Philosophical Misframings of Poverty

This chapter explains why viewing poverty as needs scarcity caused by a maldistribution of resources has led many philosophers to ignore critical aspects of poverty and their underlying structural causes. The depoliticized view of chronic deprivation held by philosophers focused on the “moral demands of affluence” is closely linked with the moral doctrine of “sufficientarianism,” whose proponents reject or minimize the significance of inequality as such. “Effective altruism,” a popular movement promoting an evidence-based approach to improving the world through philanthropy, draws on sufficientarianism’s apolitical view of poverty as reducible to needs deprivation, measurable in terms of income and consumption. This chapter argues that ignoring the structural drivers and nonmaterial dimensions of poverty—like social exclusion, dispossession, exploitation, and subordination—leads theorists to overlook the vital role of organized poor communities’ struggles for justice.

Co-radicalisation of Islamist and Nativist Extremists in Europe

A vast amount of social science research has been dedicated to the study of Islamist extremism – in particular, to uncover its psychological and structural drivers. However, the recent revival of extreme-right extremism points to the need to investigate this re-emerging phenomenon. This article highlights some of the characteristics of the extremisation of Islamism in Europe in parallel with the rise of the extremisation of right-wing extremist groups. In doing so, we explore similarities between Islamist and right-wing extremist individuals and groups. The main premise of the article is that a threat-regulation approach fails to understand the role of contextual and structural factors in the political and religious extremisation of individuals. Instead, the article claims that a reciprocal-threat model can better explain extremist violence since it is based on the idea that nativist and Islamist extremist individuals/groups are mutually threatening each other.

Disability Law in a Pandemic: The Temporal Folds of Medico-legal Violence

Disabled people are subject to disability laws – such as guardianship, mental health and mental capacity legislation – which only apply to them, and which enable legal violence on the basis of disability (‘disability-specific lawful violence’). While public health laws during the COVID-19 pandemic enabled coercive interventions in the general population, disabled people have additionally been subject to the continued, and at times intensified, operation of disability laws and their lawful violence. In this article we engage with scholarship on law, temporality and disability to explore the amplification of disability-specific lawful violence during the pandemic. We show how this amplification has been made possible through the folding of longstanding assumptions about disabled people – as at risk of police contact; as vulnerable, unhealthy and contaminating – into the immediate crisis of the pandemic; ignoring structural drivers of oppression, and responsibilising disabled people for their circumstances and the violence they experience.