Transnational Social Protection Social Welfare across National Borders

Argues that a new set of transnational social welfare arrangements has emerged that challenge traditional social welfare provision based on national citizenship and residence.

The idea that social rights are something we are eligible for based on where we live or where we are citizens is out-of-date. In Transnational Social Protection, Peggy Levitt, Erica Dobbs, Ken Chih-Yan Sun, and Ruxandra Paul consider what happens to social welfare when more and more people live, work, study, and retire outside their countries of citizenship where they receive health, education, and elder care. The authors use the concept of resource environment to show how migrants and their families piece together packages of protections from multiple sources in multiple settings and the ways that these vary by place and time. They further show how a new, hybrid transnational social protection regime has emerged in response to the changing environment that complements, supplements, or, in some cases, substitutes for national social welfare systems as we knew them. Examining how national social welfare is affected when migration and mobility become an integral part of everyday life, this book moves our understanding of social protection from the national to the transnational.

Peggy Levitt is the Mildred Lane Kemper Chair of Sociology and the Chair of the sociology department at Wellesley College. She is also a co-founder of the Global (De)Centre. Levitt has received Honorary Doctoral Degrees from the University of Helsinki (2017) and from Maastricht University (2014). She was recently a Robert Schuman Fellow at the European University Institute (2017-2019) and a Distinguished Visitor at the Baptist University of Hong Kong (2019). Her earlier books include Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display (2015), Religion on the Edge (Oxford, 2012), God Needs No Passport (2007), The Transnational Studies Reader (2007), The Changing Face of Home (2002), and The Transnational Villagers (2001).

Erica Dobbs is Assistant Professor of Politics at Pomona College. Her research explores how mass migration forces both states and individuals to rethink the dynamics of political and social citizenship in liberal democratic societies. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Oxford Migration Studies, and other outlets, and has received support from the Fulbright-Schuman program for the European Union, the American Council of Learned Societies foundation, and the Hirsch Research Initiation program at Pomona College.

Ken Chih-Yan Sun is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Villanova University. His research interests include families, migration, life stage, inequalities, and globalization. He is the author of Time and Migration: How Long-term Taiwanese Immigrants Negotiate Later Life (2021). He also published his works in Social Problems; Journal of Marriage and Family; Global Networks; Sociological Forum; Qualitative Sociology; Ethnic and Racial Studies; Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies; Symbolic Interaction; Identities; Journal of Family Issues; Population, Space, and Place; and Current Sociology.

Ruxandra Paul is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Amherst College, Massachusetts, and a local affiliate of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University. Her research agenda examines the socio-political effects of globalization, supranational integration, and increasingly porous borders. Specific interests include European integration, international migration, citizenship, pandemic politics, and cyberpolitics. Her work has appeared in European Policy Analysis, Oxford Development Studies, PS: Political Science & Politics, Foreign Policy - Romania, and Courrier International. She was a Harvard Academy Dissertation Fellow and a Chateaubriand Fellow of the French Government for Humanities and Social Sciences.