The transformation of Managua's road system should be seen as a case of “infrastructural violence” which is intrinsic to a broader regime of injustice, argues Dennis Rodgers
It is time to recognise that punishing the homeless for performing necessary, life-sustaining activities in public, where no alternatives exist, amounts to cruel and unusual punishment, says Karen Cunningham
Constant fear, routine humiliation, no escape: this isn't prison, but life on incapacity benefit in the United Kingdom. There is another way: one that respects human dignity.
"They forced us to sit naked in a row and splashed a mug of water on each of us". Bashirabi is a poor vegetable vendor who was waiting to get a train home to Nagpur when she was detained and sent to a Beggars Home.
The Turkish government's decision to transform Istanbul into a globally competitive city is based on the planned displacement and forced relocation of the poor, says Tuna Kuyucu
The European Union is committed to ending homelessness by 2015, but across the continent, policies that frame homelessness as an ‘offence’ and the governance of public spaces as a law and order problem, are working against this goal, says Guillem Fernàndez Evangelista
The coupling of revanchist logic with the new military urbanism is creating citadels of political and economic power from which the poor and 'disordered' are excluded. Stephen Graham in conversation with Vijay Nagaraj
All too often, states disproportionately apply the death penalty to the 'small fish' in drug trafficking organisations. That these people usually poor, often young and occasionally ignorant of the contents of their cargo does nothing to elicit mercy
New changes intended to simplify the UK's welfare benefit system could have negative consequences. While the government moralises about "individual responsibility", its policies will entrench poverty for some
The increasing penalization of poverty is a response to social insecurity; a result of public policy that weds the "invisible hand" of the market to the "iron fist" of the penal state, says Loïc Wacquant
The regime of controls, conditionalities and sanctions that characterise the governance of poverty - in stark contrast to laissez faire financial governance - threatens the rights and the dignity of those it ostensibly protects, say Kate Donald and Smriti Upadhyay
The governance and perception of welfare in Canada has inextricably linked poverty, welfare and crime: to be poor is to be culpable. Only by resisting punitive trends and addressing the root causes of poverty can we reverse the tide of criminalization in welfare, says Wendy Chan
