A world-system is not the system of the world but a system that becomes a world. It operates like a matrix of mirrors, each reflecting fragments of power dynamics through a core-periphery divide that obscures the entanglements between nature, society, and knowledge. This divide is not merely geopolitical; it is epistemic, with the core shaping what is seen, understood, and valued.
Institutions reinforce this structure through a web of interstate recognition and credit-based sovereignty, where core states legitimize one another while binding peripheral states into cycles of dependency. Sustaining the interstate system requires continuous processes of externalizing, shifting, and downgrading. Ghost acreage describes the displaced consumption of resources, beyond the core-periphery’s atlas—hidden extensions of consumption, extraction, and waste. These outsourced and invisible acreages are the “infinite outside” for the world systems, bearing its costs.
The modern world-system operates far beyond individual elements, unfolding across boundaries with the flows of energy, money, ideologies and knowledge, revealing its inner complexity. In the Anthropocene, this relationship intensifies as Earth system deeply impacted by the coherent and sweeping force of the world-system. Earth itself becomes a field of externalization, symbolized by the iconic "Blue Marble" photograph—a veiled image that ghosts the true planetary costs beneath the global structure.