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This paper examines how women in Hindu far-right organisations in India and the UK enact non-state social protection through self-defence, healthcare relief, and childcare. It shows how welfare withdrawal enables exclusionary solidarities and new forms of political belonging beyond the state.

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This paper is based on a comparative ethnographic study of women’s activism within Hindu far-right (HFR) organisations in India and the UK. By focusing on practices commonly associated with social protection, i.e., self-defence training, pandemic relief, childcare provision, and family regulation, this paper examines how non-state actors step into domains vacated or distrusted by the state, and how these interventions produce gendered and exclusionary forms of community.

Across both contexts, women justify paramilitary-style self-defence camps as responses to women’s vulnerability, even where empirical evidence of threat is limited, revealing protection as a moral and political claim rather than a purely pragmatic response. In the UK, welfare gaps in childcare were mobilised to justify community-based facilities structured around religious belonging. During the COVID-19 pandemic in India, HFR groups distributed branded relief kits in impoverished neighbourhoods amid the collapse of public healthcare, effectively operating as pseudo-state welfare providers. Similar efforts in the UK failed to gain traction, highlighting how the strength of public welfare infrastructures can limit the reach of far-right actors.

By examining a group that is a minority in one country but a majority in another, this paper analyses the role of the welfare state and complicates dominant binaries around migration, welfare, and nationalism. It argues that HFR women both call for and benefit from state withdrawal, producing solidarities that form political subjects beyond and against universalist welfare frameworks.

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The Yellow Vest protesters who came from the urban periphery to Paris in 2018, first objected to a gas tax and finally confronted the reduction of the welfare state in France. What led Yellow Vests to frame an inclusive vision within a context rife with anti-immigrant and racist options.

Paper long abstract

Under the conditions of the shrinking state in France the party of the National Front, now National Rally, presented a program to classify immigrants as second class citizens with less access to entitlements. In 2018, observers feared that the Yellow Vest protesters, mostly from the urban peripheries of France, would turn to this extreme right party.

Instead the Yellow Vests insisted that the state belongs to the people and that the President was “stealing the state” in the cutbacks of health care and other services. Reflecting a moral economy of the state, they framed the state as belonging to them, paid for by them, and answerable to them. At the roundabouts where they built cabins to spend time together, they claimed their rights to state services, such as health, education, retirement, care for the disabled, and the elderly. My five years of research suggests that through these activities and their battle for a commons, the Yellow Vests built an inclusive sense of community which crossed boundaries of race and migration.

The reduction of state services also causes the degradation of social life. Where the lack of transportation and the closing of local stores and cafes had decimated social interactions, the Yellow Vests recreated communities. The ideologies which emerged from these efforts were based on inclusion. As the protests continued, they did not veer towards anti-immigrant and racist directions, explicit in the second class citizen status, but instead towards a demand for universalistic support for a just welfare state.

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This paper examines welfare calculus—the moral and material reasoning through which people determine what they need and can claim—in the context of shrinking welfare states and social precarity. It emphasises how social protection is enacted and challenged from below.

Paper long abstract

In contexts characterised by shrinking welfare states, polarised discourses of deservingness, and governance based on quantification, how do people determine what they need, what they can claim, and what they owe to others? This paper introduces the concept of welfare calculus to explore the moral and material reasoning through which individuals and households navigate social protection from below. Rooted in extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Setúbal, a post-industrial city in southern Portugal, the paper draws on interviews, participant observation, and institutional encounters across municipal offices, parish charities, and informal care networks. In this climate of austerity and fragmentation, formal welfare systems intersect with vernacular infrastructures of obligation — such as neighbourhood credit, kin-based redistribution, and reputational judgments — creating complex moral landscapes of survival.

Instead of viewing welfare access solely as a technical matter of eligibility, the paper demonstrates how individuals perform moral worth, narrate needs, and strategically manoeuvre within discretionary systems. These acts of welfare calculus involve biographical storytelling, emotional regulation, and the moral labour required to make claims understandable and legitimate. Women frequently emerge as central figures in this process, acting as mediators between formal entitlements and informal care responsibilities. By examining how welfare is calculated and interpreted in lives characterised by precarity, this paper adds to debates on grassroots welfare, moral economies, and the redefinition of social protection amid crises. It contends that these everyday negotiations are not marginal but reveal the moral infrastructure through which welfare is enacted, contested, and sustained from the grassroots level.

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Based on ethnography in a Baptist soup kitchen in Curitiba, Brazil, (2022–2024), this paper examines how conservative faith-based actors combine care and evangelization to negotiate belonging, otherness and political subjectivities in polarized and precarious times.

Paper long abstract

Soup kitchens are often considered short-term solutions to failing welfare states. In Brazil, this view was reinforced during and after Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency (2018–2022), which many saw as a period of diminished welfare. However, the Brazilian welfare state has long been shaped, supplemented, and contested by social movements, religious organizations, and humanitarian actors. During the Covid-19 pandemic, soup kitchens gained renewed visibility and were reframed as part of the welfare system under center-left President Lula da Silva. This paper draws on ethnographic research conducted from 2022 to 2024 at a Baptist-run soup kitchen in Curitiba, Brazil, during and after the presidential elections. At Sopa Solidária, volunteers served soup to residents of Curitiba’s impoverished city center and a nearby favela. Despite the fact that soup kitchens were publicly embraced as part of Lula's welfare policy, support for the far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro was widely expressed among the volunteers. Unlike in European contexts, where migrants are often the primary "others" in ethnonationalist welfare narratives, in southern Brazil, otherness is articulated along moral, religious, racial, class, and regional lines. Volunteers oscillated between perceiving recipients as "criminals," "addicts," or "possessed by the devil" and as "spiritual brothers and sisters" or "potential believers." Recipients were constructed as moral outsiders, yet they were also seen as individuals who can be transformed through religious conversion and incorporated into the community. Faith-based actors provided social protection outside the state by creating moral hierarchies, political subjectivities, and a sense of belonging in contexts of precarity and political polarization.

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Authoritarianism, welfare cuts, and the stigmatization of already marginalized social groups prompted a wide array of acts of solidarity in Hungary since 2015. The paper examines the social justice imaginaries and micro-infrastructures of solidarity actors across diverse spatial contexts.

Paper long abstract

Since the right-wing-populist Fidesz-KDNP government entered power in 2010, it has transformed Hungary into a workfare (Szikra 2019; Scheiring, 2020; Scheiring and Szombati, 2020) and carefare regime (Fodor, 2022; Gregor and Verebes, 2023). Welfare cuts, as well as workfare and familist-pronatalist had been introduced, and specific social groups in need of care, such as homeless people and refugees, have been stigmatized and criminalized (Udvarhelyi, 2013; Ágh, 2015; Szikra et al., 2020; Fodor, 2022; Vidra and Messing, 2025). People enacting grassroots solidarity care for people affected by welfare cuts and marginalization have been targeted with funding cuts, hostile media campaigns, and legal changes (Ágh, 2015; Kapitány, 2019; Szikra et al., 2020). Democratic backsliding and the rolling back of welfare provisions, as well as the stigmatization of already marginalized social groups, prompted the participation of many people in solidarity acts. We argue that these are not merely acts of social protection against an oppressive state, but also include imaginaries of a “liveable provisional life” (Berlant 2016, 395). The aim of the paper is to study the social justice imaginaries and micro-infrastructures of solidarity actors across diverse spatial contexts, based on our fieldwork in the capital city, a large town, a small town, and three villages in Hungary. The research is based on ethnographic work (interviews and participant observation) with 20 civil groups that engage in acts of solidarity on issues of education, social care, housing, and legal aid, focusing on Roma people, refugees, people affected by housing poverty, and gender-based violence.

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The Canary Islands migration route has exposed tensions in Spain’s care of unaccompanied minors, marked by saturation, age disputes, and uneven redistribution. Ethnography shows how youth—especially age disputed— sometimes depend on activist networks to navigate legal gaps and seek protection.

Paper long abstract

Since 2020, arrivals via unauthorized maritime routes from West Africa to the Canary Islands have been framed as a migration crisis, prompting emergency governance strategies based on deterrence, large-scale encampment for adult men, and specific resources for women and unaccompanied minors. While most adults were transferred to mainland Spain or continued toward continental Europe, unaccompanied minors remained legally confined to the islands, as the first autonomous community of arrival is required to assume their guardianship. This prolonged saturation generated multiple challenges: age assessment disputes and misidentifications, precarious and under-supervised facilities, and abrupt transitions when minors turned 18. In 2025, new regulations mandating interregional redistribution sought to ease pressure on the Canary Islands but triggered political conflict and uneven implementation across autonomous communities.

This paper analyzes the governance of unaccompanied foreign minors in Spain within this evolving landscape, highlighting the Canary route as a key locus where the tensions of the European (im)mobility regime become visible. It examines everyday practices of accompaniment that have emerged in response to institutional shortcomings, led by local organizations and activist networks that compensate for gaps in public social services and major humanitarian agencies.

Drawing on ethnographic engagement with young unauthorized migrants who arrived through the Canary route, the paper focuses particularly on “non recognized” minors facing age disputes. It explores their legal struggles, the consequences of being classified as adults without enforceable rights, and the crucial role of activist and informal networks in securing protection, mobility, and pathways toward more stable futures.

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Drawing on ethnographic research and a material perspective, I examine the everyday practice of a volunteer-run van that offers emergency support to homeless people during winter nights in a German city, asking how it negotiates a responsibility to provide shelter in a retreating welfare state.

Paper long abstract

In winter, conditions for homeless people become life-threatening, especially when sleeping outside. Emergency shelters become overcrowded, or people avoid them because of exclusionary rules, or experiences of violence or mistreatment. To counter this, grassroots initiatives step in to care for those affected. One such initiative is a volunteer-run van that conducts outreach tours every winter night in a large German city, driving people to shelters or providing material assistance.

Drawing on observations and stories from extensive ethnographic participation in these tours, I look at the van as a case study of grassroots homeless emergency support that provides welfare from below. I do so through a material perspective that takes both the van’s and its clients’ everyday practices seriously, as they navigate the practical and often cyclical effects of social, economic and migration policies that both marginalise and (increasingly) refuse to care. As the van’s assistance is not based on welfare principles but the ambivalent logic of humanitarianism, volunteers navigate limited resources and the constant need to make difficult choices to secure physical survival above all else.

Furthermore, I show how every night, volunteers engage in complex negotiations over responsibility with state and medical authorities. They have to strike a delicate balance between compliance and subversion to retain an already compromised agency to help their clients. With this case study, I seek to illuminate the realities of providing emergency support and social protection at, and beyond, the margins of a withdrawing welfare state.

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Based on ethnographic research with senior working-class communities in Poland, this paper examines how the loss of socialist-era commons and welfare infrastructures after 1989 shaped political polarisation, nostalgia for state socialism, and contemporary right-wing support.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with senior post-industrial working-class communities in Nowa Huta, Dębica, and Oleśnica, Poland, this paper examines the enduring influence of social protection, belonging, and solidarity forged under state socialism in the context of a diminished welfare state under neoliberal capitalism. We argue that the intensification of political polarisation since the post-1989 transition is closely linked to processes of material dispossession, discursive devaluation, and the privatisation of resources that once sustained working-class life.

Our research partners frequently articulate a tension between right-wing political views and Catholic devotion and a nostalgic attachment to the collectively organised, secular everyday life of state socialism. Rather than interpreting this as ideological inconsistency, we suggest it reflects lived experiences of welfare retrenchment and the erosion of everyday infrastructures of care. Moving beyond state-centred accounts of welfare, our analysis foregrounds the commons as vernacular forms of social integration, protection, and dignity. Under state socialism, shared infrastructures such as allotment gardens and workers’ cultural clubs enabled social reproduction, mutual care, and everyday solidarity.

The enclosure and privatisation of these commons after 1989 marked a profound reconfiguration of welfare infrastructures and modes of belonging. We explore how the shared experience of this loss, and the silencing of claims grounded in it, has shaped contemporary political identities, including support for a nationalistic right-wing party that mobilises dignifying narratives while expanding social benefits. At the same time, memories and material traces of past commons continue to inform vernacular understandings and enactments of welfare, community, and solidarity among seniors.