This review symposium contains three reviews of Alexander Betts’ Survival Migration: Failed Governance and the Crisis of Displacement by Alexandra Délano, Catherine Weaver and James Milner, respectively, as well as a reply by Alexander Betts. Survival Migration addresses an issue of great and growing importance: the precarious status of refugees who flee their country to survive environmental changes, food insecurity and generalized violence – that is, people who seek refuge in another state with the aim of survival. Their status is precarious because they often fall between existing legal categories, and because they often flee to states that are unwilling or unable to protect them. Betts uses the concept of survival migration to highlight this crisis. He introduces another concept – regime stretching – to show how states adapt, or stretch, existing international frameworks and structures to the situation they face. The analytical and normative advantages of the concepts of survival migration and regime stretching are at the centre of the exchange between Betts and the reviewers of his book.

Göran Therborn’s recent book The Killing Fields of Inequality is an opportunity for political scientists to reconnect with a thematic that has for long been the pre-occupation of sociologists: inequality. The killing fields to which Therborn refers in the title of his book are inequalities of wealth, health, education, dignity, and so on. These inequalities are killing fields because they result in millions of premature deaths every year, not just in the Third World, but also in North America and Europe. And even when people survive inequality, their lives are limited by the inequalities they face. In The Killing Fields, Therborn examines the different ‘fields’ of inequality, examining the different ways in which inequality works, for instance through what he terms ‘distanciation’, and he identifies the critical battlefields on which the struggle against inequality has to take place. In their reviews of Therborn’s book, Walden Bello, Joohee Lee and Shujiro Yazawa take a critical look at the different aspects of Therborn’s argument, including the role of the middle classes, the concept of distanciation and Therborn’s use of Amartya Sen’s capability approach.