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Paper short abstract

This paper brings together two activist-researchers’ perspectives from Europe and Senegal to examine how transnational no-border networks enact co-resistance and decolonial solidarity while negotiating persistent, intersectional power asymmetries.

Paper long abstract

This paper brings together two activist-researchers’ perspectives: one rooted in Dakar, Senegal, active in transnational no-border resistance including the Transborder Caravan in France, and one based in Salzburg, Austria, whose fieldwork extends to Dakar. Drawing on overlapping yet differently situated experiences, we rethink solidarity in struggles against the European Union’s racialised migration governance. Our collaboration is based on shared, long-term activism and divergent positionalities, shaped by race, gender, and institutional privilege. We place these differences at the centre of the analysis, treating positionality as a crucial lens through which tensions and contradictions of transnational solidarity become visible.

Theoretically, we ground the paper in decolonial thought and Black feminisms, which foreground the persistence of coloniality in knowledge and power structures and show how embodied, intersectional experiences of oppression generate different forms of resistance (Grosfoguel 2007; Mohanty 2011; Olufemi 2020). Critical Whiteness Studies further illuminates how ‘whiteness’ functions as context-specific, structuring force, even within anti-racist no-border networks (DiAngelo 2021). We argue that friendship operates as political practice, enabling co-resistance and extending debates on decolonial solidarity (Oghalai & Varela 2023).

Empirically, our analysis builds on engaged ethnography within no-border networks across Europe and Senegal. We show how no-border activism in Europe is often sustained through feminised, volunteer-based infrastructures, whereas in Dakar, activist practices are shaped by different gendered configurations, lived migration experiences, and colonial continuities, producing distinct forms of organising. Overall, our findings reveal how transnational no-border networks enact co-resistance and decolonial solidarity while negotiating persistent power asymmetries.