The 2007 – 2008 financial crisis has been the subject of many articles, books, movies and even a theater play. We take you for a walk along Wall Street, pointing at some aspects of the story that touch our personal experiences and interests. We look critically at some of the main underlying causes. Besides political blindness, we highlight the unbridled growth of power of relatively small groups of investment bankers and how these brought financial institutions to (and in some cases beyond) the edge of bankruptcy. We expose some of the over-complicated financial instruments together with their astronomical volumes traded. We also look more critically at the role played by quants (financial engineers) in general and mathematicians in particular. What is the truth behind “The formula that killed Wall Street”? An important aspect concerns early warnings not heeded to. In summary, this is a chapter on greed, power, complexity, volume and stupidity.

This chapter examines different styles and contents of attempts to revise the outcome of the Paris Peace Conference. It contrasts the devastating critique of the Economic Consequences, with specific proposals with which Keynes was involved that began in November 1919 with meetings in Amsterdam hosted by the Dutch banker Gerard Vissering, and involving a wide range of international bankers, including some influential Americans. The Amsterdam meeting suggested a plan for leveraging private U.S. finance for the sustainable reconstruction of Europe that anticipated some aspects of the 1924 Dawes Plan. Keynes found his role in the Amsterdam plan undermined by the notoriety of the Economic Consequences and the disapprobrium it attracted. How could he hope to persuade the U.S. government after the attack on Woodrow Wilson mounted in the Economic Consequences? There is a sharp contrast – even contradiction – between the Cambridge world of sharp analysis and polemic and the Amsterdam approach, where market-oriented people tried to devise a solution using financial products/financial engineering. And each of these approaches was also quite different from the diplomatic logic that had produced the Versailles Treaty.

Chapter 6 investigates the manifestations of the politicization and securitization of immigration over time in Spain, the UK, and the US, each of which experienced acts of terrorism between 2001 and 2005. The chapter’s objectives are to illuminate the trajectory of inter-political party competition regarding immigration and the propensity of the major parties to securitize and politicize immigration. It plots the interaction of the key variables of our immigration threat politics paradigm as these are illuminated in each country’s political context. Among these are the predominant threat frames, attitudinal influences, popular policy preferences, and patterns of inter-party politics regarding immigration. The evidence reveals that the shift from a predominant economic and/or cultural threat frame to a public safety one precipitates depolitization and a popular and an inter- party consensus regarding immigration in the near term. However, once restrictive policies are embedded and the salience of immigration recedes, familiar patterns of inter-party competition resume.

The Conclusions summarize the book’s findings and revisits the question of whether contemporary liberal states can manage immigration and human mobility in a new security environment. Based on the evidence, we conclude that liberal states in the post-Cold War era are empowered to implement restrictive and illiberal policies by enlisting the cooperation of non-central state gatekeepers and the support of their publics. The chapter then considers the implications of the contemporary migration policy playing field for the civil liberties of citizens and migrants. It also surveys the effects of the 2019-22 Covid-19 pandemic on the course of human mobility worldwide and assesses whether they resonate with the assumptions of the book’s immigration threat politics paradigm. Several emergent inter-generational and values patterns around human mobility and immigration are then identified. We conclude with muted optimism about the liberal compromise elicited by the paradigm shift to embedded securitism. Despite its affront to the core values and principles upon which liberal democracies were founded, the expansion of the migration regulatory field reflects the consent of the governed.

Chapter 2 situates the migration trilemma within a dynamic, securitarian framework. Informed by evidence gathered from cross-national public opinion surveys, media content analyses, an experiment, and original surveys of Members of the European Parliament, it evaluates the ways in which frames have influenced the course of the politics of immigration and the content of immigration policy in post-WWII Europe and the US. It underscores the considerable influence media and political elite frames have on popular attitudes regarding immigration and, indirectly, immigration and human mobility policies. The chapter’s main insight is that the way immigration is primarily framed largely determines whether the subject is salient, and when so, how it influences human mobility considerations. Its central argument is that as the public safety and national security dimensions of immigration have become more salient, liberal states have adopted more expansive and restrictive policies.

In many countries, the idea of minority autonomy is a taboo topic, rejected out of hand as a threat to the state. Yet the desire for some degree of self-government runs deep in many ethnic and religious communities. Some people have suggested that a generalized scheme of decentralization or devolution, understood as a country-wide process that shifts power from the central state to lower levels of government, can de facto enable minority autonomy without invoking any idea of group rights or ethnic autonomy. This chapter argues that this proposal is unlikely to work. Generalized decentralization can be implemented in ways that disempower and fragment minorities, and has often been adopted precisely with this intention. Decentralization is only likely to benefit minorities if and when it is designed with minority aspirations in mind. And this in turn requires that minority aspirations be moved out of the taboo category into the category of normal democratic politics: minority aspirations must be “normalized” and “desecuritized.” This is likely to require changes both in the broader geopolitics of the region and in the local self-understandings of nationhood and peoplehood.

Chapter 4 documents and analyzes China’s domestic policies aimed at countering Uyghur violence. We discuss the broad securitization of Xinjiang, including budgets and the forces involved. Drawing on the best available data on Uyghur-related political violence and China’s public security expenditure in Xinjiang, we present the first rigorous assessment of the feedback loop of violence and repression in Xinjiang. We demonstrate that government repression is not systematically followed by increased Uyghur violence and that increased security expenditures are excessive and inefficient, especially in the long run. This chapter also traces the recent strategic shift in China’s policies from postattack securitization toward actively and forcibly promoting ethnic mingling and “de-extremification.” While this policy reorientation has been attributed to Beijing’s intolerance of instability, our analysis shows that it is a result of a more complex set of competing priorities within the Chinese government.

Chapter 6 dissects the drivers of Tunisian immigration politics before, during and after the 2011 regime change, focusing on the reasons behind restrictive policy continuity in the face of international and civil society efforts to initiate a liberal reform. I show that while foreign policy interests, the role of national identity narratives, and the imperative to secure state power over immigration have remained constants in Tunisian immigration policymaking, the role and weight of domestic factors such as public opinion and civil society activism in public policymaking has fundamentally changed after 2011. Yet, instead of triggering liberal reform in line with the revolutionary spirit, democratization has compelled political elites to put ‘Tunisians first’ and to sideline issues of racism and immigration. Ultimately, the bottom-up and external pressures that emerged after 2011 only led to minor, mostly informal policy changes that have not affected the restrictive core of Tunisia’s immigration regime in the first decade of democratization.

Chapter 4 dissects the origins, drivers and implementation of the 2013 liberal immigration reform in Morocco, which broke with the restrictive rhetoric and policies that Morocco had pursued since the late 1990s. In particular, I examine state formation legacies in migration control, as well as reform drivers within the state apparatus, civil society and the international sphere to show that Moroccan authorities increasingly devise immigration policies within a three-level game – keeping in mind not only domestic and European but also African policy interests. In this context, I demonstrate that Moroccan immigration policy is primarily driven by the monarchy’s foreign policy and domestic regime legitimation goals and that the 2013 reform has been a central tool in fortifying Morocco’s image as a ‘liberal monarchy’ at home and abroad at a moment of regional political turmoil after the ‘Arab Spring’. I also explain how the inconsistent implementation dynamics that mitigate the reform’s impact on migrants’ everyday lives have not jeopardized but reinforced the king’s power position.

Before we can explore the ontology of security, we must establish a preferred meaning of the word and purge it, as far as possible, of ambiguity. This preliminary task is especially important when one’s subject is a term in common currency and deployed in a wide variety of contexts for a wide variety of purposes.1 The more familiar a word, the more likely we are to take for granted that our own particular understanding of it is widely shared and that its meaning goes without saying. This is as true of the word ‘security’ as it is for almost every other key concept in the study of world politics.

The politicization of religion is the result of the competition over loyalties between the nation-state and religious groups. The state regulates the immanent and the transcendent. Allegiance to the state transcends the allegiance to God on the Chinese territory. The genealogy of this habitus is traced back to the Jesuit mission to China in the 16th century through the rise of the Communist Party and the current mode of regulation/repression of religion by the state, especially the Muslims in the Xinjiang province.

The methodological risks of defining religion a priori are discussed. The alternative is to study ideas, groups, and institutions that are defined, perceived or contested as religious. In any given case, the dimension of religion that is at stake is identified (specifically, one or all of the three Bs: belief, belonging or behaving) along with which specific interactions between the three are at play for both political and religious communities. The interaction between the two sets of three Bs, religious and political, can explain the politicization of religion and vice versa in specific contexts. From these findings, three trends emerge that cut across all the cases and would be worth further exploration: the loss of local autonomy of religious communities, the securitization of religion and the blurring of the national and international political division. In closing, the respective limits of variable-centered investigations and postcolonial studies are discussed.