The Global Social Protest Research Working Group of the Arrighi Center includes faculty, post-doctoral fellows, graduate students, and undergraduate students. The group is concerned with expanding our theoretical and empirical understanding of the recent major wave of global social unrest. The recent wave of global social unrest includes movements as diverse as the Arab Spring in the Middle East and North Africa, the Indignados Movement in Spain, the Occupy Movement in the United States, urban riots in Paris and London, and labor movements in China. The goal of the research working group is to build a detailed picture of the timing, spatial patterning, and forms of social unrest that have characterized the contemporary wave and to develop an understanding of the degree to which the current wave is similar/different from previous major global waves of social unrest. To pursue this empirical and theoretical agenda, the research group has pioneered new methodological approaches for collecting long-term world-scale data on social unrest.

The Global Inequality and Development Research Working Group of the Arrighi Center is made up of faculty, post-doctoral fellows, graduate students, and undergraduate students. The group is concerned with the theoretical and empirical study of global inequality and development as well as a critical rethinking of dominant models of development. While the ultimate goals may remain the same—i.e., the improvement of individual life chances and the diminishing of global inequality—our understanding of the most effective means for reaching these goals is clearly inadequate.

Building from central analyses originally outlined by Giovanni Arrighi and others, members of the research group are focused on updating and extending prior research on the long-term historical patterning of global inequality and on the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of  the dominant postwar development strategies (i.e., industrialization, urbanization, and other forms of ‘modernization’).  Research is also focused on the implications of the changes over time in the global economic and political context, including the rise of financial capital, changing structures and norms in global governance related to development, and the increasing salience of ecological limits to ‘modernization’ (particularly fossil-fuel intensive industrialization).

Contemporary processes of urban governance are increasingly challenged by the rise of global finance and the explosion of municipal debt, by problems of environmental sustainability, and by shifts in the geographical center of world-economic growth and political power. Previously lauded models for urban success–through urban entrepreneurialism, state-led redevelopment projects, public-private partnerships, and nested organization of government levels (local, regional, national)–are confronted by the crisis of welfare states and the rise of a politics of austerity. New forms of uneven spatial development are emerging within and between urban centers.

Under these conditions, the gleaming new mega-cities in China, India, or throughout the Arabian Gulf and the long-lived luminaries of global capitalism in Europe and North America, such as London or even New York, have become spectacles of a continuous urban crisis. Confronted from above, by the financial crisis and the repeated ‘booms and busts’ of global capital, and from below, by increasing inequality and the fracturing of older political, economic, and social ties, cities seem to lurch between failures of governance and losses of legitimacy. Even the provision of basic services has become an acute problem, as can be seen from such divergent experiences as the exodus from and destitution of Detroit to the agglomeration of slums in Lagos. The micro (local) urban form has become more subjected than ever to acute macro (global) problems.

These challenges raise questions about what it means to govern urban areas. Specifically, how does governance extend across or within metropolitan regions, and what role do urban dwellers play in building and rebuilding urban space in the twenty-first century? The Global Urban Governance Research Working Group addresses these questions through the empirical study of contemporary forms of urban governance, especially the interaction between government organizations, private investment, civil society, and individual citizens. Ultimately this will involve a conceptual rethinking of the dominant strategies of urban development, providing a basis for better understanding of urbanization and urban development in the new century.