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Paper short abstract

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.