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Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnography and interviews, we propose the concept of 'care-driven non-conflictual activism' to explain how low-visibility cooperation in the form of mutual help, individual civic acts and bridge-building talk sustains civic life under polarisation and beyond protest in Poland.

Paper long abstract

In a polarised political environment, cooperation is often assumed to belong either to ‘civil society’ as an unproblematic good or to ‘activism’ as collective contention. Drawing on ethnographic observations (2015–2024) and two-wave interviews/focus groups in Poland and among Polish migrants (2017–2021), this paper reframes cooperation as a low-visibility civic repertoire sustained through ordinary relationships rather than organisations or protest events. We analyse three cooperative practices that respondents frequently describe as ‘just normal’: (1) neighbourhood mutual help (shopping, dog-walking, homework support) intensified during COVID-19; (2) single-handed problem-solving that substitutes for distrusted institutions (care work, small-scale environmental repair, ad hoc assistance to vulnerable strangers); and (3) conversational cooperation—patient face-to-face work of finding common ground and persuading across ideological difference. Conceptually, we propose a concept of "care-driven non-conflictual activism": politically consequential cooperation that avoids overt antagonism, is anchored in relational durability, and circulates as ‘social energy’ across life courses and generations. The argument bridges classic anthropological accounts of reciprocity and moral obligation with recent debates on everyday politics and civic agency, showing how cooperative acts build social infrastructures that can outlast protest cycles. Empirically, this case demonstrates why cooperation persists under mistrust, as a practical mode of inhabiting polarised social worlds. Bringing these mundane cooperations into view invites a redefinition of political participation in contemporary Europe, one attentive to care, endurance, and relational work rather than confrontation alone.