Conclusion

The aim of this volume has been to put the idea of ‘unequal security’ on the agenda of the social sciences. An important reason for this is that we see a danger that current political concerns about insecurity might crowd out distributive issues: Whereas ‘inequality’ was the buzzword of the 2010s, insecurity is on its way to becoming the new ‘defining challenge of our time’, as Barack Obama called inequality in 2013. 1 Specifically, the succession of crises since the turn of the millennium—increasingly conceptualized as an interactive and systemic ‘polycrisis’ (Tooze, 2022; UNICEF, 2023; World Economic Forum, 2023; Zeitlin et al., 2019)—has led many to conclude that we have entered a new age: the age of insecurity.