ABSTRACT
In recent decades some of the most widespread social policies on the planet, and those most commonly recommended by multilateral organisations, are the so-called conditional transfers of income. Many countries in Asia, Europe, Africa, Latin America and even the United States transfer cash and/or goods to a considerable number of their citizens as compensation for their impoverished situation. In Latin America alone, in 2013 there were more than 137,000,000 people who received a conditional transfer of money. The chief goal of this chapter is to highlight the colonising effect of social policies by constructing a set of sensations and emotions as part of a politics of sensibility. Through this mechanism of compensation, developed in numerous countries spread across the planet, is constituted the same “sensibility of the poor”. In so doing, we have pursued the following argumentative scheme: a synthesis of the connections between social policies, sensibilities and coloniality is developed, a means through which the social conditional cash transfer operates in different continents, in order to review the way in which states today decide to mitigate the situations of poverty, and redirect the conflict of what can be called the “colonially desired sensibility”.
