Predatory Welfare by Erin Torkelson

Drawing on seven years of immersive fieldwork in South Africa — from grant payment queues and grocery stores to Parliament and the Constitutional Court — Torkelson shows how a flagship antipoverty programme became entangled with predatory finance. Instead of offering relief, cash transfers are often leveraged bylenders as collateral, pulling recipients, especially Black women, into cycles of debt. The very survival strategies people are pushed into are later framed as personal failings rather than the result of long-standing structural inequality. In the process, individuals are racialised as inadequate managers of money and marked as risky financial subjects.

Blending analysis with storytelling, Predatory Welfare offers a bold rethinking of welfare, development and racial inequality. It argues that social grants cannot be understood as neutral or purely benevolent and that economic justice requires far more than cash alone. Predatory Welfare asks readers to reconsider what real economic justice looks like — and what it will take to achieve it