Introduction

A growing body of scholarship has critically interrogated the supposed secularism of development, challenging the notion that it operates independently of religious ideologies. These scholars contend that development is deeply intertwined with foundational religious principles such as charity, neighbourliness and community – principles that, in many contexts, manifest not only in hierarchical structures but also in horizontal, peer-to-peer (P2P) relationships. Building on these insights, this chapter explores faith-based approaches to development and humanitarianism, highlighting their historical and contemporary relevance while critically examining their potential and limitations. We begin by arguing that the practice of giving – often inspired by religious beliefs – has long been an integral part of community life and is far from a novel phenomenon. Faith has historically motivated acts of charity, solidarity and mutual support, forming the bedrock of many communal development practices. Against this backdrop, we explore the value of faith-based approaches, considering their varying scales and capacities and positioning them within broader international development objectives.

To illustrate these dynamics, the chapter examines a faith-based network of Zimbabwean Catholics in London engaged in transnational charitable activities. This case study demonstrates how faith-based approaches can transcend national boundaries while maintaining a deeply localized and horizontal ethos. The small-scale, person-to-person nature of these initiatives underscores their grassroots character, where relationships and support are grounded in mutual reciprocity and community ties rather than hierarchical structures. The chapter then turns to Muslim charity and humanitarianism, offering a comparative perspective. While we recognize the potential for horizontal engagement in these initiatives, we also critically analyse how, like Christian charity, they can exhibit top-down tendencies.

Finland and Sweden handed in their applications to join NATO in May 2022. From the NATO point of view, these membership bids were largely welcome. Given their membership in the EU and their long-standing and enhanced partnerships, the accession process should have been relatively smooth. Most analysts expected that it would only take a few months and that Sweden and Finland would join together. Neither of these happened: Finland waited for entry for a year and Sweden for almost two years – they joined in April 2023 and March 2024, respectively. In hindsight, the process was much faster compared to previous post-Cold War enlargements, but the sense of urgency due to an ongoing full-scale war in Europe was also historically unique. This makes the complexities of the accession processes within the Alliance important as potential indicators for the real nature of its community. What does the process say about NATO as an alliance? Did it boost NATO's agility to consolidate in times of crisis or undermine its credibility?

This chapter covers the NATO accession process for Finland and Sweden. We focus on the Turkish reservations against the decision to invite Finland and Sweden to become members of the Alliance and how these were overcome, and we move on to the ratification of the accession protocols, which turned out to be an even more cumbersome episode. First, however, we examine how NATO perceived Finland and Sweden's military non-alignment in the post-Cold War era.

Introduction

One of the most profound transformations of the global economy in the 21st century has been the rise of emerging markets. Whereas developing and emerging economies (DEEs) accounted for only 37 per cent of global gross domestic product (GDP) in 1990, their share rose to 59 per cent by 2024 (). As a recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) report put it, emerging markets – especially from Asia as well as the BRICS – are increasingly ‘trading places’ with Western high-income economies since they have become drivers of global growth and are evermore integrated with global trade and production (IMF, 2024aIMF, 2024b: ). Global patterns of trade, consumption, production, and innovation are no longer solely defined by the West as emerging markets occupy ever more important roles within the global economy. However, in this context emerging markets have increasingly financialized (Chapter 4Bonizzi, 2013).On the one hand, financial markets, actors, and industries have become much more prominent and central for the functioning of emerging market economies at the domestic level (1 Hardie, 2012; ). On the other hand, emerging markets are increasingly integrated into global financial circuits and thus subject and more vulnerable to global market conditions and sentiment (Karwowski, 2020Bortz and Kaltenbrunner, 2018; ). Despite their growing economic importance, emerging markets are situated within a global financial system that was created by – and is continuously dominated by – Western, Naqvi, 2019aglobal financial institutions.

Introduction

The liquidity of racism and racial flows in the context of late modernity has served to obscure the realities of race relations and the persistence of colonial legacies. Having discussed these concepts at the macro (societal) level, this chapter will explore education as a site within which their effects might be manifested at the meso, institutional level. Education represents one of the key sites within which differential viscosities in utilizing education as a site for negotiating social mobility are manifested across highly racialized lines. In the context of late modernity, education is presented as an entity which aspires to egalitarianism, whereby meritocracy supersedes social inequalities, and represents a site of the investment of progressive politics in policy and practice. Nowhere more substantively have we seen the embedding of the multicultural project than within education policy in the UK. This chapter will develop themes introduced earlier on around ‘race’ and postracialism to provide a critical account of the extent to which racist outcomes persist in education. This book is focused on demonstrating how relationships between structure and agency, which characterize late modernity, manifest through persistent racialized inequities across political, institutional and cultural spheres. It draws upon various processes – both active and passive – to demonstrate how apparently unrelated phenomena collude to ensure the sustaining of highly racialized inequities in educational outcomes and displacement from education itself. Furthermore, we also demonstrate how racialized inequities are facilitated and sustained through public policy in the absence of any clear or discernible agenda with regard to ‘race’.

The 2024 General Election

On 22 May, following weeks of speculation that the 2024 General Election would be held in the autumn, thus giving Rishi Sunak at least two complete years in office and allowing the economic outlook a greater opportunity to improve, he gave a speech outside Number 10. A rain-drenched Prime Minister, beleaguered with the knowledge that most of the electorate had had enough of him and 14 years of Tory rule, called the election for 4 July. Writing on the day of the announcement, Chris Mason, Political Editor, BBC News, reported that two very senior Government figures had very recently confirmed autumn as the date. Those favouring an earlier date, however, were worried if he did go for that, things could get even worse. In the event, Labour had a landslide victory, gaining 211 seats, giving them a total of 412; the Tories lost 251 seats, giving them just 121; Reform UK got five seats up from zero and Nigel Farage, who had become its leader the month before the election, won his first Westminster seat. Reform UK came third, with 14.3 per cent of the vote compared to the Tories’ 23.7 per cent and Labour's 33.7 per cent.

London rally

Just over three weeks after the election, on 27 July, thousands of supporters of far-right activist Tommy Robinson filled Trafalgar Square in central London after a march. In 2018, former Trump advisor Steve Bannon had described Robinson as ‘not just a guy but a movement in and of himself [who] represents the working class and channels a lot of the frustration of everyday, blue-collar Britons. … He is a force of nature … not built to be managed’.

Time and again, development organizations and policy makers tout plans to mobilize, catalyze, or leverage new flows of private finance as solutions to seemingly intractable development problems. The UN Climate Change Conference (‘COP 29’) in Baku in 2024 resulted in yet more commitments for catalyzing private finance. High-profile scandals hitting lauded ‘impact investment’ firms have done little to dull policy makers’ enthusiasm in this regard. Aid is increasingly dispersed through development finance institutions that look and behave like private investment firms, while philanthropies become tangled up with donors and private contractors alike. Structural adjustment and policy conditionality for heavily indebted countries has returned (if it ever left), although efforts to restructure sovereign debt are often frustrated by the megalithic asset management firms that hold growing shares of Southern debt. Businesses loudly and proudly declare their intention to fight poverty and shape policy norms through ‘multistakeholder’ forums. Public private partnerships are once again being promoted as vehicles for the delivery of assorted development goals. Meanwhile for-profit consultancies (rather than civil society organizations or public policy experts) have the ear of policy makers and development ministries. As private sector actors become increasingly central to the design and delivery of international development, critical, interdisciplinary research on business, finance, and development has never been more pressing.

This series is intended as a home for works which examine the multiple forms that new public– private ‘state-capital hybrids’ take in contemporary international development.

At a moment where emerging economies’ share of global GDP has risen drastically, and where this shift has called into question the dominance of the West in the contemporary world order, how this ‘rise’ remains structured within a hierarchically organized global economy – and the nature of variations within the Global South – is an important research and political question. As defined by the editors, this book aims to combine insights from literatures on financial subordination, financial statecraft, and comparative capitalism to begin to answer this question. In this afterword, I hope to engage critically, yet constructively, with this aim and the book's contributions, to ultimately push the research agenda on the nature of states in the Global South within a hierarchically structured world forward.

The need for a greater understanding of how international financial subordination (IFS) shapes states of the Global South is an important one and Petry and Nölke's book is a step towards broadening and developing this understanding. As one of the authors who put forward the concept of IFS (), I am particularly glad to see so much engagement with the concept and attempts to broaden and deepen the debate about it and how it relates to other concepts from other theoretical traditions. As with all concepts that are picked up by a wide range of traditions, there is a risk that it loses some of its original meaning in the process of transmission. One problem with concepts spreading through different traditions and disciplines is that the link between theory and politics that originally constituted the concept can be weakened or even torn apart.

This book has examined Finland and Sweden's accession to NATO and the repercussions that this has had on the new members as well as on NATO and European security, particularly in the precarious Baltic-Arctic area in Russia's vicinity. The aim has been to put the northern enlargement of NATO into the wider historical context of previous NATO enlargements, particularly those in the post-Cold War era. We have scrutinized the relationship of both Finland and Sweden with NATO, the political debate in the two countries and their decision-making processes after Russia had invaded Ukraine, which led to their NATO membership bids in May 2022.

Russia's war on Ukraine, its turn to militant authoritarianism and its quest to revise and replace the European security order were the key reasons why Finland and Sweden abandoned their former policy of military non-alignment and preferred to join NATO. However, the decision required quick but careful domestic and international manoeuvring in times of crisis. An important factor in Finland was the dramatic change in public opinion in favour of NATO membership. In Sweden, Finland's example in the matter persuaded both the leaders and the public to apply for membership in NATO simultaneously.

Finland and Sweden's accession to the Alliance was relatively quick: they were invited to become members less than two months after submission of membership bids, but the process was then delayed by Turkey and Hungary, who prolonged the ratification of the accession treaties by presenting their own criteria for membership.

Bauman and his work on late modernity, specifically the condition of liquidity, is useful in terms of understanding how the formation of power emerges out of a liquefaction of solidified or ‘modern’ structures of modernity. However, the persistence of the monster of racism beyond the liquefaction of the solid formations of power, politics and bureaucracy which facilitated the horrors of the Holocaust may appear problematic for Bauman's concept of liquid modernity. This work has contributed two significant interventions relating to theories of late modernity in the mainstream social sciences canon. The first of these interventions is to demonstrate the ways in which Bauman's concept of liquidity can be applied meaningfully and substantively to issues concerning ‘race’, which have been largely absent in mainstream canonic theorizing on the conditions of late modernity, especially in the works of Bauman himself (see Rattansi, 2016, 2017). We feel this intervention is significant because it serves as a conduit for further conceptual development of Baumanian social thought to (re)position Zygmunt Bauman back into the critical tradition of social theory.

The second intervention relates to the bridging of the gap between significant bodies of Bauman's work. Drawing upon Rattansi's (2017) extensive critique on Bauman's lack of engagement with issues concerning ‘race’ required us to attempt to resolve this issue by demonstrating how the liquid metaphor critically informs understandings of ‘race’ and racism in the context of late modernity. Through this process, we have drawn connections between Bauman's older work on bureaucratization in the facilitation of the Holocaust, and his later theoretical contributions regarding liquid modernity.

Introduction

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the role of the state and the financialization of the global economy have emerged as focal points of academic inquiry. Those studies focusing on state capitalism and economic statecraft especially have highlighted the renewed and increasing visibility of the state's involvement in economic activities. As well as emphasizing the rising role of sovereign wealth funds, state-owned enterprises, and national development banks (for example, Alami and Dixon, 2020; ), this literature encompasses the analysis of widespread state interventions in the aftermath of global financial crises and the growing economic and geopolitical influence, including the potential challenge to Western-centric capitalism, of state-led development models in the Global South (notably from China; see for example, Alami et al, 2022Bremmer, 2010; ). These analyses of diverse empirical instances reflect the literature's broader conceptual engagement with the state's augmented role in emerging and Petry, 2023capitalist economies (ECEs).

Many of these contributions have highlighted the transnational and externally facing aspect of state involvement in ECEs. For example, highlight that developing countries have always faced a trade-off between autonomy and external pressures, whereas Nölke et al (2021) Haberly and Wójcik (2017) argue that state intervention in the Global South is more calculated and internationally extroverted. Yet so far the specific nature and role of the state in countries which assume a subordinate position in global money and financial markets remains undertheorized and underanalyzed.

Introduction

In this chapter we will seek to develop the liquid metaphor to help aid our understanding of an issue which has received consistent media attention in recent years in the UK; that is, the recent popular panic linking drill music to violent crime. To understand how contemporary racism operates in a liquid society (Bauman, 2000), we have to conduct analyses which offer nuanced and intricate ways of understanding social problems. Drill music is a subgenre of rap which has its origins in the southside of Chicago, where artists like Chief Keef leveraged their gritty street sounds to launch themselves to global celebrity status. Sonically, drill and trap music have comparable sounds, using stripped-back ominous beats and borrowing heavily from the panacea of gangsta rap. Forrest Stuart (2020: 58) describes them thus: ‘Both trap and drill embrace dissonant minor keys played on electronic synthesizers – something like Jaws, Psycho and suspenseful horror movies. The booming 808 drum machines provides percussive punch. The kick drums, snares and hi-hats are often layered in rapid sequences that simulate the sound of an automatic machine gun.’

Both subgenres (but drill in particular) have become well known for specific kinds of provocative street aesthetics. Accompanying music videos tend to have a DIY feel, commonly filmed within the physical spaces of the artists’ neighbourhoods and usually featuring groups of people (predominantly young men) presenting some affinity to one another and the space(s) depicted. Artists like Chief Keef and their associates have been known to brandish automatic firearms in videos, along with balaclavas and masks. Lyrically these subgenres tend to match the provocative visual, with lyrics pertaining to drugs, violence and some of the grittier realities of life in the American ghetto.

Introduction

In April 2023, Labour MP Diane Abbott wrote a letter to The Observer in response to an article in that newspaper by Tomiwa Owolode, entitled ‘Racism in Britain is not a black and white issue. It's far more complicated’. Here is the letter in full:

Hours after her remarks were published, Abbott apologised and claimed they were made in error and that an ‘initial draft’ of her thoughts had been sent for publication by accident. Nevertheless, she had the Party Whip suspended and an investigation was launched.

An anonymous letter to The Observer's sister newspaper, The Guardian, captured the absurdity of Abbott's claim with particular respect to antisemitism: