Response to financial meltdown is entangled with basic challenges to global governance. Environment, global security and ethnicity and nationalism are all global issues today. Focusing on the political and social dimensions of the crisis, contributors examine changes in relationships between the world’s richer and poorer countries, efforts to strengthen global institutions, and difficulties facing states trying to create stability for their citizens. The Possible Futures Series gathers together the great minds of social science to address the significance of the global economic crisis in a series of short, accessible books. Each volume takes on the past, present and future of this crisis, suggesting that the crisis has an informative history, that the consequences could be much more basic than stock declines, and that only fundamental changes – not fiscal band aids – can hold off future repetitions.