Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

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.