The social policies deployed by the state in working-class neighborhoods have as much to do with the ties and feelings of precarious citizens as with their social and economic situations. Instead of improving access to rights, they seek to reform the relationships and emotions that bind residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods to one another. As a result, they juxtapose legal and social definitions of citizenship with a moralized vision of this status, and profoundly reshape the ways in which social work professionals intervene, their relationship with precarious populations, and what these populations can expect from the state. This is the starting point for the research presented in this thematic dossier, which examines social workers' attempts to solve social problems by transforming the quantity, quality and configuration of the relationships that bind precarious individuals to each other, and to state agents and institutions - in other words, to govern through ties.