In early 2020, governments in Eastern Europe responded to the COVID-19 pandemic with the introduction of restrictive measures, national lockdowns, and border closures. State responses in March and April suggested policy convergence across the region, with the prioritization of the recommendations from public health experts over economic activity and the freedom of movement. In early fall, after a second spike in the number of COVID-19 infections across Europe, policy strategies revealed
How do individuals protect and provide for themselves in a world where so many people live, work, study, and retire outside their countries of citizenship? The conventional wisdom is that access to social protections is limited by proximity—by citizenship, by geographic proximity, and by social networks—which all place natural limits on the availability of social protection. The authors believe this conventional wisdom is sorely out of date. How and where people earn their livelihoods, the communities with which they identify, and where the rights and responsibilities of citizenship get fulfilled has changed dramatically. Among other topics, the authors examine the relationships between residents without membership and members without residence; professional-class migrants who carry two passports and poor, low-skilled, and undocumented migrants. This book analyzes how these changes are transforming social welfare as we know it. The authors argue that a new set of social welfare arrangements has emerged that they call Hybrid Transnational Social Protection (HTSP). This book finds that HTSP sometimes complements and sometimes substitutes traditional modes of social welfare provision. Migrants and their families unevenly and unequally piece together resource environments across borders from multiple sources. Changing understandings of how and where supranational rights are granted will aid migrants and nonmigrants in their efforts to protect themselves across borders. In fact, the authors suggest four logics upon which rights are based: citizenship, personhood/humanity, the market, and community. The conflicts between these different logics are at the core of the contemporary controversies over what can and should be done to protect dispersed individuals and families from risk, danger, and precarity.
This book argues that a new set of social arrangements, hybrid transnational social protection has emerged creating enhanced protections for some, increasing precarity for others, and raising new policy conundrums for governments and citizens around the world. Whatever we, as citizens and policymakers, decide to do moving forward, we must recognize that a fundamental shift in the organization of social life is already well underway. It is up to us to reimagine the communities to which we belong and to which we are responsible and to redefine our rights and obligations accordingly.
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