Challenging Counterintuitive and Discriminatory Welfare: Transformative Justice and Social Love

Welfare has traditionally been associated with citizenship, inclusion, social protection, and the reduction of inequalities. Yet contemporary welfare systems increasingly display dynamics that contradict the promises and normative foundations upon which post-war welfare states were built. Policies and practices designed to protect, integrate, and empower may instead marginalize, discipline, exclude, or even persecute the groups they are expected to support, producing forms of social and political powerlessness.

Counterintuitive and discriminatory welfare may take unintended or deliberate, implicit or explicit forms, ranging from ordinary processes of exclusion and discrimination to more systematic and politically driven dynamics shaped by the pursuit of public consensus. These may emerge across different policy fields, including poverty relief, migration, disability, health, criminal justice, housing, education, and social work.

While some of these dynamics have long accompanied welfare institutions, others appear to reflect broader transformations of contemporary neoliberalism, progressively narrowing spaces of democracy, citizenship, social rights, and the rule of law. Thus, counterintuitive and discriminatory welfare is not a matter of policy failures or unintended consequences, but a sign of democratic backsliding, progressively reversing the role and purposes historically associated with social policies, even if the promises of post-war welfare states were never fully realized.

Against this backdrop, transformative justice and social love could provide lenses to examine both the contradictions of contemporary welfare and the possibilities for its renewal through collective action, care, recognition, and solidarity. What alternative imaginaries, practices, and institutional and governance arrangements do these approaches offer for changing the worlds we inhabit?