Moving beyond punitivism: punishment, state failure and democracy at the margins

Recent commentary on the punitive turn has focused on the repressive nature of criminal justice policy. Yet, on a marginalised council estate (social housing project) in England, residents appropriate the state in ways that do not always align with the law. What is more, where the state fails to provide residents with the protection they need, residents mobilise informal violence that is condemned by the state. An ethnographic analysis of personalised uses of criminal justice questions the state-centric assumptions of order that have informed recent narratives of the punitive turn. It also calls for a reassessment of the relationship between democratic politics and criminal justice by drawing attention to popular demands that are not captured by a focus on punishment alone

The labour of care: why we need an alternative political economy of social care

Caring is often taken for granted as an activity. But what happens when a social emotion is monetised? Insa Koch explains what the consequences are for those dispensing and those in receipt of care at a time of austerity politics, and in a legal system where female carers have never had the same rights and protections as their male counterparts

What's in a vote? Brexit beyond culture wars

The result of the United Kingdom’s EU referendum has been interpreted as evidence of a “culture war” between proponents of liberal cosmopolitanism and defenders of socially conservative values. According to this interpretation, voters on both sides are seen as driven by identity-based politics. But on a council estate (social-housing project) in England, what made the EU referendum different from an ordinary election was that citizens perceived it as an opportunity to reject government as they know it. Citizens’ engagements with the referendum constitute attempts to insert everyday moralities into electoral processes. They provide an opening into alternative, if yet unknown, futures that go beyond any singular narratives that divide the electorate into camps of so-called Leavers and Remainers

Bread-and-butter politics: democratic disenchantment and everyday politics on an English council estate

Despite evidence of widespread disenchantment with formal politics among England’s impoverished sectors, people on the margins continue to engage with elected representatives on their own terms. On English council estates (social housing projects), residents mediate their experiences of an alien and distant political system by drawing local politicians into localized networks of support and care. While this allows residents to voice demands for “bread and butter,” personalized alliances with politicians rarely translate into collective action. The limits of a “bread and butter” strategy highlight the precariousness of working class movements at a time when the political left has largely been dismantled. They also demonstrate the need to account for the lived realities of social class in aspirational narratives for “alternative” democratic futures

The guardians of the welfare state: Universal Credit, welfare control and the moral economy of frontline work in austerity Britain

Ongoing processes of ‘austerity localism’, including the state’s withdrawal from local communities, have created heightened pressures at the frontline. Sitting in local authorities, third sector bodies and community organisations, frontline workers come to act as the de facto guardians of a much-diminished welfare state. Yet, in a situation where needs outweigh resources, they also allocate support based on moral hierarchies of deservingness. This Janus-faced role of frontline workers as both a bulwark against, and an enabler of, neo-liberal welfare control is examined through the framework of a moral economy of frontline work. I argue that the tensions reflect a deeper struggle over competing notions of citizenship, and of the state’s responsibilities towards its citizens, in austerity Britain today

The state of the welfare state: advice, governance and care in settings of austerity

Contemporary attempts to govern ‘the state of the welfare state’ are as much about moral endeavours as they are about political and economic imperatives. Such is the argument put forward in this Introduction, which focuses on the work that advisers perform in settings of austerity across Europe. Advisers are often the last call for help for their clients/dependents who find themselves increasingly at the mercy of local authorities, immigration regimes, landlords, banks and debt collection agencies. But competing visions of moral worth and social justice continue to permeate the everyday deliberations of those who administer, support and advocate advice. Struggles and dilemmas over how best to provide assistance and balance individuals’ moral judgments against the collective good frequently occur. We explore both the dovetailing of and divergence between domains and roles, in disrupting as well as reproducing dominant logics of extraction and accumulation

Economies of advice

Because of academic divisions of labour anthropologists have come late to the study of the changing landscape of welfare and advice provision in Euro-America (and beyond). But it is crucial to understanding contemporary economies. Attention to the increasing informalization, hybridization, plurality and complexity of welfare/care/advice provision in the context of 21st-century austerity Europe challenges the widely-held view of how state bureaucracies operate. The corollaries are the difficulties in accessing what help is available (hence the increasing need for advice) and an increase in grassroots mutual aid and activism to supplement and in some cases even supplant state advice provision

Social polarisation at the local level: why inequality must be re-politicised from within different localities

Mark Fransham and Insa Koch examine how intensifying inequality in the UK plays out at a local level. They distinguish differing dynamics of ‘elite-based’ polarisation (in Oxford and Tunbridge Wells) and ‘poverty-based’ polarisation (in Margate and Oldham). They write that, although across these four towns marginalised communities express a sense of local belonging, tensions between social groups remain strong and all towns are marked by a weak or ‘squeezed middle’

Everyday authoritarianism: class and coercion on housing estates in neoliberal Britain

In Britain, especially in the 2010s, neoliberal reform involved an extension of legal coercion into the domestic and community lives of marginalized citizens. On two postindustrial housing estates in Britain, working-class residents experience this “everyday authoritarianism” in areas that the liberal state typically constructs as private and purports to leave alone: the home and the intimate relations that frame it. Residents engage this legal coercion by adopting responses that range from defensive avoidance to co-opting officials to acts of vigilantism. By doing so, they negotiate the presence of an authority that is often out of sync with their own expectations for protection, and in some cases actively undermines their efforts to remain safe. Their pluralism can be framed neither in terms of an acceptance of state authority nor as a straightforward refusal to be governed. Rather, it reveals the contradictory ways in which marginalized citizens define their relationship to the state under contemporary conditions of class fragmentation. By adding detail on everyday life to meta-narratives of an authoritarian turn, this article theorizes the political potential and limits of people's daily engagements with the state for contesting the latter's authority. [class, coercion, liberal governance]