Scholars have increasingly recognized that during the last two decades, beginning with the 1989 end of the Cold War, states have assumed new functions (for example heightened security and immigration policies), reconfigured existing activities (for example through the delegation of services to non-state actors and the privatization of other functions) and designed new agencies (notably, for instance, in the proliferation of regulatory bodies). The drivers of change include globalization, Europeanization and since 2008 economic crisis. This paper presents a set of papers focused on these changes and their explanation. The five papers include one theoretical analysis and four substantial empirical case studies. The authors are interdisciplinary coming from political science and sociology. They are located across five countries – France, Ireland, Italy, the UK and the US.