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Describing and understanding the rapidly changing picture of welfare in Central and Eastern Europe is a pressing task for social policy analysts. Two recent collections bring together some stimulating and valuable analyses that help to throw light on these massive transformations, which can appear so forbidding to the newcomer to this topic. Cerami and Vanhuysse’s edited collection is an ambitious conspectus of the principal changes taking place in countries in the Central and Eastern regions of Europe. The focus is on the experience of the nine newer members of the EU: the Visegrad region of Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and Bulgaria and Romania in South-Eastern Europe. This cluster of countries forms what Offe in his closing chapter calls ‘terra incognita’, in terms of their welfare states. The editors’ intention is to chart similarities and …