1st Edition

Welfare Racism The Discursive Dimension

Edited By Fabio Perocco Copyright 2026
284 Pages 4 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

284 Pages 4 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

Welfare racism is a combination of racial discrimination in the welfare system and racist discourses used in the name of the welfare state. Presenting a global overview of discourses of welfare racism across the world by institutional actors, public figures, political parties, and mass media, this book examines the evolution, character, role, and consequences of racialised welfare discourse... Read more

1. Policies, practices and discourses of welfare racism

Fabio Perocco

2. Institutional Racism and Discrimination Against Migrants: A Political Stake at the Heart of the Belgian Social Compromise 

Nouria Ouali

3. Dismantling Welfare through Anti-Communism and White Nationalism in the United States 

Justin Akers Chacón

4. Welfare policy discourse in Austria – where racism and classism meet and intersect

Andreas Schadauer

5. The impossibility of social inclusion: the ethno-racist welfare discourse in Sweden

Diana Mulinari and Anders Neergaard

6. Presenting Non-European Migrants and Refugees as a Challenge to the Welfare State: The Racialized Welfare State Discourse in Norway 

Meltem Yilmaz Sener

7. Beyond welfare racism rhetoric. Exclusionary metamessages at the implementation level

Alèxia Rué and Olga Jubany 

8. The Japanese social welfare as a driver of racist discourses 

Nicola Costalunga

9. “Unmasking the business of hospitality”. The normalization of welfare racism by the Italian radical right

Dario Lucchesi

10. The Ukrainian invasion: Welfare populism in Gyurcsány Ferenc’s Facebook posts during the 2018 electoral campaign

Petra Andits

11. Welfare racism in a society of structural crisis

Fabio Perocco

Biography

Fabio Perocco is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Venice and Editor-in-Chief of Inequalities: Journal of Critical Inequality Studies.

Welfare Racism: The Discursive Dimension, a collection edited by Fabio Perocco, provides a powerful analytical entry point into [the problem of coded language in which public policies are discussed]. [It] explicitly foregrounds racism as a structural component of policy-making processes, that can no longer be ignored by those who study welfare and social policy.” - Giulio Bertoluzza, Race & Class