Confronted by the upheavals of total war and the radicalism of the post-1945 Labour Government, the Conservative Party strove to develop a response. Balancing those who called for the party’s adaptation to Labour’s new order and those who called for its rolling back proved difficult. The Conservative’s narrow election victory in 1951 meant that its room for political manoeuvre was severely restricted and the Conservative governments of the period found themselves aspiring to running Labour’s State better than Labour. This also applied to relations with the unions and the organised working class, as the Conservative Government struggled to balance full employment, low inflation and higher public spending in an often crisis‑ridden economy. The party attempted to revive its union organisation in an effort to increase its influence amongst their members. During this period, although the party welcomed electoral success, many came to see the trade unions as a problem requiring remedial action, but Conservative governments continued to place a high value on maintaining established relations in the interest of stability and governance.

This first empirical chapter sets the stage for an analysis of the politics of migration in the contemporary Middle East via an in-depth analysis of the linkages between emigration and foreign policy in the case of Egypt. Modern Egypt was chosen as a case study based on two factors. First, the country has a historical standing as the largest regional provider of migrant labour. Second, the qualitative variety of migratory processes throughout the history of modern Egypt, and their quantitative increase in the post-1973 period, have endowed the Egyptian case with a vast array of writings, debates, customs, and social rituals on migration, whose discursive importance has been unexamined. This chapter argues that Egyptian practices demonstrate key linkages between emigration, subject-making processes, and foreign policy in the 1952–2011 era. The discourse on migration under Nasser reflected a broader collectivist ethos, under which the theme of population movement was employed to discipline Egyptian citizens in accordance with the regime’s ideology of statism-developmentalism. In contrast, migration and, more specifically, return migration under Sadat and Mubarak was employed to promote an individualisation of responsibility, as citizens disciplined themselves to use their freedom in making responsible choices under a broader turn towards neoliberalism.

Examining the racialized discourses of the “illegal” alien and the Watts uprising, this concluding reflection will examine how early twentieth-century constructions of violence and masculinity were reconfigured in later decades but in ways that reiterated the enduring themes of savagery, death, and punishment.

Chapter 4 examines experiences en route and of arrival to the EU, to emphasise the limitations of European asylum and protection policies. It draws attention to the complexity of migratory journeys and explores how the struggle to find peace and safety often involves a seemingly unending search by people on the move. By pointing to the longevity of many journeys outside EU territory, their fragmented nature, and what we call varied and ‘intersecting drivers and conditions of flight’, the analysis shows how people on the move often face cumulative experiences of precarity in which both colonial legacies and racialised violence form a part. It also reveals the violence and limitations of an asylum system that requires cross-border travel irrespective of the difficulties and risks that this imposes. While some were actively seeking asylum on arrival to the EU and others were more generally seeking peace and safety, people on the move advanced a multiplicity of claims and demands in contesting the cumulative experiences of precarity that they faced both before and after arrival to the EU. As such, our counter-archive draws attention to the limits of assumptions about the need to provide people on the move with humanitarian succour.

The concluding chapter opens with a concise summary of our key findings before setting out how the book extends knowledge and understanding of African football migration. We point to five key contributions and advancements. Firstly, our findings set out a comprehensive picture that incorporates the intersecting macro-, meso- and micro-level currents that contour and influence the migratory imaginaries and projects of African football players. Secondly, and informed by our long-term, ongoing relationships and engagement with African players and other actors, we have situated their perspectives, subjectivities and experiences at the centre of our analysis. Thirdly, the long-term, temporal perspective we offer through this book exposes the whole career course of African players from their initial engagement with football, through to their transnational careers and post-playing career lives. Fourthly, by showing ethnographically how the historical, political, economic and social dynamics of African contexts connect with and shape the experiences of players in destination settings, we uncover the multiple transnational dimensions in players’ imaginaries and professional and personal life courses. Finally, this book highlights the intellectual benefits of examining African football migration, and sport migration more generally, in an interdisciplinary manner. We finish this concluding chapter by pointing to new empirical, conceptual and methodological directions for research on African football migration.

This chapter provides an overview of the book's themes and focuses on the following question: why did a party that historically emphasised compromise and cooperation, rather than exclusion and confrontation, shift so dramatically and in a relatively short period of time to a strategy of exclusion? It provides an overview of Conservative statecraft towards the unions and the organised working class, explaining why the shift from accommodation took place when it did. In essence the party concluded in the 1970s that the demands of governance and governability had to take precedence over efforts to sustain the traditional strategy.

This chapter examines the constellation of ideas about race, manhood, resistance and violence that shaped the transnational social landscape in which anti-black and anti-Mexican violence unfolded in the 1910s. it examines how a range of white American, African American and Mexican political figures, activists, racial theorists and scholars interpreted the New World histories of slavery and conquest. While the black and Mexican writers and political actors whose ideas are considered here offered their own narratives of New World history diametrically opposed to those which claimed the supremacy of white U.S. civilization, they also perceived struggles for freedom, social transformation and nationhood through a masculinist frame. The chapter will examine how such discourses of manhood and virility permeated the politics of resistance against U.S. violence, imperialism and Mexican dictatorship, as I will begin to examine here, in African Americans’ anti-lynching activism and the Mexican anarchist movement in the borderlands. I will pay particular attention to how the history of slavery in the Americas shaped constructions of gender, race and historical struggle.

After 1974 and under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher, the party reinstituted an extensive and radical rethink of its attitudes and policies towards the organised working class, actively contemplating the measures likely to be needed in order to avoid a repeat of the Heath Government’s experiences. In opposition, therefore, the party undertook a number of extensive studies into the dimensions of the problem and developed a strategy to handle serious confrontations with the unions. The party invested considerable resources in attempting to revive its union organisation. For a time this played an important role in the party. The collapse of the 1974–1979 Labour Government and ‘the Winter of Discontent’ brought a Conservative government to office, which was determined to deal with ‘the union problem’. It did not come into office with a fully developed programme; both union and industrial relations legislation was passed piecemeal, and was an incremental response, and likewise, the countermeasures needed to meet serious industrial confrontation were developed over time and in response to events. Particularly significant for both was the steel strike. By 1990 when Mrs Thatcher left office the unions’ legal, political and industrial environment had been transformed, with the unions effectively excluded, and the political salience of the organise working class ended.

Temporality implicates all aspects of siblingship. This chapter explores the ways sibling relationships shift, evolve, ebb and flow through the life course, attending to how siblings may become closer as they grow older or drift apart as they age. This evolution of the sibling relationship over time is moulded by critical moments in the life course such as progressing through the educational system, having children, redundancy, divorce, bereavement, illness and so on. Alongside these pivotal moments, the chapter considers the role of the temporal rhythms of everyday family life in the ways siblingship is done, from the embodied proximity and enhanced ‘knowing’ that comes from growing up in the same home as children to the role of certain family traditions or occasions such as Christmas, Eid, birthdays and family holidays which have their own temporal qualities. The chapter demonstrates the importance of accounting for the role of time in shaping sibling relationships and demonstrates how the temporalities of siblingship can illuminate relational and social aspects of time.

This comparative chapter, which is a deviation from traditional ways of presenting data on discrimination and labour market differentials, converts statistical data to show the ways groups are racially stratified in the labour market. It provides evidence of racial stratification in Ireland by analysing the disparity in outcomes among migrant groups and how it is divided along racial lines. It utilises three main sources of data: a selected employability programme (EP) with a database of 639 unique individuals (N = 639); the Irish 2011 and 2016 national census statistics and various OECD reports of migrants’ outcomes in the EU; and data from 32 semi-structured interviews with first-generation migrants of Spanish, Polish and Nigerian descent. The conflating of nationality of descent and race in the society, coupled with the separation of White workers to paid labour and Black workers to unpaid labour, is also discussed.

This chapter concentrates on how Ghanaian players experience youth football and academy life, and the strategies they deploy and resources they draw on as they work towards becoming a professional migrant footballer. It also examines how young players encounter, respond to and seek to overcome the inability to translate their considerable physical, emotional and financial investments into securing a playing contract abroad. The chapter illustrates how young people deploy unique forms of agency, like ‘trying your luck’, to realise their aspirations for and expectations of transnational migration. It also teases out the subjectivities that enable young people to remain resolute in the pursuit of their dreams, despite the empirical evidence around them pointing to the fact that for the vast majority of young players the likely outcome is involuntary immobility. One such form of evidence is being ‘sacked’ and or released from an academy before securing terms with a foreign club. This moment is argued to constitute a ‘vital conjuncture’ in the lives of players, one marked by ‘shame’ but also resourcefulness as players come to terms with and try to navigate their way through involuntary immobility’. The chapter therefore provides a critical reflection on an overlooked issue in scholarship on African football migration: namely, the emotional dimension of trying to migrate and ‘become a somebody’ through football.

The introduction sets up the Irish case as an empirical roadmap for race scholars across Europe to research and uncover the often unspoken and obfuscated aspects of race. It provides insight about the genealogy of the study on which the data in this book are based, with a detailed section on how the chapters are set and connected. Critical race theory and four of its tenets are discussed to ground readers in the theoretical understanding and race consciousness underpinning this book. A bonus mind-map is also provided in this chapter that captures the complexity of racial inequality and the myriad ways race is nuanced in labour market differentials as a roadmap for thinking through and making meaning of racial stratification. It provides a useful guide for structuring a non-racist examination of society.