Scholars of different schools have extensively analysed world systems as networks of communication under the fashionable heading "globalization". This collected research pushes the argument one step further. Globalization is not a homogenization of all social life on Earth. It is a heterogeneous process that connects the global and the local on different levels. Globalization is a metaphor for different border structures, new borderlines, and conditions of membership, which emerge in a global world-system. As a world-system expands it incorporates new territories and boundaries of the world-system. These frontiers or boundary zones are the locus of resistance to incorporation, ethnogenesis, ethnic transformation and ethnocide.