Postcolonial perspectives on the welfare state

This paper focuses on law and regulations within loopholes of exception; that is, sovereign power in the dialectics between law and moral disorder in the realm of a liberal, democratic welfare state. The analysis is based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork in the largest suburban immigrant neighborhood in Denmark, Gellerupparken. The case focuses on the local implications of power that unfold in spatial and social political regulations on immigrant families. I argue that the Danish welfare state uses excessive power to “conquest” the moral order of marginal communities while enhancing and imbuing particular democratic standards to society at large. That is, in order to impose certain democratic values, the state makes exceptions from its own democratic rights and rules.