European welfare states are comprehensive, fostering solidarity across generations, promoting income redistribution, balancing gendered labour market and life course transitions, whilst providing safeguards against economic shocks. In an era of rapid socioeconomic restructuring, policymakers face constant pressures to reform their welfare systems in response to evolving fiscal, political, social and demographic realities. The welfare state debate has shifted from the question of 'how much?...

Née en 1936 et publiée par l'Ifri, Politique étrangère, la plus ancienne revue française de relations internationales, propose un numéro exceptionnel, à paraître début juin 2026.**Réunissant de prestigieux contributeurs français et étrangers, ce numéro ambitionne de dresser, en trois temps, le panorama d’un monde incertain, de ses avenirs possibles :Un monde à vivreLes fondements – démog...

This book primarily explores the welfare-policy responses to the Great Recession, reform trajectories that swept across Europe over the last decade, with a final chapter that focuses on Covid-19 welfare management. The 2008 crash marked a critical stress test for European welfare states with dramatic repercussions, including a massive surge in unemployment, a widening in wage and income disparities, and rising poverty. Hikes in fiscal deficits and public debt, required to pre-empt an econo...

Christopher Deeming and Paul Smyth together with internationally renowned contributors propose that the merging of the ‘social investment’ and ‘inclusive growth and development’ agendas is forging an unprecedented global social policy framework. The book shows how these key ideas together with the environmental imperative of ‘sustainability’ are shaping a new global development agenda.This framework opens the way to a truly global social policy discipline making it essential readin...

Leading scholars in the field examine the highly topical issue of the future of the welfare state in Europe. They argue that welfare states need to adjust, and examine which kind of welfare architecture will further Europe's stated goal of maximum social inclusion and justice. The volume concentrates on four principal social policy domains; the aged and transition to retirement; the welfare issues related to profound changes in working life; the new risks and needs that arise in households...

The Uses of Social Investment provides the first study of the welfare state, under the new post-crisis austerity context and associated crisis management politics, to take stock of the limits and potential of social investment. It surveys the emergence, diffusion, limits, merits, and politics of social investment as the welfare policy paradigm for the 21st century, seen through the lens of the life-course contingencies of the competitive knowledge economy and modern family-hood. F...