8-23-05

UCR Professors receive NSF grant

“Global state formation: modeling the rise, fall and upward sweeps of large polities in world history and the global future”

The UCR Institute for Research on World-Systems has been awarded a National Science Foundation 
Human and Social Dynamics (HSD) research grant to study “global state formation: modeling 
the rise, fall and upward sweeps of large polities in world history and the global future.” 
UCR Professors E.N. Anderson (Anthropology) and Christopher Chase-Dunn (Sociology) are co-Principal investigators with Professor Peter Turchin (Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Connecticut). The 
three-year research project will receive $450,000 to study the growth of cities and polities in four regions of 
Afroeurasia from 1000 BCE to 1500 CE, and then the whole Earth over the past 500 years. The project will test 
models of expansion of states and empires. The products of the project will help to inform scholars and 
policy-makers about long-run patterns of historical social evolution and their implications for the future of global 
governance and world state formation. Dr. Patricia White, the Sociology Program Director at NSF said: 
“Congratulations! … Competition for HSD research grants is extremely intense and the success of your proposal is 
an indication of the high esteem in which the HSD panelists hold your work.”
 
More information about the project is available at https://irows.ucr.edu/research/citemp/citemp.html
 

upward sweeps