This book explores the transformation of contemporary social welfare into what the author terms “surveillant care”—a hybrid system that merges protection with control, requiring recipients to surrender privacy and autonomy as prerequisites for assistance. Drawing on Foucauldian governmentality and critical social theory, the study examines how care has evolved from a citizenship right into a conditional service requiring extensive documentation and behavioural compliance.

The book traces the historical shift from universal welfare provision to eligibility-based systems that transform citizens into managed cases. It analyses how visibility, documentation, and assessment function as interconnected technologies of power that reshape both social need and subjectivity. The work investigates how recipients must undergo “social self-annihilation” to access services, while exploring alternative forms of resistance through silence, invisibility, and informal care networks.

Through innovative theoretical analysis, the book contributes to international debates on welfare reform, neoliberal governance, and biopolitical management of vulnerability. It addresses scholars in sociology, political science, social policy, and critical theory, while offering insights relevant to practitioners and policymakers.

Stavros Pantazopoulos is Assistant Professor of Social Transformation and Social Policy at the Department of Sociology, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece. He has published extensively on social policy, demographic change, and welfare regimes, highlighting the links between demographic shifts, welfare institutions, and social change.