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At a time when Black Lives Matter has brought the legacies of transatlantic slavery to the global headlines, the British state has discovered slavery of a different kind: the evils of "modern slavery." Modern slavery has been defined as an urgent contemporary problem facing domestic citizens on home ground. This is nowhere more evident than in the case of county lines, the name given to the street-level drug economy of heroin and crack cocaine that is connecting larger cities to coastal and market towns. The runners of this illicit trade—working-class teenagers and young men, often racialized as nonwhite, from marginalized social housing estates—are no longer treated as criminals but as modern slaves in need of saving. Yet the making of modern slaves hinges upon fraught processes of techno-moral governance that divorce individuals' de jure vulnerability from the state's de facto production of classed and racial domination. Thus, in the name of saving the vulnerable, the state expands its remit of control into the most intimate realms of people's lives. What is more, by distinguishing those who are considered worthy of legal victimhood from others who are not, it has reinvented the figure of the modern slave master in the body of the male black working-class youth. Far from constituting a departure from punitive modes of governance, the politics of victimhood entrenches deep-seated inequalities while further distancing the state from the afterlives of Empire in postcolonial austerity Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Welfare landscapes are key sites for the everyday enactment and negotiation of citizenship, but they have remained relatively marginal in debates about migrants' belonging in postcolonial Europe. Drawing on ethnographic studies of Egyptian migrant parents' engagements with the welfare state in Paris, Amsterdam and Milan, this paper examines how citizenship is enacted, negotiated and experienced in welfare encounters. In contrast to the racialised citizenship produced by public discourses and bordering institutions, such welfare encounters articulate a social citizenship built on the idea that all citizens and legalised residents have a right to social welfare. This social citizenship is worked out in concrete encounters that revolve around material provisions and assistance, which are often deeply personal and intimate. Such encounters do not transact abstract notions of the citizen but draw on dense ideas and valuations of good lives, roles, responsibilities and deservingness on the part of welfare actors and beneficiaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many migrant mothers residing in Paris find themselves in a situation marked by legal precarity, which causes them to be suspended between disparate possible futures for their families. This paper examines the case of one such mother. This paper proposes the notion of the "space of hesitation" to denote the way in which legal precarity creates a specific timespace for migrant mothers like Um Ahmed in which they perform their mothering. This timespace is at once marked by the juggling of multiple, disparate futures, and by the sense of a stand-still as it remains uncertain which of these possible futures will materialize. Um Ahmed therefore operates in a mode of hesitation as to what skills and cultural sensibilities she needs to cultivate in her children, and struggles with a profound self-doubt of her motherhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue examines welfare programs as sites where Europe's increasingly diverse societies are being shaped and negotiated. It zooms in on parenting as a central governmental domain where concerns about, and hopes for, the future of society intersect with notions of citizenship, family care, welfare, and deservingness of public resources. In this introduction to the special issue, we draw out three paradoxical orders that shape the encounters between migrant parents and welfare actors we have studied. One is concerned with the tension between the universal and difference, the other with the re-articulation of the public and the private, and a third with irreconcilable social and institutional demands. This helps us understand how Europe's diverse societies are being shaped on the ground, beyond the often strongly racialized, nationalist rhetoric that has come to dominate public debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how notions of citizenship are negotiated in encounters between parents and youth care professionals in Amsterdam in the context of heated debates over citizenship and belonging. We draw on ethnographic research on Egyptian migrant parents' interactions with the welfare state, and on the work of youth care professionals. We found that both parents and professionals were invested in universal forms of citizenship. Parents wanted to be treated like their fellow citizens regardless of their background, while professionals wanted to care for all children. While parents feared and suspected that their children were subject to unfair treatment, professional practices left little space for disagreement or a consideration of racialized aspects of their encounters with clients. We conclude that notions of equal citizenship provide a primary, but uncertain ground for the elaboration of citizenship and belonging in parenting encounters, which is haunted by the spectre of difference and inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across Europe, new welfare programs exemplify attempts to govern through community. This article asks how such governing through community is done in practice. Drawing on comparative insights from fieldwork with parenting support professionals and volunteers in Amsterdam, Milan, and Paris, we document not only how governing through community is actually done but also what new forms of entanglements and unruly effects such governing creates. We argue that intimate welfare landscapes organized at the scale of the neighborhood (1) entangle welfare actors in neighborhood-focused networked relationships; (2) tend to bridge, obfuscate, and dissolve boundaries between state agent and citizen and between state and society; and (3) rely heavily on affective labor and personalized relationships. We show that the reorganization of governance through neighborhood-based networks produces an unwieldy quagmire of networks and partnerships. Moreover, rather than creating self-caring communities, new welfare programs primarily draw increasing numbers into governmental roles. Finally, instead of being released from its welfare and social responsibilities, locally embedded professionals turn out to be particularly effective at bringing the welfare state back in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editors discuss various reports within the issue on topics including anxious politics, ethnographic explorations, and racism in Europe.