This paper examines how healthcare fragmentation produces institutional displacement for Singapore's aging population, a phenomenon we conceptualise as ‘aging out of place’. It examines how older adults become systematically disconnected from care coordination while remaining physically in place. Analysis of Singapore's healthcare system reveals that institutional displacement operates through three reinforcing mechanisms: structural fragmentation across independent providers; financing arrangements in which insurance covers less than a quarter of long-term care costs, and administrative complexity that systematically excludes those with limited literacy, digital skills or family support. Current reforms like Healthier SG are constrained by voluntary participation and parallel financing mechanisms which limit their potential to address systemic fragmentation. The study recommends three parallel changes: unified governance cutting across ministry boundaries, a shift from fee-for-service to population-based payment, and operational infrastructure built around interoperable records and simplified administrative processes. Theoretically, the analysis extends aging-in-place concepts to encompass institutional dimensions of displacement. Practically, it shows that coordination must be built into system architecture for the aged. The study's findings have implications for aging societies worldwide confronting similar fragmentation challenges.

This article examines why reforms extending redistributive programs produce divergent outcomes across policy pillars within the same country under a shared historical-institutional framework. Using comparative process tracing, it introduces the retail politics mechanism to explain the success of healthcare reforms versus the stagnation of pension reforms in Indonesia's post-authoritarian democratic transition. The mechanism refers to a causal process in which electoral competition incentivises politicians to prioritise reforms whose benefits are highly visible to citizens and convertible into political gains. Consequently, distributive battles among politicians and technocrats occurred within policy subsystems rather than the regime level, producing an episodic welfare architecture characterised by expansion in some domains and institutional inertia in others. Findings also reveal enabling conditions for the mechanism to operate within each policy pillar—cumulative institutional experience, ideational-cultural negotiation, and electoral pragmatism. It thus offers insights for refining post-incrementalist orthodoxy and reinterpreting power resource–bounded welfare state debates by illustrating how the combination of incremental and punctuated models of change is differentially managed across sectors and strategically leveraged by political and policy entrepreneurs.

Drawing on institutionalist political economy, this paper argues that education should be conceptualised as a foundational institutional determinant of health rather than a contextual socioeconomic factor. Utilising data from Scotland, which faces some of the most profound health challenges within Europe, this paper uses Qualitative Comparative Analysis to explore data at the intermediate zone level from two of its major cities, Dundee and Aberdeen, to explore education and training alongside work, income, access to health care, crime and housing, and relating them to a composite outcome measure of health. These results are then compared to those for Glasgow city, which is perhaps the most heavily-researched, in terms of health, in the UK. It finds deprivation in education and training to be a necessary condition in areas of poorer health, especially where income and housing deprivation also occur, a finding requiring an urgent policy response.

Young people not in employment, education, or training (NEET) often face complex and overlapping challenges, yet the welfare services intended to support them are fragmented across organisational boundaries. This article contributes to the literature by exploring how street-level bureaucrats in a Swedish municipality understand and navigate this paradox, using a qualitative case study informed by wicked problems theory. The findings show how structural complexity in the form of interconnected needs and limited knowability interacts with stakeholder complexity, where fragmented knowledge, divergent institutional framings, competing organisational priorities, and diffuse authority shape how support is organised and delivered. Practitioners described how coordination across sectors was difficult to sustain, particularly when support relied on partial information, narrow mandates, and systems that prioritised measurable outputs over meaningful progress. The study confirms the analytical value of wicked problems theory, while also extending it by highlighting the temporal instability of coordination processes. While the typology helps explain why coordination and collective action are difficult in fragmented welfare systems, the findings show how joint efforts are difficult to sustain over time in the face of staff turnover, shifting mandates, and short-term initiatives. For policy and practice, the findings underscore the importance of governance arrangements that facilitate flexibility, cross-sectoral collaboration, and continuity of support.

Using qualitative data with older (50+) EU-migrants and NGO representatives, this study investigates the drivers of old-age poverty and retirement insecurity for low-income EU-migrants. Our findings indicate that the nature of work that many are/were engaged in and education, along with timing and age of arrival to the UK, influenced poverty risk, placing older and more recent migrants at a disadvantage. These risks were exacerbated by poor awareness of the legal rules and procedures surrounding social-security coordination and pensions portability following the UK-EU Withdrawal and UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreements. Our research found that living with family members could provide reciprocal advantages such as intergenerational support and facilitate dual-earning households, although such arrangements could also be precarious for older EU-migrants due to labour market and financial instabilities of family members. Pensions and retirement insecurities were further compounded by immigration and welfare bureaucracies; the complexity of pensions coordination and a lack of accessible information about pensions portability and support.

Despite clear eligibility criteria, many older adults do not claim available financial and social benefits. Understanding the reasons behind low uptake is essential for designing more accessible and acceptable support systems. Guided by administrative burden theory, this study investigates why older individuals may be reluctant to seek support and explores factors that facilitate engagement with eligible benefits. A qualitative design was employed, involving three focus group discussions with 25 participants aged 50 and above living in Yorkshire, United Kingdom. Participants were recruited through community networks, and discussions were analysed through thematic analysis. The findings reveal psychological costs of generational pride, perceived injustice and scepticism, as well as learning and compliance costs of institutional inaccessibility as the barriers to uptake. The findings also illuminate streamlined bureaucratic processes, organisational mediation, and social support as important motivators of benefits engagement. The findings carry important policy implications, particularly for designing welfare systems that are more accessible, relationally responsive, and capable of reducing psychological barriers that currently discourage benefit uptake among older people.

This article explores how social policy is created through the everyday labor of social workers in a Serbian town, challenging assumptions about the absence of the state in post-socialist welfare regimes. Drawing on rich ethnographic material, I argue that social policy is not merely implemented or absent, but actively constituted through the moral, bureaucratic, and relational work of frontline professionals. Rather than viewing the state as absent or dysfunctional, this ethnography reveals its presence as fragmented, negotiated, and affectively charged. Through the lens of double-embeddedness, social workers’ simultaneous entanglement in institutional structures and community networks, I show how social workers navigate both bureaucratic expectations and community obligations that produce social policy. By situating social work within broader debates in the anthropology of the state and policy, the article contributes an understanding of the way in which governance is lived and shaped in the post-Yugoslav context.

Developing interactions within the much-secluded setting of women's jail is an intricate process. That carries foreseen anxiety about building rapport with prisoners, the dread of expulsion, and constant field volatility. Engaging women offenders to converse is difficult, and adapting to such sociability is not very convincing. Given the ethos of Indian prisons, a researcher must consider the holistic picture. The task starts even before commencing the research, continues with the scholarly ethnographic study and the post-phase of jotting down what is compiled. Technical innovations like cell phones, audio recorders, and cameras−fail inside prison, requiring researchers to lean on memory to supplement field annotations. By experiencing one of the difficult field explorations, this article reviews why prison environments are challenging to capture insights and how certain tools help advance notes effectively. By doing so, the larger aim is to excavate anthropological insights through creative methodological considerations in Indian prisons.

The study examines social service provision during emergencies, with the October 2023 war in Israel as a case study. Building on literature devoted to coping strategies adopted by frontline social service providers, which primarily addresses routine contexts, our research explores their adaptation during crises. Using qualitative methods, including 18 formal interviews and 50 informal conversations with social workers as main providers of social services and such secondary sources as news articles and TV reports, we investigated how social workers manage the widening gap between inadequate social policy and escalating public needs during a prolonged emergency. Data analysis, informed by constructivist grounded theory, revealed that social workers employed extensive volunteer practices as a core coping strategy, which evolved across three distinct phases of the crisis. We conceptualized these practices as ‘coerced volunteering’, a phenomenon whereby structural constraints and professional obligations oblige unpaid work. The study contributes to literature on public social service provision during emergencies vis-à-vis inadequacy of social policy. We discuss implications for policy and practice.

This article uses the framework of prefigurative citizenship to show how Sahrawi refugees have worked to build a sense of hope and possibility while displaced. Prefigurative citizenship is both made and mobilized in relation to a vision that rewrites current connections between a state, a territory, and a people to reposition Sahrawi refugees while building decolonized futures. This article explores how Western Sahara's territorial qualities and natural resource wealth inform the making of a prefigurative Sahrawi citizenship through affective ties to the territory. These configurations of Sahrawi place and property in Western Sahara form the basis for building a future that challenges dispossessive social orders of the contemporary, creating the landscape for political actions and claims-making in the present.

Conducting fieldwork on politically sensitive topics in authoritarian contexts presents researchers with acute trade-offs between access and autonomy. This note reflects on the methodological strategies and ethical dilemmas we encountered while studying land acquisition in Vietnam—a single-party state where land conflict represents one of the most politically contentious issues facing the regime. Specifically, we discuss how working through government-affiliated institutions and local officials carries both significant advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, official state support proved essential for reaching otherwise inaccessible populations and building respondent trust. On the other hand, it introduced sampling biases toward compliant respondents, misperceptions of researcher power among interviewees, and ethical tensions inherent in conducting research that state actors viewed as potentially useful. We describe the adaptive strategies we employed to mitigate these constraints and reflect on the broader implications for positionality, research integrity, and the responsibilities of researchers who study communities whose lives are shaped by the very systems under investigation.

How does it feel to observe, participate, document, and eventually analyse ‘material’ where the ethnographer studies her own community's complicity, consensus and actions toward a majoritarian state? When anti-Muslim sentiment is on the surface of things: temples on ruins of demolished mosques and graves, renamed cities which sound unmistakably ‘Hindu’, saffron artefacts like flags atop homes, stickers of hyper-masculinized Hindu Gods on vehicles, religious tattoos on bodies; and hate toward the Muslim minority looms gently, casually, as a matter of fact within family, friends, neighbors, acquaintances, and strangers, the heart (break) of an ethnographer becomes a productive filter to perceive and study this world. Reflecting on fieldwork conducted in Uttarakhand, India I attempt to put in words the unspeakableness of sorrow of doing such work, where fieldwork doesn't just entail yet another field site, but is life itself—a site of recurring loss.

How do researchers navigate the “nervousness” of conducting fieldwork in the face of ethical discomfort? Drawing on our field notes, we show how collaborative fieldwork helped us navigate some of these challenges. We argue for an alternative way of imagining fieldwork that foregrounds collaboration as an ongoing research practice extending beyond just fieldwork.

How should researchers in “closed contexts”, navigate “post-access” scenario when their own positionality conflicts with ideologically driven keepers of “information” in conflict/authoritarian settings? If they decide to consciously write/not write such information, do researchers perpetuate “relations of domination” prevalent on field or compromise agency of the marginalized populations? Also, how should researchers navigate indirect threats, suspicion and fear that come along while navigating through such information? Based on my fieldwork experience of doing policy ethnography (October 2022–June 2023) in spatially polarised Ahmedabad (and a short fieldwork in Dimapur (Nagaland) studying mob lynching incident and peacekeeping in 2015 in which a mosque was attacked), this short paper engages with the ethical implications of “possessing information” through what I call “declining to use access”. Declining access implies selective withdrawal of access to sensitive information that could be valuable to research as it is shared on perceived perceptions of mutual trust (intimacy) by partisan and non-partisan actors in authoritarian settings.

In this paper, I discuss my experience of ethnographic fieldwork in Uttar Pradesh (UP), which has emerged as an ideal prototype of a Hindutva state in India. I examine my position as an oppositional researcher at one of Durga Vahini's annual training camps in UP. Based on my experience, I further analyze how certain bodies are allowed within or expelled from the coveted events of Hindu right-wing organizations that work towards training young minds for the Hindu nation they aim to build. I assess the question of my privileges in the field, which stem from my social location, which provided me the confidence to study the Hindu right-wing and assured my physical safety. In the article, I focus on “strategies based on fear” in hostile situations and the ethical dilemmas faced by an oppositional researcher in the field.

To speak of methods is to speak of the tools through which knowledge is gathered and produced. Yet, method can also be understood as a mode of engagement that shapes what becomes perceptible and how we reproduce political worlds. Fieldwork, then, is at once the application of techniques to make sense of a research problem, but also, ultimately, an encounter that rearranges our intellectual expectations and affective dispositions alike. This note develops a discussion around one such rearrangement: from hope to rage, both as a lament that developed in the field and as a proposition that could help us think about how knowledge is produced under conditions of closure, repetition, and the exhaustion of hope.

South Korea is known for its strong work-centric culture, having long recorded some of the longest working hours in the OECD based on its norm of overtime work. Against this backdrop, the 52-h working time reform, consisting of 40 standard and 12 overtime hours, was introduced in 2018. The current paper is the first qualitative study to document Korean employees' work experiences following the working time reform based on 32 interviews. The findings show that the reform produced divergent organizational trajectories shaped by firms' capacity and willingness to reorganise work. While a small subset of high-capacity workplaces normalised a 40-h working week through active organizational measures, most workplaces experienced more limited change, often with unintended consequences arising from reduced overtime without adequate workload adjustment or the displacement of work into informal and undocumented forms. In yet other cases, the reform had little relevance due to exemption, pre-existing schedules, or structurally unbounded work. By offering an up-to-date picture of how policy interacts with organizational culture and practice, this study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of change and continuity in working time norms following a major policy reform in a hyper work-oriented context.

Ontario's Integrated Employment Services reform promises person-centred assessment and ‘life stabilisation’ supports before people on social assistance are pushed towards work. This article argues that the model is structurally incapable of delivering on that promise because it layers standardised, marketised employment services onto a social assistance regime that keeps people in deep poverty and rations basic supports. Drawing on an anonymous online survey of nearly 1200 Ontario Works and Ontario Disability Support Program recipients who were seeking or considering employment, we use descriptive statistics and thematic analysis to foreground recipients' own accounts of income adequacy, life-stabilisation supports and Employment Ontario services. Respondents consistently described a system in which housing, food and health costs far exceed benefits; stabilisation supports are difficult to access, crisis-oriented and time limited; and employment services are thin, generic and poorly aligned with longer-term goals. At the same time, many reported respectful relationships with individual workers operating within outcome-based contracting arrangements and scarce resources. We situate these patterns within debates on activation, marketised employment services and social reproduction to show how Integrated Employment Services can mandate activation while failing to create the material and institutional conditions required for sustainable and decent employment.

This article investigates how social workers enact ethical judgement in digitalised welfare organisations. Drawing on the concept of ethics work, it examines how engagements with digital systems involve ongoing processes of identifying, interpreting and responding to ethically salient aspects of practice. The study is based on an organisational ethnography in Swedish social services, combining 45 interviews with social workers and approximately 200 h of shadowing in child and family services and economic assistance units. The analysis focuses on situations where digital systems generate frictions, ambiguities or risks for clients and explores how practitioners discern what is at stake and adjust, supplement or bypass digital routines. The findings show that discretionary responses to digital friction constitute important sites of ethics work. Digitalization introduces new conditions under which ethics work unfolds: ethical concerns are increasingly triggered by system logics embedded in digital systems and practitioners enact responsibility by interpreting system outputs and mitigating unintended consequences for clients. Rather than replacing traditional forms of ethical judgement, digital systems reconfigure when and how ethics work is enacted in everyday welfare practice.

This article seeks to highlight the unstable relationship between identity documents, checkpoints, violence and the law. To do this the piece uses stories from three Syrians concerning their everyday interactions with the law, primarily at checkpoints but also in other administrative settings. Building on anthropological and socio-legal scholarship on documents and state encounters, as well as literature from integration and memory studies, I argue that checkpoints are key sites where the latent violence underpinning legal authority becomes visible. At such sites, the inherently unstable way identity (most obvious in identity documentation), violence and the law interrelate has affective possibility. Through deepening our understanding of these particular legal encounters, I highlight commonalities in the way identity documents, checkpoints, violence and the law functions not just in authoritarian settings but also in so-called liberal democracies.

This work seeks to contribute to the literature exploring the role of courts in democratic erosion and autocratization. Accordingly, I explore the dynamics of attacks against the judiciary and how this set into motion the erosion of democracy. My argument is that populists, leaders with autocratic tendencies or “false democrats” want to capture the courts to legally concentrate power on the ruling party. They do so by taking over the judiciary through (a) rhetorical attacks that weaken the already fragile public legitimacy of the courts and (b) legal attacks (institutional reforms) to dismantle judicial independence, technically removing a veto player and triggering democratic erosion. To develop this argument, I use the case of Mexico, a recent example that illuminates how both rhetorical and institutional attacks unfold to subvert judicial independence, capture the judiciary, and erode democracy. I develop this argument using two original databases.

Under what organizational conditions are police officers more likely to use lethal force against racial minority suspects in the United States? Using identity and institutional theories, we find that perceived legitimacy is likely to determine how street-level bureaucrats and managers define their identities and influence the disproportionate killings of minorities in the United States. In sum, we show that bureaucrats, either street-level White police officers or their managers, assume different identities, either social or role identity, depending on the organizational contexts, visibility of their actions to the public, and the following perceived legitimacy to the public by utilizing institutional theory. These findings reveal when racial disparities are likely to rise, driven by the interplay among officer and suspect race, leadership dynamics, and the bureaucratic pursuit of legitimacy. We discuss theoretical and practical implications regarding police use of force in state-citizen interactions.

In times of fast-changing social needs and limited public resources, private welfare provision plays an increasingly prominent role in the welfare mix. This article explores two dimensions of this trend, which have often been examined separately: occupational welfare (OW) and employment in the social economy. We investigate their interplay through a case study of cooperative enterprises in Italy. While cooperatives are central actors in Italy's social economy and play a vital role in delivering welfare services, existing literature points to low wages and precarious working conditions. Does OW improve employment conditions in a sector that, despite its social mission, often reproduces precarious forms of work? To address this question, the article draws on a mixed-methods approach, combining data from two original surveys with qualitative insights from 25 interviews. The findings reveal that OW appears to be relatively widespread among cooperatives. However, especially in those offering publicly procured welfare services, their provision is severely constrained by tight economic margins. Where present, OW is likely to be used as an indirect supplement to (low) wages rather than for genuine social purposes. Moreover, a clear Matthew effect emerges: higher-skilled workers in managerial positions benefit the most from OW, which often fails to reach the most vulnerable workers.

Digital work instructions (DWIs) are increasingly used in mainstream manufacturing and assembly settings to support task execution, training and process adaptability. However, their implementation in work integration social enterprises (WISEs) has received limited scholarly attention. Drawing on a mixed-methods research project in Flanders, Belgium, this article examines the factors influencing DWI adoption in WISEs and the effects organisations report in relation to their use. The analysis considers barriers, motives, government support, organisational characteristics and perceived economic, social, environmental and negative effects. The study combines a targeted literature review, semi-structured interviews, participatory evaluation and a survey of 41 WISEs. The findings suggest that DWIs are associated with perceived improvements in operational efficiency, training processes and worker autonomy, while implementation challenges include upfront costs, integration issues and the effort required to design and maintain effective instructions. Adopters and non-adopters also differed in how they perceived the benefits, barriers and risks associated with DWIs. The article contributes to research on digital transformation in inclusive work settings by examining DWI adoption in a context that remains underexplored in the literature, and it offers practical insights for managers and policymakers involved in WISE digitalisation.

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered historic expansions of the U.S. social safety net to mitigate unprecedented economic hardship. However, increased government spending and program expansions on paper do not automatically translate into equitable access in practice. Following the PRISMA-ScR guidelines, this scoping review synthesizes 33 peer-reviewed studies published between 2020 and 2025 examining access to federal social safety net programs, including food assistance, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and housing and energy assistance. The review identified six categories of barriers to access: racial and ethnic disparities, administrative barriers, policy design barriers, instrumental barriers, geographic and demographic disparities, and COVID-19 specific factors. At the same time, four opportunities were identified that improved access: program expansions, staff and community efforts, convenience of remote services, and Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer (P-EBT). Findings highlight the dual reality of entrenched exclusions and innovative adaptations, underscoring the need for reforms that institutionalize equity and resilience in the social safety net.

People with disability from culturally diverse backgrounds face challenges accessing community services. These negative experiences contribute to everyday harm, a common but less noticeable form of harm that negatively impacts a person's wellbeing and social connections. Despite its impact, the concept of everyday harm is underexplored for this community in service settings. A scoping review was conducted through a systematic search across four databases of Eric/ProQuest, CINAHL, Scopus and Taylor & Francis. Eighteen articles were identified and thematically analysed. Findings revealed that everyday harm is often experienced by people from culturally diverse communities and overlooked by service providers. Three major themes were identified: (1) experiences of everyday harm, (2) responses to it and (3) practices of services to prevent or address everyday harm. Everyday harm experiences are shaped by historic systemic inequality, neglect of cultural responsiveness in services and capacity and awareness of service providers. People experience everyday harm to the combination of the intersecting parts of their identities. The findings imply the need for culturally responsive policy change, rights-based service reform and inclusive empirical research to better understand the steps to prevent or address everyday harm in service settings.

This article examines the trend in fathers' uptake of parental leave following the 2004 parental leave reform in Estonia and analyses the factors that determine whether fathers take leave. The reform introduced generous earnings-related parental leave benefits paid over a long period but did not implement a fathers' quota. The study population includes children born between 2004 and 2018. We use a register-based dataset and logistic regression to analyse variation in the probability that fathers take parental leave. The main explanatory variables are fathers' earnings and educational attainment. Following the reform, fathers' uptake of parental leave more than tripled over the study period. We find a strong positive association between fathers' earnings and their use of parental leave, likely due to the full replacement of previous earnings and the high ceiling on parental leave benefits. Incorporating an interaction between parents' income levels into the regression analysis suggests that economic optimisation plays an important role in fathers' decisions to take leave, while relative resources with the couple also matter. This study expands the geographical scope of research into the determinants of fathers' parental leave use. We find both similarities as well as differences in fathers' leave uptake compared to Nordic countries.

Heteronormative public administration assumes that LGBTQIA+ communities will reflect their heterosexual counterparts. The resulting deficient outreach to vulnerable communities has worsened health disparities, as seen in the 2022 Mpox epidemic, in which gay and bisexual men experienced the highest infection rates. This research applied queer theory to examine social media efforts to eliminate Mpox spread. This study critically assessed 591 social media messages from influencers, non-profits, and government for queer-focused and heteronormative discourse. Findings revealed that most governmental and non-profit accounts failed to augment content for the at-risk audience. Gay and bisexual men had to navigate heteronormative content to locate resources critical to their well-being. Conversely, influencers acted as a public health system through repeated messaging and by supplementing governmental guidance with steps tailored for a queer audience. Influencers' value came from leveraging their lived experiences to challenge discriminatory societal norms, highlighting the crucial role of culturally relevant communication.

In Rotterdam, the Netherlands, grassroots organizers with a forced migration background provide support to recent refugees. These organizers try to sustain the informal character of the work they do, while, at the same time, they seek to institutionalize their organization by entering into collaborative government arrangements that are structured by neoliberal funding instruments. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this article does three things. First, it reveals modes of affectivity in settings in which society and the state are imbricated with neoliberal market-oriented logics. Second, it shows how right-wing populism feeds into fantasies and rituals of statecraft. Third, it demonstrates how refugee support is situated in hybrid and diffuse webs of governance. I argue that competitive tendering as a way of sponsoring and regulating civil society organizations not only supports capitalist and neoliberal ideologies by following the logics of capital but also enables the proliferation of racism and anti-migrant hostility. To demonstrate their “professionalism,” civil society organizations are faced not only with the impossible job of implementing a degree of bureaucracy to show that they are non-bureaucratic, but also that they get to speak the language of capital—that in an extreme right-wing conjuncture becomes easily tangled up with anti-migrant hostility.

Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the outsourcing of asylum processing and resettlement from Global North to South. Many of these containment practices retrace the fault lines of more typically thought-of colonial extractive regimes. This article draws on long-term ethnographic research conducted in the Republic of Nauru, the world's smallest island nation, located in the equatorial Pacific. I consider how past toxic regimes give shape to the emergence of contemporary toxicities related to expanding outsourced border regimes. I advance the notion of toxic entanglement to help account for the relational production of damaging extractive sectors. Building on both literal environmental toxicity and the increasingly prevalent popular usage of “toxic” as a descriptor for harmful social relations, I argue that the concept of toxic entanglement—informed by local references to toxicity—allows for a deeper understanding of unevenly distributed risks that migrants and locals face. By attending to toxic entanglements across extractive industries and making visible moments of refusal, we can better amplify future responses to mutually constitutive forms of social oppression.

This article examines how humanitarian management of the dead in the Nagorno–Karabakh conflict constructs deceased soldiers as objects of care, incorporating them into “humanity after life”—a postmortem register of humanitarian concern. Drawing on ethnographic research with families of missing persons and observations of care practices around the war dead in post-war Azerbaijan, I argue that under Azerbaijan's system of mandatory conscription, humanitarian practice can displace ethical and institutional attention from living conscripts in active duty toward the dead, making “humanity” most institutionally actionable through recovery, identification, and burial. I call this posthumous humanity: the process through which dead bodies become an enforceable site of international humanitarian legal recognition and procedural care, even as those same individuals, while alive and as members of the armed forces, were lawfully targetable while participating in hostilities under IHL's principle of distinction. I show how “humanity” functions here as a juridical register distributed through IHL categories and humanitarian practices. The article also challenges the legal-humanitarian category of “children” by tracing how kinship idioms, such as referring to conscripted sons as uşaqlar (“children”), unsettle legal distinctions between protected civilians and combatants. The analysis contributes to anthropological debates on law, kinship, humanitarianism, and the politics of death.

To receive justice in the legal system, one must be seen by the legal system; this is as true for nonhuman animal victims of crime as it is for human victims. Situating animal cruelty within the invisible crimes framework, this paper highlights the paucity of research on prosecutions and sentencing under animal welfare law. Due in part to a lack of transparency in the public and private institutions that regulate animal welfare, our understanding of how animals are recognized within legal systems has so far relied heavily on critiques of animal welfare legislation as written. Drawing on an original database of Australian prosecutions of cruelty cases (n = 552) involving “pet” animals, this paper offers new, empirically centered perspectives on the legal treatment of animals. It calls for an expansion of the invisible crimes framework to include “invisible victims” and supports recent calls for animals to be recognized as crime victims.

How much knowledge do policymakers have about poverty, inequality, and social policy and does that knowledge matter? This study analyzes innovative data from direct (e.g., face-to-face) interviews of 49 California and Texas state legislators. Knowledge is assessed comprehensively with 11 questions and compared against a nationally representative sample of adults. Legislators answered only 42.5% of questions correctly—statistically significantly, but only slightly higher than the general public's 30.9% correct. Less than a tenth of legislators knew the poverty rate, and less than a quarter knew what share of the poor are homeless or the top 5% income threshold. There is also substantial heterogeneity as few answered most questions correctly, but several answered almost all incorrectly, and 14 of 49 performed worse than the general public. We demonstrate that this knowledge is salient because it strongly predicts legislators' voting. We then show key legislative roles, affiliations with stakeholders, and educational or biographical backgrounds do not result in greater knowledge. While legislators report various information sources influencing their thinking in this domain, some cannot cite any source, and sources are unrelated to knowledge. Ultimately, this study demonstrates policymakers' knowledge about poverty, inequality, and social policy is both limited and consequential.

Comparative research on school-to-work transitions (SWT) mainly focused on cross-country differences, while territorial variations among sub-national territories in youth labour market and transitions outcomes have been underexplored. In this paper, we investigate the impact over time of national institutional configurations and regional contextual traits on subnational school-to-work transitions outcomes, combining comparative welfare and SWT research with studies on regional economics. Our findings reveal that SWT evolves conditionally on the interaction between national welfare institutions and regional socio-economic contexts. The analysis identifies regime-specific sensitivity to territorial human capital concentration, with Sub-protective and post-socialist regimes showing greater variability across the human capital distribution, while Employment-centred and Universalistic regimes demonstrate more consistent outcomes.

Front cover illustration: Veterans of Peterloo assembled in support of parliamentary reform at Failsworth (Lancashire) in 1884. Image Ref P7611, courtesy of Oldham Archives, reproduced from Sim Schofield, Short Stories about Failsworth Folk (1905), 65–6.