The new millennium started on an anxious note, although the much-feared millennium bug proved uneventful. What followed, though, was a series of crises until 2020 involving financial meltdown, a nuclear disaster, and a pandemic. Japan and Germany, like the rest of the world, emerged bruised and battered by the first and last of these calamities. Japan suffered the middle one on its own, although Fukushima also galvanised Germany’s opposition to nuclear power. This in turn reinforced the European country’s longstanding overreliance on Russian gas, a folly laid bare when Russia invaded Ukraine in spring 2022. Taken together, the crises exposed some of the vulnerabilities and deficiencies of Japanese and German capitalisms as they have evolved since the Second World War. But they also highlighted key sources of strength, not least resilience and adaptability in the face of extreme adversity. On balance, the two countries therefore weathered the crises better than most.

On April 15, 2009, 1,022 Tax Day Tea Party rallies took place across the US. These rallies were transformative for the Tea Party and served to put the insurgency on the national stage. Soon after April 15, local Tea Party groups began appearing across the country. By the end of 2009, 743 local Tea Party chapters had come into existence. This chapter develops an explanatory account of the earliest wave of Tea Party protests and the early risers that followed. We emphasize the dual importance of material threats brought about by the Great Recession, and status threats linked to a perceived decline in social power among White conservative Christians. Our results show that the Tea Party was set in motion by powerful, well-resourced conservative groups. The groups honed the Tea Party’s message and built an online infrastructure allowing any potential activist to stage a rally or form a local Tea Party group. The grassroots expansion of the Tea Party took off and became the public face of the insurgency. Tea Party activism was most intense in communities with higher levels of both material threats and status threats.

The Tea Party’s local chapter network played an essential role in the insurgency’s momentum, but almost no research has examined these groups beyond accounting for their emergence. This chapter focuses on the external factors related to Tea Party organization building and maintenance. Using web crawlers and newspaper data, we analyzed the trajectory of the 3,587 local Tea Party chapters that had collectively embodied the insurgency, emphasizing when chapters were formed, how long they survived, and when they stopped showing any signs of organized activity. Between 2011 and 2012 – the peak years of the Tea Party’s organized activity – more than 2,000 chapters were active. Beginning in 2012, chapters began to disappear. By the end of 2014, less than 10% of all Tea Party groups showed any signs of activity. The decline of local Tea Party groups is associated with lowering material threats as the economy slowly recovered from the Great Recession. At the same time, status threats help account for the persistence of Tea activism. The election of politicians affiliated with the Tea Party had little impact on local chapter survival.

This chapter recounts the cascade of problems that threated international liberalism and the Washington Consensus during the first part of the twenty-first century. The Global War on Terror launched under US leadership, the global financial crisis and the ensuring Great Recession, and the promise and dashed hopes of the Arab Spring all exposed the failure of the liberal internationalist system and the expanded international organizations to fulfill the hopes of the 1990s.

Iceland is a country of rugged beauty, volcanic mountains, countless waterfalls and, well, ice. Its inhabitants are even more exotic; 54 per cent of Icelanders, for example, believe in elves – or say it’s possible that they exist. Travelling through the desolate landscape, one can easily imagine how such beliefs emerge: Iceland is a country with fewer than 400,000 residents. To put that in perspective, almost double the number of people live in the 33 square kilometres of Macau than in the 100,000 square kilometres of Iceland.

Iceland might seem like a strange place to start a story about the largest global financial crisis since the Great Depression. But Iceland exemplifies both the worst and best of the crisis. The story begins several years before 2008, when Iceland’s bank managers saw an opportunity: they could attract the savings of Europeans, mostly residents of England and the Netherlands, by offering interest rates higher than those of the banks of those countries.

The 2016 presidential election brought on a blizzard of foreboding announcements about American democracy. Yet as political scientists and pundits alike turned their gaze toward the spectacle of Trump’s Washington, fewer seemed as concerned about what was happening in places like Raleigh or Jefferson City. In fact, scholars and commentators troubled by abuses of power in the executive branch pointed to federalism as “the most effective tool” for protecting democracy, “especially if other constitutional checks fail.” States, it was argued, provided crucial venues for dissent and the formation of alternative governing coalitions. And while new analyses of democratic backsliding mentioned gerrymandering in state legislatures and state-level episodes of “constitutional hardball,” they tended to focus their attention on the national level.

We provide an overview of the monetary policy failures that resulted in the 2007–2008 financial crisis and ensuing Great Recession, focusing on the United States. Before the crisis, monetary policy was too loose, which fueled the bubble. After the bubble burst, monetary policy became too tight, hindering the recovery. These failures are fundamentally due to the Federal Reserve’s discretionary monetary policy. Furthermore, the popular approach of “constrained discretion” is really just discretion. Hence, it is sensitive to all the usual problems with discretionary monetary policy. Only firm monetary rules, ones that actually bind, can maintain macroeconomic stability and prevent crises.

Since the 1970s, the focus of contentious protest, as well as of the corresponding research, has increasingly moved from economic issues to the cultural issues associated with the new social movements. With Europe experiencing the most severe economic crisis in decades, we ask if the return of hard times has changed the distribution of contention over the different policy domains. Drawing on a dataset covering more than 30.000 protest events in thirty European countries from 2000 to 2015 and the issues and actors involved in each event, we analyse how the salience of cultural, political, and economic issues in the protest arena changes over time across countries and regions. We find evidence for a reinvigoration of economic protest particularly in southern Europe, a region that was strongly affected by the economic crisis. However, the varying crisis experiences also served to channel economic grievances into other issues: Governments deflected blame for austerity packages onto international institutions and right-wing challengers mobilized economic fears by promising more exclusive welfare benefits. Hence, the economic crisis was also addressed in political and cultural terms. Finally, we show that when the Euro-crisis ended, the migration crisis began to affect the protest arena.

The choice of specific action repertoires allows protesters to increase their visibility and eventually their success. A rise in protest, i.e. a protest wave, often comes with a qualitative expansion of the conflict, which can take two forms: changes in the action repertoire and a growing diversity of involved actors. In this chapter, we examine the types of protest and the types of actors over time. In so doing, we ask whether and how the Great Recession transformed customary action repertoires in southern, north-western, and eastern Europe. Hence, we show variations in the use of commonplace action forms, i.e. demonstrations, strikes, and confrontational and violent actions. We find that demonstrations and strikes remain the dominant form of protest across regions and time periods, while transformations in the action repertoire of contention, in the form of violent events, took place only in some parts of the south and were short lived. Lastly, we turn to actors and we show that protest events increasingly feature social groups without formal organizational structures. We conclude by arguing that contention repertoires remained largely unaffected by the Great Recession; demonstrations were and remained the prevailing form of protest in all three regions during the whole period under study.

This chapter focuses on growth transition from the “Golden Age” (from 1950 to the early 1970s) of rapid growth, lower wealth inequality, and the absence of international financial crises during the stagflation in the 1970s (inflation, monetary instability, stagnation) and then to the neoliberal era (with volatile growth and frequent crises) in the core economies of North America and western Europe. The chapter identifies both economic and political economy factors surrounding the stagflation of the 1970s, in the context of challenges to US hegemony, and postauthoritarian transition in southern Europe. The chapter examines the frequency and intensity of recessive episodes and their impact on per capita GDP and investment from 1970 to 2015, affecting both core advanced countries and the European periphery.