irreal negotiates radical environmental upheaval in a manner that realism’s recognisable individual experience cannot.

In the legal textual tradition of the Minhāj and the Tuḥfa, a particular subsequent text and its author mark a point from which to analyse Shāfiʿī experiments in the Indian Ocean rim. This chapter considers Fatḥ al-muʿīn, written by Aḥmad Zayn al-Dīn bin Muḥammad Ghazālī al-Malaybārī (d. ca. 1583), an autocommentary on his Qurrat al-ʿayn. Both the base text and the autocommentary form an independent family in the Shāfiʿī textual history with their own textual descendants, while they can also be considered as indirect progenies of the Tuḥfa, for they stimulated the Shāfiʿī legacy of Ibn Ḥajar and his oeuvre on the Malabar Coast and the wider territories around the Indian Ocean. They demonstrate how Indian Ocean Muslims made their way into the textual landscape of Shāfiʿīsm, and even into the heartlands of Islam. They added to the long pattern of Islamic thought in a traditional way and also advanced it. The chapter investigates how it criticised many methods and arguments of its intellectual predecessors and generated a different discourse within the school from its peculiar perspective from Malabar and the Indian Ocean at large.

This chapter is the third and last one dedicated to the analysis of 19th State practice. It turns to precedents of justifying force in the ‘peripheries’, i.e., non-‘European’ spaces. Four case studies are more particularly analysed: building from the work of Inge Van Hulle, it looks at British colonial expansion in Western Africa; at the Anglo-Zulu War (1879); at the French Tonkin expeditions in the 1870s and 1880s; and at the United States’ annexation of Hawaii (1893–1898). It shows that even though the status of ‘peripheral’ entities in the international legal system was debated, intervening States once more took care to develop legal arguments to justify their colonial and expansionist adventures. In so doing it completes the picture of the practice of justifying force in the nineteenth century.

Katz and Lazarsfeld’s Personal Influence introduced the world to the impact of networks on the dissemination of mass media. Their “two-step flow” model showed that broadcast signals reached most of the public by being filtered through well-connected people – “opinion leaders” – who were the primary receivers of media messages, and the primary vehicles through which those messages were then disseminated to everyone else. Scientific and industry attention soon shifted to the task of identifying who the opinion leaders were, and how they could be targeted to spread new content. I trace these intellectual developments through to the arrival of social media, which brought greater attention to the idea of “central” players – or “influencers” – in the social network, as the key leverage points for disseminating products, ideas, and political messages. I show how this scientific search for the sources of social influence eventually led to a paradox: the unlikely finding that many social contagions do not spread from the central players to the periphery, but rather from the network periphery to the center. To explain these startling findings, the distinction between simple contagions, like information and viruses, and complex contagions, like social innovations and political movements, shows how the spread of new ideas through social networks depends in counterintuitive ways on the complexity of the contagion and the structure of the social network.

The chapter explores the League’s “rural hygiene” campaign. During its work on different reflections of sanitary problems that put local, national, and global public health at risk, the League invested substantial scientific, comparative, and professional effort while it was considering possible policies with which these dangers could be faced. These suggested policies, articulated in terms of international law, focused on the eradication of a variety of environmental-sanitary risks and spreading diseases, which the League believed to be plaguing the countryside in Eastern Europe and across the “Far East”. Among the international community’s concerns were the need to protect water resources from human and nonhuman pollution, to treat refuse, to fight spreading diseases in rural areas, to limit fly breeding, to control rats and pests, and more. Citing these concerns as threats to local and international communities, the League conceptualized agricultural peripheries as a rural frontier from which humanity could better protect itself, using various means of sanitary engineering, special medical services, and political awareness.

This chapter tracks two main events that took up much of the League’s attention. First, it assembled the European Conference on Rural Hygiene (1931) and, later, parallel to its main agenda, the Intergovernmental Conference of Far Eastern Countries on Rural Hygiene, held at Bandoeng, Java in August 1937.

A concluding section annotates the contributions of this book to contemporary scholarship on non-Western world literature and intellectual history. It provides a critical assessment of humanism and literary form and makes suggestions for realignment and expansion. I locate twentieth-century modernity as an inter-linked and asymmetrical relationship between the metropolitan core and the global periphery. This is a relation that continues to structure the twenty-first-century world and the struggle for liberation in interesting and unforeseen ways.

World-systems analysis is a holistic and critical social science approach that proposes the study of social change focusing on whole systemic human interaction networks. The general theoretical approach is based on institutional materialism that is inspired by classical sociology and anthropology (Chase-Dunn and Lerro 2016). The world-system perspective emerged in the 1960s and 1970s to explicate the nature of the core–periphery hierarchy over the last five centuries.

Chapter 3 draws on the historical basis laid out in the prior chapter to establish how the current national security arenas of each country came about and what it means for the local cases under scrutiny here. Going beyond the national level, decisions made by peacekeeping headquarters and mission contributors inform the actions of international actors and form a sort of international security arena. The described historical legacies, narratives, and capacities of actors on the national and international levels shape the corridor in which different ordering practices can be negotiated at the local level.

Throughout his career as a writer, Borges strategically strove to create an image of James Joyce as the artificer of intricately woven labyrinths whose sheer scope and encyclopaedic bulk both fascinated and horrified him. The chapter charts the twists and turns of Borges’s ambivalent relationship with Joyce, from his 1925 review of Ulysses and translation of a page of its final chapter, to the development of a more problematic attitude where he sought to reposition his own art of brevity as the antithesis of Joyce’s epic legacy.