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Paper short abstract

Solidarity based on locally rooted activism that addresses people’s needs, as seen in two case studies in Catalonia, illustrates how sharing resources without asking for ideological alignment or organizing open mutual aid assemblies can make it possible to connect different people in struggle.

Paper long abstract

How does an anarchist bookshop become frequented by Filipino nuns, an association of Moroccan women or a communist youth organization? How can the left in a medium-sized city overcome historical ideological divides and start organizing together with migrant communities? This paper draws on two case studies in Catalonia to examine the building of alliances and solidarity based on locally rooted activism that addresses people’s everyday needs. Although being two distinct organizing experiences, both cases help illuminate ways of bridging people and struggles.

The aforementioned bookshop is run as a “rearguard organization” in a predominantly migrant neighborhood, providing resources for people organizing whether a protest, a concert or a meal for a hundred people. There is a specific practice of generosity, and of not asking for ideological alignment, that makes it possible for “unlikely alliances” to happen, as one of its members put it.

The second case study is a network of different organizations that started from a housing group and is now composed by more collectives addressing people’s basic needs and rights, mainly made up of migrant people. While a lot of non-migrant activists in the city used to organize around their political identities, the network’s organizations’ grounding on everyday problems has made it possible to overcome divides, and to become a stronger political actor.

Without neglecting the role of ideology and acknowledging the existence (and also importance) of political differences, the paper explores concrete practices of solidarity to sketch useful strategies for building “unlikely alliances” in different contexts.

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Drawing on ethnography at the Western Balkan-EU border, I discuss border solidarity forged at the moment of engagement across difference. I argue for “solidarity because of everything”—utilizing asymmetries and contradictions to form a reflexive solidarity without romanticizing difference.

Paper long abstract

The everyday materiality of a violent borderzone at the fringes of EUrope constitutes a “contact zone” (Pratt 1992) between different subjectivities, positionalities, and biographies that would not encounter and co-exist otherwise. This is a relational space where different care practices (e.g., humanitarian and solidarity actors) are formed and negotiated daily. These practices are much more salient here since they are organized directly against visible violence and neglect. Care appears as the antidote to violence until it is not; specifically when violence permeates practices of care, since it fails to process the difference that comes with the sociality of the borderzone. Interaction within humanitarianism can become an “incomplete encounter” that fails to touch the biographies, either by flattening the situatedness of human experience or de-historicizing difference.

Based on my ethnographic research at the so-called Western Balkan-EU border between 2022 and 2025, during which I was positioned at the very cracks of different care practices alongside five different humanitarian groups, I discuss border solidarity through an ethnography of border encounter(s). I frame this as a counter-practice that is forged precisely at the moment of engagement across difference, contingent upon remaining open to the contradictions the encountered brings. I ask whether we can even speak of border solidarity prior to difference and contradiction? Therefore, I argue not only for a “solidarity despite everything” for the sake of political responsibility, but also for a “solidarity because of everything”—utilizing the asymmetries, contradictions, and cleavages through which we can form a reflexive solidarity without romanticizing difference.

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Based on activist ethnography with refugee solidarity groups, this paper shows how activists struggle to keep solidarity political as their work slips toward humanitarian care. It argues that the politics of solidarity lies in lived, affective experience, not practices alone.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores how political activists navigate the shifting boundaries between practicing political solidarity and their concerns of slipping into more paternalistic modes of action, especially charity, humanitarian work, or social work. Drawing on long-term activist ethnography (2015–2020) with anti-border and anti-deportation activists in Germany and Slovenia, I examine these dynamics in situations where activists organised with asylum-seekers during and after the so-called European “refugee crisis.”

I am interested in how activists continuously cultivated their political ideals in order to engage in collective political struggle with asylum-seekers by organising direct actions, self-organised assemblies, and various solidarity events. I show that despite these efforts, activists repeatedly encountered lived realities that pulled their engagement into monotonous, frustrating, and time-consuming forms of humanitarian work. My core argument is that the political quality of solidarity did not reside in the practices as such, but in the ways activists experienced their work as political.

The paper argues that solidarity and political engagement should not be analysed only through practices, discourses, infrastructures, or emotions alone. Rather, attention to embodied and affective dynamics is crucial to understanding how actors sustain a sense of political meaning in situations that blur the line between solidarity and care. In doing so, the paper contributes both to social movement scholarship, which remains comparatively underdeveloped in its engagement with affect theory, and to debates on the shifting relations between solidarity and charity, which are often framed as moral opposites, yet ethnographically revealed as entangled and situationally blurred modes of practice.

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Drawing upon research conducted in the Polish town of Przemyśl during the refugee crisis that followed the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, the paper discusses practices of self-organized, non-institutionalized volunteer aid and how discourses of solidarity intersect with other moral discourses.

Paper long abstract

Solidarity represents a central dimension of cultural, institutional and interactional life in modern societies. Yet how practices of solidarity can simultaneously be expressions of different moral discourses remains largely unexplored. Drawing upon research conducted in the Polish border town of Przemyśl in the context of the refugee crisis that followed Russia's attack on Ukraine, the paper discusses practices of self-organized, non-institutionalized volunteer aid and the different meanings attached to them. It addresses the issue of how solidarity with Ukrainian refugees became possible in a context, such as southeastern Poland, within which past Polish-Ukrainian conflict is still vividly 'remembered'. The paper illustrates the contradictions with which the idea of solidarity is rife: on the one hand, it is expressed by remarks such as 'We help them, but we do not like them'; on the other hand, the conflict in Ukraine and the subsequent inflow of refugees had the effect of generating, among Polish volunteers living in the area, a sense of affective solidarity with Ukrainians in opposition to a common Russian 'enemy', and particularly a populist sense of distinction between 'us' as 'ordinary' individual volunteers and foreign NGOs. The paper pursues the argument that while the rise of non-institutionalized volunteer aid at a massive scale has signaled a change in the nature of humanitarianism, it has also shown that to understand how solidarity becomes possible we need to explore how it intersects with other moral discourses, of which populism is one of the most powerful.

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Based on ethnographic research on volunteer programs in Swiss alpine farming, this paper explores how fragile, affective forms of solidarity emerge in everyday encounters between urban volunteers and mountain farmers, despite asymmetries, ambivalence, and the absence of collective consensus.

Paper long abstract

Mountain farmers in Switzerland face difficult conditions due to terrain constraints, climate change, labour shortages, overwork, and economic pressures. Both longstanding and more recent initiatives supported by civil society and public institutions provide volunteer labour – mostly from urban backgrounds – to assist farmers in their daily work.

This paper draws on a four-year ethnographic project in four non-monetary aid programs supporting mountain farmers in the Swiss Alps, bringing together distinct social worlds and positionalities. While volunteers and farmers rarely share political horizons, their repeated interactions generate localized forms of collective action grounded in agricultural work. We interrogate what makes such solidarity possible across these differences, where neither common cause nor explicit political commitment serves as the basis for coming together – what we conceptualise as counterintuitive solidarity.

Foregrounding the affective dimensions of these exchanges, the paper traces how care manifests through bodily exhaustion in shared labour, how sympathy becomes entangled with moral hierarchies around “proper” farming practices, and how gratitude coexists with subtle forms of dependence. These encounters also involve miscommunication, unmet expectations, and moments of tensions despite intentions of mutual support. Rather than forming a cohesive collective or social movement, they generate what we describe as solidarity without consensus: fragmented, situational, and often ambivalent commitments that nonetheless sustain mutual engagement.

By focusing on these non-ideal, everyday solidaristic practices “despite everything”, the paper contributes to rethinking solidarity not as a universal moral ideal, but as a relational, affective, and situated practice through which urban-rural relations in Switzerland are renegotiated.

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Our paper aims to understand the various strategies of civic solidarity initiatives from co-optation through maneuvering to resistance, and how these strategies influence their impact in local society and their position in the wider social and political environment.

Paper long abstract

The background for this paper is our research on transformative solidarity, which uses interviews and ethnographic methods to explore civic solidarity across six municipalities in Hungary. In this paper, we will focus on civic groups that operate educational programs outside of state schools to address the disadvantages faced by children from deprived backgrounds, most of whom are Roma. We will first examine the operation and impact of tutoring centres (in Hungarian: tanoda) from the perspective of how they navigate a space largely defined by state-controlled resources. The tanodas are professional civil organizations, most of whose founders and members are non-Roma, and, in rare cases, Roma and non-Roma together. Since the target group consists largely of Roma families and their children, another key element is their relationship with institutions of ethnic representation and self-government. Understanding the variations in civic and ethnic solidarity relations is the second goal of our paper. The third type of relationships to be examined are horizontal relationships through which the civic tutoring centres are included into local society on the one hand and into a trans-local network of civic and professional organizations on the other. The interaction among the three types of relationships (toward the state, toward ethnic peers, and toward civil society) is the final question of the study, which we would like to answer from the perspective of the sustainability and impact of solidarity on the one hand and the shrinking civil space in autocracies on the other.

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Drawing on ethnography with British Kashmiri/Pakistani activists, the paper traces the work of ethical feelings in transnational activism for Kashmir. It offers insights into the conflicting and transformative potential of political solidarity and entangled nationalist and Islamic identity politics.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the work of ‘passion’ in transnational activism for Kashmir and the right to self-determination for Kashmiris. Drawing on insights from my ethnographic research with British Kashmiri/Pakistani activists, I examine the transformative and conflicting potential of solidarity and entangled nationalist and Islamic identity politics. I conclude my paper by outlining a theory of political solidarity as affective-ethical striving for a shared narrative of bridgeable differences.

Rather than assuming a ‘common cause’ of solidarity movements (see Scholz 2008), I propose the lens of emotion (Ahmed 2005) to examine how solidarity feels – not only as a passive experience or visceral intensity, but also as an active, yet vulnerable, engagement with the world, and how to act well despite contradictions and radical differences.

I contend that emotions reveal what matters to people (Lutz 2017), and that this ‘mattering’ can point us towards the ethical striving of a person (Kuan 2023). While ethical feelings, including emotions of ‘passion’, navigate power disparities and bridge differences between oppressed people and privileged activists, they also reproduce hierarchies and forms of marginalisation. In the case of the Jammu and Kashmir region, disputed by powerful nation-states, claiming solidarity with Kashmir is contested, as it can be used to promote mutually exclusive political aspirations, including independence for Kashmir, or accession to Pakistan or India. Theorising solidarity as feeling allows us to explore (self-)transformative and repressive moments of ethical striving, bridging, but also reifying, differences, and recognising certain struggles and their (post-)colonial histories of oppression, while ignoring others.

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This paper examines how Japanese youth activists practises solidarity with Palestine in contexts where such engagement is socially unexpected. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Kyoto, it explores how solidarity emerges through persistence, and everyday negotiation across difference.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how solidarity is practised in contexts where political alignment is neither obvious nor socially encouraged, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Kyoto. Following activists who have organised demonstrations, vigils, and digital campaigns in solidarity with Palestine which is an engagement that sits uneasily within the political restraint and civic harmony of Japan.

Rather than approaching solidarity as a shared ideological position, the paper focuses on how it is produced through everyday practices that are tentative, affectively charged, and uncomfortable. Activists describe their participation not in terms of certainty but through feelings of hesitation, responsibility, and the difficulty of remaining visible in public and online spaces. Solidarity is sustained through constant repetition, showing up, reposting, standing together despite doubts about effectiveness and social reception.

The paper foregrounds the affective labour involved in these practices, tracing how care, fatigue, anxiety, and moral unease circulate within the movement. Digital platforms play a central role, not simply as tools for mobilisation but as spaces where memories, images, and emotions are archived, contested, and reworked. These digital traces intersect with embodied actions in the city, blurring boundaries between online and offline activism and between solidarity and charity.

By focusing on these lived dynamics, the paper contributes to discussions of “counterintuitive solidarity” by showing how collective action can emerge despite political distance, unequal exposure to risk, and limited expectations of success. Solidarity appears not as a seamless moral stance but as a fragile, negotiated practice rooted in affect, presence, and ongoing relational work.

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This paper examines private hosting of Ukrainian refugees in Poland as a fragile, negotiated form of solidarity sustained despite unequal dependencies, moral tensions, and everyday domestic frictions within host–refugee relations.

Paper long abstract

Following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Poland emerged as a primary destination for refugees, resulting in a significant display of social solidarity. Among large-scale humanitarian responses, private hosting became a prevalent and intimate form of support, with over 500,000 Ukrainians accommodated in Polish households. Although widely celebrated, this support developed within relationships characterized by legal and economic inequalities, cultural hierarchies, and longstanding geopolitical imaginaries between Poles and Ukrainians.

Based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork conducted since 2024 in western Poland, this paper examines host-refugee relations as sites where solidarity is enacted through everyday domestic routines. Instead of focusing solely on public discourse, the analysis investigates how care, gratitude, irritation, restraint, and mutual expectations are negotiated within shared households. It further explores how both hosts and refugees engage in continuous emotional and moral labour to sustain relationships that are supportive yet asymmetrical.

This paper theorizes solidarity not as a fixed ethical stance but as a fragile social achievement, produced through caregiving, boundary-making, and conflict avoidance. These relationships persist not due to the elimination of inequalities, but because such inequalities are managed or reconfigured through intimate interactions. Private homes therefore serve as infrastructures of solidarity, translating geopolitical conflicts into everyday routines of cohabitation and mutual adjustment.

By foregrounding the relational and affective dimensions of hosting, this paper contributes to debates on solidarity that move beyond activism and institutional humanitarianism. The analysis demonstrates how care, paternalism, and moral obligation become intertwined in domestic encounters across significant differences in positionality.

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This paper examines the messy work of forging collective action within the queue at the Saint‑Denis prefecture in La Réunion. Based on eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork, it analyzes how modest acts of mutual aid appear in a setting normally understood as purely bureaucratic. Each weekday, hundreds of migrants gather to process residence permits, facing waiting times that create a debilitating state of liminality.

Within this pressure cooker, migrants negotiate shade, reserve places, and exchange information. These routine gestures form a fragile solidarity that emerges "despite everything." The paper centers on a specific event—a woman collapsing at the gate—to illustrate the affective complexity of this solidarity. The incident triggers a confrontation with guards and offers of help, yet simultaneously elicits suspicion among peers regarding the authenticity of the collapse.

The study reconceptualizes the queue as a laboratory for collective action, arguing that solidarity here is situational and intertwined with empathy, indifference, and paternalism. Rather than a universalist ideal, the paper demonstrates that solidarity in the queue is a survival mechanism constrained by institutional opacity. These findings suggest that the physical and emotional toll of administrative waiting creates a specific "conditions of possibility" for collective action, where support and suspicion are inextricably linked.

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The case study shows how Ukrainian refugees find unexpected allies in Russian anti-war migrants. Driven by moral imperatives rather than duty, their expression of solidarity fills gaps left by failing state structures and political shifts, providing vital financial and medical aid.

Paper long abstract

Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine triggered a mass migration to Georgia, a country well-recognized in the Russian-speaking world. Despite efforts undertaken by the Georgian state, non-governmental organisations and individuals, it is challenging to ensure comprehensive support to all refugees, especially those with specific needs. One of the most vulnerable groups of refugees is the elderly and the chronically ill, who have restricted access to the public healthcare system and medication, and do not possess significant financial resources. Their needs were fulfilled primarily by non-governmental projects financed by USAID – United States Agency for International Development.

One of the most talked-about decisions of Donald Trump’s cabinet was cutting funds aimed at international aid. Sudden and significant restrictions on financial support were poignant for non-governmental and civil society organisations, including those operating in Georgia. Plenty of institutions were forced to restrict or suspend their activities. Additionally, the Georgian parliament, closely aligned with the Kremlin, suspended negotiations about Georgia’s accession to the European Union, which caused mass protests in Tbilisi. These changes in political circumstances have made the implementation of development aid in Georgia almost impossible.

In this context, Ukrainian refugees have found unexpected allies in Russian anti-war migrants, who have organized to provide financial and medical assistance. This paper examines practices of solidarity forged across citizenship lines and power asymmetries. The case study demonstrates how counterintuitive solidarity is filling the gaps left by failing state structures and shifting international priorities.