Salvatore Babones


Salvatore Babones is an American sociologist, associate professor at the University of Sydney, and an expert in the areas of Chinese and American economy and society. His research is related to macro-level structure of the world economy, with a particular focus on China's global economic integration. He is an author of several books, numerous academic articles, and a contributor to Foreign Affairs, Al Jazeera English, Quadrant and Truthout.

Biography

He received PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 2003. From 2003 to 2008 he has been a professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh; since 2008 at the University of Sydney. He has also been a Visiting Associate Professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and a Visiting Scholar at Academia Sinica in Taipei.
He has been associated with or written for the Institute for Policy Studies, the Russian International Affairs Council, the Centre for International Relations, the Poland-Asia Research Center and the Latvian International Affairs Council.

Work

Babones has offered a reformulation of world-systems analysis that distinguishes five core elements of the perspective from ancillary theories that have been promulgated within that perspective. He added to these five core elements the "strong theorem" that the core-periphery hierarchy of the modern world-economy could best be understood in terms of state strength and cultural integration. He began to use the historical Chinese concept of tianxia to describe the structure of the millennial world-system as an American tianxia that has endogenized the entire world-economy under a single, American-dominated political system. He also writes on quantitative methodology for the social sciences.
In 2018 he published a book on Donald Trump and his administration, dealing with modern meaning and framing of concepts such as democracy, populism and authoritarianism.

Books