Governing poverty: risking rights?

“Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property system.”

- Walter Benjamin, 1936

Universal credit: fair for whom?

Deborah Padfield 6 August 2011

New changes intended to simplify the UK's welfare benefit system could have negative consequences. While the government moralises about "individual responsibility", its policies will entrench poverty for some

The punitive regulation of poverty in the neoliberal age

Loïc Wacquant 1 August 2011

The increasing penalization of poverty is a response to social insecurity; a result of public policy that weds the "invisible hand" of the market to the "iron fist" of the penal state, says Loïc Wacquant

Governing poverty: risking rights

Kate Donald and Smriti Upadhyay 1 August 2011

The regime of controls, conditionalities and sanctions that characterise the governance of poverty - in stark contrast to laissez faire financial governance - threatens the rights and the dignity of those it ostensibly protects, say Kate Donald and Smriti Upadhyay

Migration: controlling the unsettled poor

Bridget Anderson 1 August 2011

Examining the way in which first rulers, and then the state, have coerced the poor in England into mobility and immobility, offers opportunities for developing a new politics of migration, says Bridget Anderson

Canada: punishing the undeserving poor

Wendy Chan 1 August 2011

The governance and perception of welfare in Canada has inextricably linked poverty, welfare and crime: to be poor is to be culpable. Only by resisting punitive trends and addressing the root causes of poverty can we reverse the tide of criminalization in welfare, says Wendy Chan

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