Post-socialist social policy and global social policy studies

It has been nearly three decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union and of the Eastern Bloc that marked the beginning of dramatic social changes in the region. Post-socialist welfare reforms have been as much national projects as they were global or transnational undertakings. It was hardly accidental that the rise of the field of global social policy coincided with the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), as Bob Deacon drew his ideas from the "making" of post-socialist social policy. It was Bob Deacon's work that examined the complexity and diversity of transnational actors, their changing perspectives and positions over time, their shifting influences on social policy, and the agency of individual actors within an organization.