Introduction: State Capacity, Capacity to Aspire and Layered Resilience During a Pandemic

We begin this introductory chapter by setting out the book’s core question—where do people with a migration background look for help and orientation in times of a societal crisis? We explore this question through our project that examined the relationship between the state and minorities through a qualitative research among particular minorities in Stuttgart, Milan and London. We introduce the concept of layered resilience and the issue of social cohesion during a pandemic before describing our methodology and the book’s contents.