For Wallerstein, “a world-system is a social system, one that has boundaries, structures, member groups, rules of legitimation, and coherence. Its life is made up of the conflicting forces which hold it together by tension and tear it apart as each group seeks eternally to remold it to its advantage. It has the characteristics of an organism, in that its has a lifespan over which its characteristics change in some respects and remain stable in others.
Life within it is largely self-contained, and the dynamics of its development are largely internal”. A world-system is what Wallerstein terms a “world economy”, integrated through the market rather than a political center, in which two or more regions are interdependent with respect to necessities like food, fuel, and protection, and two or more polities compete for domination without the emergence of one single center forever.
In his own first definition, Wallerstein (1974) said that a world-system is a “multicultural territorial division of labor in which the production and exchange of basic goods and raw materials is necessary for the everyday life of its inhabitants.” This division of labor refers to the forces and relations of production of the world economy as a whole and it leads to the existence of two interdependent regions: core and periphery.
These are geographically and culturally different, one focusing 011 labor-intensive, and the other on capital- intensive production. (Gold frank, 2000). The core-periphery relationship is structural. Semi-peripheral states acts as a buffer zone between core and periphery, and has a mix of the kinds of activities and institutions that exist on them (Skocpol, 1977).