Misery of Position and the Crisis of Possibility. New Forms of Poverty in Contemporary Democracies

Marginality emerges as a multidimensional phenomenon that cannot be reduced solely to deprivations linked to the redistributive sphere, but is instead inter-twined with a dense network of social issues, including processes of social disintegra-tion, vulnerability, relational exclusion, and the erosion of solidarity. It is within this context that the concept of new urban poverty takes shape. The weakening of collec-tive protection dispositifs, the restructuring of labour markets, and the growing indi-vidualization of risk have contributed to the formation of an intermediate social space, situated between inclusion and exclusion, in which heterogeneous forms of economic, social, and relational fragility accumulate. These configurations constitute the struc-tural outcome of transformations induced by neoliberal capitalism. This contribution is situated within an operational theoretical framework that integrates the analysis of positional and relational poverty with the study of institutional processes involved in the production of marginality. Its aim is to analyze the expansion and complexity of new forms of poverty through a critical and conceptual re-reading of selected catego-ries and models useful for interpreting these dynamics.