This chapter provides the nature of segregation in housing and education, it is worth briefly outlining the spatial elements of the Northern Ireland conflict and its significant impact on interface areas. It discusses the spatial elements of the conflict and inequality which continue to characterise interface areas. The chapter looks at policy attempts to deal with territorial division by reimaging the city through the concept of 'shared space'. It outlines the persistence of this segregation and its importance in setting the context of young people's engagement in everyday spatial practices. According to Jones.E, the city of Belfast, from its very beginnings, was characterised by the residential segregation of Protestants and Catholics. In interface areas of Belfast, ethno-national divisions between the two communities, using religion as a convenient marker of identification, lead to the communities living side by side yet apart.

While candidly acknowledging that African governments, institutions, and societies need to take more responsibility and ought to do more to address their security challenges, they just cannot do it alone. Given the increasingly complex and interdependent nature of the African security environment the continent simply lacks the resources and capacity to tackle current and future problems. Thus, the active involvement and constructive participation of the wider global community is essential. This chapter calls for international involvement that is intelligently focused, prudently implemented, and done in partnership with Africans. Involvement that requires listening to African concerns and geared toward addressing African needs and not any external agenda. This will require an across the board overhaul of international programs, tools, and strategic vision. It also means a vastly reduced role for militaries and short-term fixes and a greater emphasis on finding the ways and means that empower people and societies through political, social and economic development.

With the rise of neoliberal regimes in both the global North and South, the social dimension of capitalist reproduction has come under severe attack. This chapter explores some of the difficulties that result from making 'social reproduction' too qualitatively distinct from other elements of production and reproduction. It also explores Enzo Mingione's key work in Fragmented Societies, showing that the understanding of social reproduction is a great deal more complex than Nancy Fraser's, especially as we move beyond capitalism's core. The chapter addresses the problematic issue of the articulated scales of socio-economic reproduction. It argues that the dominance of finance does not mean the disappearance of other forms of capital, but rather modifications in the way in which they seek to garner surplus value.

Starting from Enzo Mingione's work, this chapter illustrates the complex task of social science in dealing with the construction of concepts for comparing social situations cross-nationally and transnationally, in the domain of social policy and poverty, because of national traditions. It focuses on the very special role played by the European Union in this process of international comparison and circulation of concepts. Finally the complex task of the social scientist is illustrated by a case study of the use of the terms 'underclass', 'exclusion/esclusione' and 'marginalizzazione/marginalità'. In order to understand this difficult process we need to resort not only to English, but also to Italian and French. The chapter also focuses on the practice of sociology between its conceptual universalism and its radical embeddeness in an empirical practice marked by various national languages.

This foundational chapter explores the evolution and meaning of “security” in the African context. It explores how the meaning has changed from the colonial period through the immediate post-independence period to today. It introduces the reader to the concept of “human security” and explains why it is particularly relevant and useful in understanding and assessing 21st century African security challenges. It questions traditional, state-centric notions of security and shows how the traditional top-down approach to African security is inadequate in addressing modern-day security challenges.

This chapter focuses on the multi-dimensional uses of walls both within and between interface areas. It explores how the physical divisions are perceived and experienced by young people who live in interface areas and how they view the architecture of division. The chapter discusses of young people's conflicting perceptions of the peace walls. The young people's attitudes to the use of flags as expressions of national identity are then examined and this is followed by a discussion of their attitudes to a wall portraying racist graffiti. The chapter presents the triple notions of teenagers as victims, perpetuators and transformers of political conflict. It considers the murals which adorn many walls within and at the margins of interface communities. Murals in Loyalist areas often represent tensions, rivalries and allegiances to different local paramilitary groups such as the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and the Loyalist Volunteer Force.

This chapter argues that the sociological interest in anthropological concepts and the renewed interest of anthropology in Western economies through ethnographic investigation may generate a terrain upon which further and fruitful collaboration can be established. It provides insights as to how shifting values and new social arrangements may have initiated 'dis-embedding' processes from which 're-embedding' mechanisms are yet to be seen in their entirety. The dis-embedding/embedding mechanism of the double movement operates at different levels: it can make sense of both a large-scale event, as well as the dynamics in small-scale settings. Versatility makes the analytical tool adaptable both in sociology and anthropology. Abstract theoretical tools were turned into methodological concepts to reveal the extent of the embeddedness of the economy in contemporary societies. The chapter shows how the Polanyian metaphors shed new light on work-related social practices and their meaning in an Italian setting, the Brianza.

In recent decades the Mediterranean has witnessed an expansion of the migration routes and exchanges taking place within its shores and a parallel modification of the actors involved. A Mediterranean anthropology, common cultural elements persisting through centuries, explains social and political processes. The persistence of social, economic and cultural aspects, the way in which phenomena take place, enlightens the sense of the 'historical reality of longue durée'. The stability of the Mediterranean immigration model has persisted notwithstanding the succession of nationalities and ethnic groups composing the main inflows at various times. Aspects of the 'refugee crisis' show the way in which migration affects the Mediterranean. Intra-European migrations were already important at the time of the 'Great Migration' at the turn of the twentieth century, when the Americas were the most important destination. The concentration of immigrants in the tertiary sector is a common pattern of international migrations today.

This chapter focuses on the integration of the fields of welfare and international migration and proposes a unified framework for analysis. This framework is derived from Lockwood's concept of civic stratification, which facilitates analysis of the relationship between rights and controls. It is also applicable both to the operation of rights internal to citizenship, and to the rights that are granted to non-citizen populations. The chapter addresses contemporary developments in British welfare and immigration policy. It shows how an ever more refined system of civic stratification has been used to constrain the rights of both domestic welfare claimants and international migrants, while setting them against each other. In this process a related political discourse has worked to undermine the moral resources and claims to legitimacy of both groups in the name of a 'moral economy' driven from above by resource constraint, conditionality and control.

This chapter examines major changes in the organisation of economic activity over the last twenty or more years. These changes have emerged as a source of general economic insecurity, low-wage jobs, and new forms of employment-centred poverty. The chapter focuses on the major policies that have affected the condition of low-wage workers, and the growth dynamics in advanced service economies, especially the systemic outcomes concerning labour demand. It explains the ways in which the new terms of employment that have come about since the 1980s may also be contributing to insecurity and poverty. A key factor is the restructuring of labour markets that is part of deeply embedded features of advanced service economies. One of the most extreme forms of the casualisation of the employment relation is the informalisation of a growing array of activities.

The carrying on of trade, both legal and illegal, between communities has been a fundamental feature of global economic relationships and an essential component of economic and social development. Modern-day trafficking is more than simply a reflection of an age old problem of illegal trade, because of the power of globalization. With Africa’s continuing integration into the global economy, the continent has becoming ever more vulnerable to the dark side of globalization that drives international trafficking. The challenge that the illicit trade in drugs and small arms brings to the continent is one far beyond the immediate impact of rising transnational criminal activity, but one that has broader implications for cross-cutting linkages to African security, stability and the future of African governance.

This chapter discusses the transformations of contemporary European cities and is intellectually influenced by the Italian political economy tradition, which is particularly attentive to territories and cities. This tradition paved the way for sophisticated intellectual arguments about social networks, religion, crime, the role of the middle classes articulated to different processes of non-economic factors of economic development, the welfare state, relations of the labour market and poverty. The chapter reviews the ongoing dynamics of the bulk of European metropolises together with the differentiation processes taking place. The European city model has been rather reinforced in most European metropolises. The chapter argues that both contemporary urbanisation processes and the transformation of cities in Europe might be fruitfully explained in relation to social and political transformations as articulated in the Italian tradition of political economy than in terms of neoliberalisation.