Global Hierarchy: Political-Military and Economic Power

The impacts of globalization on changing world economic and political structures and hierarchy have been widely debated in the Social Science literature. This study builds on the preceding research on economic and political power relationships that cause and sustain an unequal exchange between the core and periphery of the world-economy.
The current study examines the dynamics of world cities in the context of long-run hegemonic cycles and the centralization and decentralization of political-military and economic power. The world city literature argues that the emergence of global cities has rearranged the state-based core-periphery structure, producing a global city system that cuts across earlier patterns of global inequality. The growth of world cities and the centrality of economic and political power structures are embedded in interstate system which is characterized by hegemonic rivalry.
The dynamics will be examined with network analysis by constructing a relational dataset using transnational corporations and their city locations, inter-polity war, political alliance, and war expenditure data. The impact of political-military conflict has already been implicitly encompassed in the city dynamics literature, yet actual empirical examination of this relationship has not been done utilizing multi-scale network data. The primary goal of the current study is to explore the shifting relationship of economic and coercive power in the hegemonic sequence (power cycles) and its impact on city hierarchy dynamics.