This final chapter examines how cross-border mobility may also feature in issue-linkage strategies, as migrants and refugees are employed as instruments of leverage by host states. This chapter focuses on two types of mobility as leverage – labour and forced migration. In terms of the former, the chapter first examines how Egypt was faced with numerous attempts by Arab host-states to target Egyptian migrant communities within their borders, predominantly unskilled or low-skilled, as instruments of coercion. Egyptian migrant communities were faced with various forms of abuse, including incarceration and torture, or, more frequently, expulsion from their host-states, who sought to take benefit from Egypt’s socio-economic dependence on labour migration. Two types of issue-linkage strategies were employed by Arab states against Egypt: in the first, Libyan coercion emerged as personalistic cross-regime relations between the sending and host-state broke down, namely between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Libyan Prime Minister Anwar Gaddafi; the second type of strategy aimed to secure specific policy concessions from Egypt, as has been the case with Iraq or, in the post-2011 era, with Libya and Jordan.

By 1964 the party leadership and membership seemed to be converging on a common diagnosis of ‘the union problem’. The failure of Conservative experiments in government with tripartism stimulated further the existing interest in legal reform. This was reinforced by the bitter conflicts over incomes policy and union reform that characterised the 1964–70 Labour Governments. Drawing on a trend in Conservative thinking that emerged in 1958, by 1968 the Conservative Party seemed committed to the extensive legal reform of unions and industrial relations as part of its determination to address ‘the British disease’. When the Conservatives entered government in 1970, this, and a seeming commitment to a more free-market approach, appeared to herald a radical departure from post-war governance. However, under the pressure of events the essentially pragmatic Heath Government speedily changed course in a number of key policy areas and also found itself in direct conflict with the trade unions, first over the Industrial Relations Act and then over incomes policy. This culminated in the ‘who governs’ election of February 1974 that precipitated the fall of the Heath Government.

This chapter examines the rationale behind African youth entering into and transitioning between a series of nodes in the local football industry that they hope will lead to transnational football migration. It reveals how youth in contemporary Africa increasingly perceive and justify their entry into the local game as part of their biographical planning in an era of neoliberal governance. The chapter also introduces a range of interpretations and representations of football that shape this project of individual and social becoming, teasing out the ‘migration drivers’ that influence young people’s decision to embark on a career in football. More specifically, youth are argued to see football migration as a vehicle for social mobility, an alternative pathway to attain a sense of respectable adulthood and fulfil intergenerational obligations to family, alongside wider social expectations around migration in West African contexts. Significantly, the chapter illustrates that although operating within neoliberal contexts that encourage individuation, the migratory drivers informing aspirations to ‘become a somebody’ through football are part of a more collective endeavour. These drivers and attendant aspirations are constitutive of a ‘social negotiation of hope’.