While previous research has highlighted the significant role of language in conditioning migrants’ access to key institutions of the welfare state, the question of how individual migrants experience linguistic disadvantage has been less in focus. Drawing on a relational approach, the article moves beyond the idea of language barriers as a static structure of (in)equality or a matter of individual shortcomings. It demonstrates how language policies and language ideologies, and their entanglements with more general trends in welfare policies and ideologies, shape migrants’ relational experiences with the welfare states and their representatives, and what are the implications of such interactions – or the lack of interaction. Empirically, it builds on qualitative data collected in Belgium and Finland, showing how language barriers and discrimination can result in Kafkaesque administrative processes that produce both material and affective hardship for migrants in these national contexts.

Existing scholarship of China’s legal institutions has primarily focusedon individual institutions, such as the court, the police, or the legalprofession. This article proposes a relational approach to the study ofpolitical-legal institutions in China. To understand the order and exercise ofpower by various political-legal institutions, the relational approachemphasizes the spatial positions of actors or institutions (the police, courts,lawyers, etc.) within the broader political-legal system and their mutualinteractions. We suggest that the changing ideas of the Chinese leadership aboutthe role of law as an instrument of governance have shaped the relations betweenvarious legal and political institutions. The interactions of thesepolitical-legal institutions (e.g. the “iron triangle” of thepolice, the court and the procuracy) further reveal the dynamics of powerrelations at work.