This article investigates how national policy frameworks in Canada, Denmark, Norway, and Uruguay conceptualise transgender inclusion, justice, and state responsibility. Through a comparative documentary analysis of national action plans, it explores tensions between legal recognition and structural justice in countries regarded as global leaders in transgender rights. The findings indicate that advanced legal recognition can coexist with persistent inequality, discrimination, and exclusion. Canada, Denmark, and Norway place greater emphasis on recognition, protection, and institutional inclusion, whereas Uruguay integrates these approaches with a greater focus on historically situated responsibility, structural transformation, and reparative commitments. The article introduces the concept of the legal vanguard paradox to elucidate these tensions.
Palliative care policies struggle with the challenges of social diversity in modern democracies. These policies privilege aspirations toward a ‘good death’ – a death characterized by awareness, preparation, and a desire for healthcare management of prolonged suffering. However, ‘good death’ as a cultural ideal is both a medically misleading and socially unrepresentative concept. As a policy ideal, good death denies: (1) different styles of dying, and (2) its opposite and contiguous social reality – the diverse lifestyle perceptions and experiences of the ‘good life’. This review argues that the challenge and task for inclusive democracies are to create health and social care policies that reflect the characteristic pluralism of their populations, even at the end-of-life itself.
The article introduces the concept of aspirational justice as a critical lens for analysing how social policies shape people's capability to imagine and pursue desirable futures. We conceptualise aspirational justice through three interdependent dimensions – distributive, procedural and epistemic justice – and develop a multi-layered framework for its analysis. Drawing on qualitative research on language and training policies for migrant women in Paris, we advance two main results. First, the capability-enhancing potential of social programmes must be analysed in light of institutional interdependencies. While migrants’ agency is sustained through third-sector organisations, state institutions retain distributive and regulatory powers that shape what futures can be envisioned. Second, aspirational justice cannot be reduced to institutional arrangements alone, it ultimately unfolds within individuals’ lived experience. For migrant women, institutional resources and constraints intersect with gendered care responsibilities and racialised labour-market stratification, narrowing both the range of futures they can envisage and their sense of entitlement to pursue them.
This article examines how activists in the Islamophobia Research Collective in Kerala transform their lived experiences of Islamophobia into systematic documentation, knowledge production, and collective action. Situated within a political landscape reshaped by Hindutva, where Muslims encounter heightened surveillance and constraints on political agency within enduring structural hierarchies, the article traces the Islamophobia Research Collective's emergence from earlier activist networks and the development of an analytical framework centred on direct and indirect Islamophobia. It analyses the everyday practices that sustain this work, including verifying hate speech, documenting Islamophobic incidents, and producing monthly and annual reports, and evaluates their impact both internally on activist subjectivities and externally on public discourse. The analysis shows how locally grounded, community-based activism generates forms of public knowledge, sustains solidarities, and strengthens resistance to Islamophobia in contemporary India.
This article introduces 'symbolic resilience' to explain how governments maintain the appearance of control during crises while limiting culpability. Using 44 interviews with senior prison policymakers and stakeholders, the article analyses prison governance in England and Wales during the COVID-19 pandemic. Results show that key decisions - adoption of a highly centralised 'gold command' structure, limited early release, and prioritisation of infection metrics - formed a governing strategy that narrowed the criteria through which policy success was evaluated while sustaining claims of effective crisis management. Combining neo-statecraft with insights from agnotology (organised production and management of 'not knowing'), the analysis demonstrates how evidentiary practices and restricted participation in decision-making reduced ministers' exposure to blame while shifting responsibility onto senior officials. Symbolic resilience provides a framework for understanding how crisis governance narrows evaluative criteria of policy success, thereby enabling governments seemingly to maintain effective control while welfare harms become institutionally marginalised within official policy evaluation.
