During the last decades, the world has been facing tremendous political transformations and new risks: epidemics such as HIV/Aids have had destabilizing effect on the caretaking role of kin; in post-socialist countries political reforms have made unemployment a new source of insecurity. Furthermore, the state's withdrawal from providing social security is taking place throughout the world. One response to these developments has been increased migration, which poses further challenges to kinship-based social support systems. This innovative volume focuses on the ambiguous role of religious networks in social security and traces the interrelatedness of religious networks and state and family support systems. Particularly timely, it describes these challenges as well as social security arrangements in the context of globalization and migration. The wide range of case studies from various parts of the world that examine various religious groups offers an important comparative contribution to the understanding of religious networks as providers of social security.

Globalisation and transnational migration have altered people's understanding of as well as their relationship to their "dwelling places" and "places of origin". Taking the empirical case of the South Lebanese Shi'ite village of Zrariye and its migrant population in Abidjan/Côte d'Ivoire, the book shows how "place", which has become a vital political, economic and social resource, continues to be of tremendous significance in the age of mobility and change. "Lebanese in Motion" explores how villagers "at home" and "abroad" are involved in producing a "translocal village-in-the-making", which emanates as a social field through their practices and narratives. Travel and the means of communication make it possible to keep in constant touch and thus renegotiate kinship, generational and gender relationships beyond local, regional and nation-state boundaries. Particularly interested in understanding how female identities are redefined, the study delineates how gender and place are mutually constituted in the translocal village under study.