When Machiavelli meets social Work: cross-border child protection and disability rights - shifting from marketisation of social care to post neoliberalism and re-conquest of public responsibility.

Against the background of neoliberal and globally organized social work, the presentation discusses the very first results of the international research project on cross-border child protection and disability rights in transnational settings (EUR&QUA). According to international Conventions (UNCRC, 1990; UNCRPD, 2006), States parties shall ensure the full realization of all human rights and fundamental freedoms for all children. Such imperatives seem to contradict neoliberal social policy, which is primarily oriented towards marketisation, austerity, and individualisation of social problems (Cummins, 2018). Actually, our research suggests that crossing borders often means breaking off helping relations and absence of professional exchange between care providers. A return to the original life context desired by the clients seems unfeasible. Therefore, we plead for social workers to acquire global, and cross-border competences in this field. Social work needs Machiavellian competences (Kusiak, 2018), which consist of critically illuminating a dominant ideology, conducting research, and acquiring strategic knowledge.