Short Abstract

What forms of belonging and practices of solidarity emerge in the context of a shrinking welfare state? This panel wants to explore different grassroots attempts at enacting social protection, and to reflect on the new ways of understanding it that emerge through empirical observations.

Long Abstract

What forms of belonging, ideas of community and practices of solidarity emerge in the context of a shrinking welfare state? The goal of this panel is to explore different grassroots attempts at enacting social protection, and to reflect on new ways of understanding and theorizing social protection that come to light through these empirical observations.

More specifically, our aim is to complicate the conventional narrative on welfare, migration and ethnonationalism. This narrative assumes a neat opposition between a homogeneous population of foreign-born individuals benefiting from residual welfare provisions and far-right supporters as victims of neoliberalism demanding welfare measures to be available exclusively to “natives.”Our goal, instead, is to ask how current demands and practices around social protection can denaturalise the welfare state rather than take it for granted and to explore related ideas and practices that escape easy categorisations as left/right, pro-migrant/anti-foreign, inclusive/exclusionary. By investigating non-state, grassroots, vernacular discourses and enactments —such as initiatives created by migrant communities excluded from formal welfare systems, actions proposed by far-right actors speaking for the “left-behind”, or newly emerging projects aiming at bypass nation state in the name of local solidarity —this panel seeks to explore how these re-articulations expand the notion of social protection beyond welfare’s historical function as an economic mechanism of the capitalist state.

Amid the erosion of welfare infrastructures and the growing existential and economic precarity of both “natives” and “non-natives”, these initiatives may signal instead emergent politics of belonging and community-building, forming political subjects and collectivities via social protection. We welcome contributions that engage with these tensions across Europe and beyond, and across diverse political and demographic contexts.

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