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This chapter has set out a framework for analysing social policy in the twenty-first century that, first of all, centralizes four key global crises which endanger future sustainability, solidarity and wellbeing and serve to reinforce historical and contemporary gender, racial, class and geo-political inequalities, precarities and dehumanizations. The framing extends from the economic exploitation generated before and after the global financial crisis into the expropriation, expulsions and depletions of human and non-human life associated with the crises of care, ecology and the racializing of transnational borders. These are all part and parcel of the contradictions and contestations in patriarchal, racial and extractivist dimensions of contemporary financialized capitalism. As such, they need to be central to the way we think about the intersecting challenges to both the hegemony of neoliberalism and the shapes of future welfare states.

The second stage of framing involved translating these crises that operate transnationally and globally into a way of capturing the specific and intersecting institutional, discursive and contested social relations that shape and are shaped in national welfare states. Here I have built on my framework of family, nation and work as the key organizing principles of welfare states to include, formatively at this point, nature as a fourth and emerging principle. I argue that the social relations, changes and contestations in these four domains act both to unsettle and to provide the means to settle and restructure welfare states. The importance of this framework is that it allows an understanding of how the four global crises (and their contestations) shape welfare at the national level; it permits a much fuller appreciation of the multiple and intersecting nature and forms of socio-economic inequality, domination, division and subordination, as well as how legitimacy for such impoverishment has been sought, deployed, mitigated and contested.

This and the previous chapter have outlined my theoretical orientations. The following three chapters demonstrate their use in three sets of analysis: the decade of neoliberal austerity in the UK; an understanding of agency and resistance within the social relations of welfare; and the transnational political and social economy of care.