Drawing together multidisciplinary research exploring everyday life in Europe during times of economic crisis, this book explores the ways in which austerity policies are lived and experienced - often alongside other significant social, political and personal change. With attention to the inequalities produced by these processes and the measures used by individuals, families and communities to help them ‘get by’, it also envisages hopeful, affirmative socio-political futures. Arranged around the themes of intergenerational relations and exchanges, ways of coping through crises, and community, civic and state infrastructures, Austerity Across Europe will appeal to social scientists with interests in everyday life, family practices, neoliberal state policy, poverty and socio-economic inequalities.

Austerity and structural adjustment programs are just the latest forms of neoliberal policy to have a profoundly damaging impact on the targeted populations. Yet, as the contributors to this collection argue, the recent austerity-related European crisis is not a breach of erstwhile development schemes, but a continuation of economic policies. Using historical analysis and ethnographically-grounded research, this volume shows the similarities of the European conundrum with realities outside Europe, seeing austerity in a non-Eurocentric fashion. In doing so, it offers novel insights as to how economic crises are experienced at a global level.

In Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, Mark Blyth, a renowned scholar of political economy, provides a powerful and trenchant account of the shift toward austerity policies by governments throughout the world since 2009. The issue is at the crux about how to emerge from the Great Recession, and will drive the debate for the foreseeable future.

The full impact of austerity policies across Europe is still being assessed, but it is clear that their gendered impacts have been consistently severe, structural and manifold. They have also been, until now, under-researched and under-estimated. This book brings together the research of leading feminist economists in the area of gender and austerity economics to perform a rigorous gender-impact analysis both at national and pan-European levels. The chapters not only offer thorough evidence for the detrimental gender-impact of austerity policies across Europe, but they also provide readers with concrete suggestions of alternative policies that national governments and the European Union should adopt. With a combination of country case studies and cross-country empirical analysis, this book reveals the scope and channels through which women and men have been impacted by austerity policies in Europe, and goes on to offer readers the opportunity to assess the feasibility and implications of a feminist alternative to continued austerity. This book will be invaluable to social science students and researchers, as well to as policy-makers searching not just for a Plan B to continued austerity policies but for a Plan F – a feminist economic strategy to stimulate sustainable economic recovery.

Weighing in on the euro-austerity debate, this book uses case studies from three countries to evaluate the distinctive politics of fiscal policy and welfare state reform during a key period in Europe.

Some of the worst effects of the global economic downturn that commenced in 2008 have been felt in Europe, and specifically in the Eurozone’s so-called PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain) and Cyprus. This edited volume is the first collection to bring together ethnographies of living with austerity inside the Eurozone, and explore how people across Southern Europe have come to understand their experiences of increased social suffering, insecurity, and material poverty. The contributors focus on how crises stimulate temporal thought (temporality), whether tilted in the direction of historicizing, presentifying, futural thought, or some combination of these possibilities. One of the themes linking diverse crisis experiences across national boundaries is how people contemplate their present conditions and potential futures in terms of the past. The studies in this collection thus supply ethnographies that journey to the source of historical production by identifying the ways in which the past may be activated, lived, embodied, and refashioned under contracting economic horizons. In times of crisis modern linear historicism is often overridden (and overwritten) by other historicities showing that in crises not only time, but history itself as an organizing structure and set of expectations, is up for grabs and can be refashioned according to new rules. This book was originally published as a special issue of History and Anthropology.

The book explores the diffusion of protest against austerity and free trade agreements in the wave of contention that shook the EU following the 2008 economic crisis. It discusses how protests against austerity and free trade agreements manifested a wider discontent with the constitutionalization of economic policy and the way economic decisions have been insulated from democratic debate. It also explores the differentiated politicization of these issues and the diffusion of protests across Western as well as Eastern Europe, which has often been neglected in studies of the post-crisis turmoil. Julia Rone emphasizes that far from being an automatic spontaneous process, protest diffusion is highly complex, and its success or failure can be impacted by the strategic agency and media practices of key political players involved such as bottom-up activists, as well as trade unions, political parties, NGOs, intellectuals and mainstream media. This is an important resource for media and communications students and scholars with an interest in activism, political economy, social movement studies and protest movements.