As a “Digital Swing State,” South Africa’s approach to digital sovereignty is unique. This chapter analyzes South Africa’s involvement in international processes relevant to digital sovereignty and critically assesses its national policy and regulatory response to the digital economy, focusing on online content regulation, cybercrime, and data policy. Attention is given also to the challenges faced by South Africa, such as cyber vulnerabilities, institutional failures in implementing digital policies, and the struggle to protect citizens’ rights in the digital space. South Africa’s emerging digital sovereignty posture is analyzed through the lens of securitization and development, revealing a complex balance between leveraging digital transformation for socioeconomic development and addressing cybersecurity threats. The chapter reveals while developmental aspirations inform South Africa’s digital policy to reap the benefits of digitalization, they are also increasingly influenced by securitization trends to protect national digital assets and avoid loss of control. The chapter recommends for South Africa to balance its securitization agenda with respect for human rights, calling for proportionate, legitimate, and human-centric policies. The aim is to achieve a positive digital sovereignty agenda that respects human rights and promotes human security, as enshrined in the 1996 Constitution, while effectively implementing digital policies for socioeconomic development.

Obtaining French citizenship is not enough to secure social acceptance, and terror attacks committed in the name of Islam have critically impaired Muslims’ claims to national membership. Beginning with a discussion of how the construction of Muslims as a “suspect community” has impacted their daily lives, the chapter explores Muslim leaders’ efforts to display exemplary conduct to reassure majority members and circumvent the terrorist stigma. Their actions, such as organizing guided tours and open days in mosques, are emblematic of this endeavor, as well as of the asymmetrical burden of mutual understanding that characterizes postcolonial European societies. Moreover, embodying exemplariness involves cultivating Islamically justified dispositions for approachability and gentleness in daily interactions. Efforts to allay suspicions can also lead Muslim leaders of the UOIF to establish taboo forms of cooperation with intelligence officers, which highlights the ways in which the securitization of Islam relies partly on the involvement of certain community members. Overall, through their practice of disidentification from “Salafi,” “literalist,” and other “extremist” worshippers, French Muslim leaders tend to reinforce the distinction made by state authorities between “good Muslims” and “bad Muslims,” thereby deflecting the fundamentalist stigma onto some coreligionists.

This final chapter compares the country findings and brings together the conceptual and empirical insights presented. It also aims to answer the questions presented in the introductory chapter: What are the security implications of energy transitions? What elements of positive and negative security can be found? How should energy security and security of supply be redefined in the context of the energy transition? Is there a hidden side to policymaking in the energy–security nexus? It first discusses the interplay between energy, security, and defense policies, followed by securitization and politicization. Subsequently, focus is placed on the security implications of energy transitions, and on negative and positive security. The chapter ends by summarizing the key technological, actor-based, and institutional aspects of the country cases, perceptions of Russia as a landscape pressure, and final conclusions.

This chapter introduces the readers to sustainability transition studies, its key concepts, and how it has been connected to security, defense, and military issues in the past. The ways in which security can play a role in transitions is connected, for example, to how niche innovations develop and expand, how sociotechnical regimes operate, and what kind of landscape pressures are perceived to influence niches and regimes. It is interlinked to the role of states in transitions, and how war and peace are connected to niche expansion. The second purpose of this chapter is to introduce security studies, including some of its key concepts. The chapter will explain what is meant by negative and positive security, reference objects, and securitization.

Chapter 6 looks at political responses to the MENA migration to Europe from 2011, the most harshly exclusionary case in my study. The migration mixed asylum seekers fleeing wars in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, with labor migrants from other MENA states. The chapter tracks Europe’s progression from initially cautious receptiveness of asylum seekers to policies of exclusion of MENA migrants from the continent. It shows that the growing numbers, migrant “mix,” and terrorist attacks by (mostly non-migrant) Islamic extremists in Europe combined to undermine need-based deservingness, empower populist parties and feed xenophobic media. The chapter focuses on the EU’s turn to militarized securitization of its land and sea borders and ‘externalization of borders’ to Turkey and Libya, policies that ended the migration surge by indiscriminate physical exclusion of migrants and asylum seekers. Case studies show the varied effects of and responses to the migration in the five European cases and in Russia, which received much smaller numbers. Responses to the MENA migration brought international migration to the core of Europe’s politics, entrenched populist parties, and showed the failure of the Geneva Convention asylum system in the 21st century.

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.