Civic Solidarity Research Articles

Solidarity Work as Political Action: Advocating for Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the USA

AbstractVolunteers in the USA have long provided support for refugees being resettled through the UNHCR-based refugee resettlement program, as well as for asylum seekers and other undocumented migrants through local community or faith-based organizations. Individual and collective acts of solidarity on behalf of those seeking sanctuary, asylum seekers, and refugees have recently increased, reflecting public reaction to increasingly restrictive US immigration policies. Based on interviews with community volunteers and leaders, we analyse this activism in terms of whether it constitutes social solidarity, civic solidarity, and/or political solidarity. We find this solidarity action on behalf of forced migrants has been relatively ‘low-risk’ compared to other countries, where activists have faced imprisonment by engaging in ‘high-risk’ solidarity action. In the USA, these efforts have emphasized civic and social solidarity, with limited political solidarity actions even when volunteers have been confronted by explicitly racist and exclusionary policies. In addition, this response has yet to develop into a broader political movement in support of refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants.

Moral solidarity as a news value: Rendering marginalized communities and enduring social injustice newsworthy

Solidarity is a longstanding, though seldom acknowledged, news value in coverage of marginalized communities. As a principled commitment to social justice, solidarity as a news value helps account for news stories that deviate from elite focus and individualistic framing, which have been regularly critiqued in scholarship on dominant news values. This article contributes a grounded framework for locating and analyzing types of solidarity that operate as news values in reporting on marginalized communities. Through qualitative textual analysis of articles published as part of the 2016 San Francisco Homeless Project, this study finds that news values of intragroup solidarity, civic solidarity, political solidarity, and moral solidarity unevenly arise in coverage of local homelessness, and each have implications for whose perspectives are rendered newsworthy. The majority of stories that exhibit solidarity as a news value are aligned with either civic solidarity or political solidarity, which means they maintain focus on the city and critique the structure of the housing market but do not necessarily move journalists toward more inclusive sourcing of people experiencing homelessness. In contrast, intragroup solidarity stories offer a grounded narrative of “we take care of us,” and moral solidarity stories amplify a narrative of “let us live – here’s what we need from you.” These stories represent the perspectives of people subjected to enduring social injustice. Moral solidarity offers the strongest value for journalism that represents marginalized communities because it renders people whose dignity is denigrated by current systemic arrangements newsworthy and amplifies their urgent appeals for concrete changes.

Enregistering mask-wearing in the time of a public health crisis

AbstractThis study explores how during the initial outbreak of COVID-19 in Taiwan, mask-wearing emerged as a semiotic register in health communication. Focusing on enregisterment (Agha 2007), I analyze interactional recordings of press conferences by the Taiwanese government, Chinese language lessons offered to international students, and conversations at a convenience store between an Australian student and her Taiwanese friend. The analysis reveals information production and reception on three social scales: public health policies, institutionalized health instruction, and interpersonal-care practices. On each scale, masking is enregistered as a semiotic sign associated with particular social actions, actors, and relations. This enregisterment transpires through an orchestration of verbal and non-verbal resources, conveying ideologies about invisible viruses in everyday life. While inconsistencies exist across scales, masking is consistently overlaid with civic solidarity and moral responsibility. In times of crisis, mask-wearing is an issue of public health and a process of typifying behaviors, identities, and relationships. (COVID-19, enregisterment, scale)*

Veganism as political solidarity: Beyond ‘ethical veganism’

Veganism as political solidarity: Beyond ‘ethical veganism’

Лібертаріанство у політико-правовому просторі національної та громадянської ідентичності

Розглянуто недосліджену проблему впливу ідеології лібертаріанства на формування національної та громадянської свідомості. Доведено, що ідеологія лібертаріанства є руйнівною політичною технологією, спричиняє загрози процесам державотворення в Україні і є ідеологією викликів національній та громадянській ідентичності. Визначено, що ідеологія має визначальний вплив на формування державної політики, державного курсу забезпечення національної і громадської єдності Української держави.

Civic solidarity of future teachers as a relevance of the current educational process in Ukraine

Civic solidarity of future teachers as a relevance of the current educational process in Ukraine

Civiс solidarity in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic will remain in history as one of the most significant and tragic events that took place in 2020-2021. The threat of rapid distribution of coronavirus demanded from state bodies of various countries of decisive actions. These actions were aimed at ensuring the safety of their population, as well as to prevent mass infection of the population. The need to urgently mobilize people to combat the epidemiological threat made urgent work to build the appropriate forms of civil solidarity. The Russian Federation also took part in this process. However, the urgent need to coordinate this process in the shortest possible time inevitably led to increased load on the integration infrastructure of Russian society. As a result of such a load, this integration structure and its inherent features became more understandable. In this process, it was also possible to identify those problems that are usually difficult to diagnose in a society in a state of balance. This article presents the results of a sociological study devoted to the analysis of the civil solidarity of residents of St Petersburg in the face of the threat of the spread of pandemia COVID-19. The work presents a methodological construct based on the works of classics of sociology. This construct made it possible to analyze the specifics of the integration of Petersburgers into those relations of civic solidarity that make it possible to counteract the risks of coronavirus spread. The article describes the logic of development and the structure of civic solidarity in the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic. The article also analyzed by citizens the perception of the threat of coronavirus distribution as a factor in public life and its integration significance in the context of the formation of a particular joint environment. The result of the study was a description of the most common solidarization practices aimed at counteracting the pandemic, and the disclosure of the main factors that affect the civil behavior of the city’s inhabitants.

Solidarity, covid-19 and a lever without fulcrum.

Herd, or collective, immunity has been a permanent reference all along the Covid-19 pandemic, often misunderstood as a technical synonym of "epidemic end" once a threshold value of immunized people is reached. The pandemic development has shown that with current variants transmissibility and current vaccines such critical threshold cannot be reached. An effective collective immunity is however attainable, the stronger the higher the population proportion of vaccinated people. This immunity, a powerful brake on the epidemic progression, depends on the degree of solidarity that society enacts as a whole via containment measures (physical distancing, masks) and vaccination. A clear solidarity deficit is manifest within countries in the form of repeatedly delayed adoption of correct interventions against the epidemic and between countries with the heavy shortage of vaccines in countries with low and middle-low income. The lever of counter epidemic actions by governments and health authorities cannot operate without the support of a fulcrum of civic solidarity: it depends only on citizens, individually and collectively, to build it small stone upon stone.

Who decides? Urban councils and consensus in the late Middle Ages

ABSTRACT The prosaic records of town council meetings are an essential, if problematic, source for historians of late medieval European towns. They are a window on the concerns, fears and ambitions of urban authorities, yet they have proved especially intractable to historians interested in the social history of urban politics. They seem to present a monotonously harmonious picture of civic unity, social solidarity and political unanimity. Looking outside the town hall for evidence of the social divisions and political discord that characterized town life, urban historians have uncovered an unstable world of ‘contentious politics’, in which revolt was only one possible means of dissent. This article argues that historians should return to the town hall and to the council chamber, to reassess the value of town council minutes. Placing the rich, and still relatively little-used, civic archive of the English city of Norwich within a wider European context, it focuses on the meaning and significance of the records of non-attendance at council meetings. It locates official anxieties about non-attendance not within a narrowly legal or institutional framework, but within a contemporary culture of urban citizenship, which was performative and disputatious. The article identifies a form of ‘consensus politics’ that involved – indeed, promoted – conflict.

The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? by Michael J. Sandel

Reviewed by: The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? by Michael J. Sandel Marc F. Plattner (bio) The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? By Michael J. Sandel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. 288 pp. This clever and artfully written book by Harvard political theorist Michael Sandel interweaves sociopolitical analysis with academic-style political theory. It is framed by the now-familiar argument that Brexit and the election of Donald Trump were the products of a populist backlash among the losers of globalization. While deploring the nativism, misogyny, and racism that often accompany populism, Sandel contends that populist resentment is rooted in and justified by the failure of democratic elites. In particular, he blames those elites for promoting an ethos that leads the successful to believe that they deserve their success, thus giving rise to what he labels the “tyranny of merit.” Sandel suggests that this exalting of merit is a relatively new phenomenon—a product of the last four decades, initiated by the free-market policies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. But it is not only conservatives whom he blames for this trend. He harshly criticizes Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Barack Obama for their emphasis on equal opportunity and for their reliance on the “rhetoric of rising” (p. 59) to promise their citizens success if they “work hard and play by the rules” (p. 67). Sandel portrays the immediate post-1945 decades as a halcyon period of civic solidarity. According to his narrative, it is only the past forty years that have brought the triumph of “meritocratic hubris” (an epithet that probably recurs in this volume more often than “rosy-fingered dawn” does in Homer’s Odyssey). The prosperous, having now come [End Page 155] to think that they have earned—and thus deserve—their success, have adopted a condescending attitude toward their poorer fellow citizens. This in turn prompts among the latter resentments that fan the flames of populism. Sandel is right to take seriously the plight of the white working class in advanced democracies. In the United States, manufacturing jobs surely have been lost due to globalization, and working-class whites have been faring poorly in terms of wage gains and a number of other indicators (especially “deaths of despair” due to suicide, drug addiction, and alcoholism). Yet the emergence of populism has been a global phenomenon, afflicting countries such as Poland, Peru, and the Philippines where its rise cannot plausibly be attributed to globalization or the loss of manufacturing jobs. The deep causes of populist dissatisfaction, which no doubt combine economic, sociological, and cultural factors, are not easy to sort out. Moreover, in the United States at least, the disjunction between the post–World War II era and more recent decades is not nearly as sharp as Sandel makes it out to be. Exhibit A in Sandel’s case—the subject with which his book begins and which frequently recurs—is the growing competition for entry into elite colleges. The percentage of applicants turned away from these institutions has indeed been rising, but the high-end college-admissions contest was already intense by the early 1960s. More generally, striving for material success is deeply rooted in the United States, as has long been recognized both in serious literature and in popular culture. It suffices to cite Alexis de Tocqueville’s judgment in the 1830s: “I know of no country . . . where the love of money has taken stronger hold on the affections of men, and where profounder contempt is expressed for the theory of the permanent equality of property.” So why did this longstanding American predisposition suddenly give birth to “meritocratic hubris”? Sandel never really makes this clear. But given the fact that he returns repeatedly to the arena of higher education, the center of his concern seems to be testing and sorting in the schools. He even entitles an entire chapter “Credentialism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice.” Yet while it is true that deaths of despair are much more prevalent among those without college degrees, this does not mean that the intense competition among the children of the upper-middle classes to get into the...

ԲԱԶՄԱՄՇԱԿՈՒԹԱՅՆՈՒԹՅԱՆ ՔԱՂԱՔԱԿԱՆՈՒԹՅԱՆ ԽՆԴԻՐՆԵՐԸ ԵՎՐՈՊԱԿԱՆ ՄԻՈՒԹՅԱՆ ԱՆՋԱՏՈՂԱԿԱՆ ՇԱՐԺՈՒՄՆԵՐԻ ԱԿՏԻՎԱՑՄԱՆ ՀԱՄԱՏԵՔՍՏՈՒՄ/MULTICULTURAL POLICY ISSUES IN THE CONTEXT OF ACTIVITY OF THE EUROPEAN UNION SEPARATIVE MOVEMENTS/ПРОБЛЕМЫ МУЛЬТИКУЛЬТУРНОЙ ПОЛИТИКИ ЕВРОПЕЙСКОГО СОЮЗА В КОНТЕКСТЕ ДЕЯТЕЛЬНОСТИ СЕПАРАТИСТСКИХ ДВИЖЕНИЙ

Considering the nationalist tendencies in the EU, the transformation of European nation-states, the increasing influx of immigrants, the socio-economic issues, it is necessary to identify the impact of the EU's multicultural policies on groups with different cultural norms and customs. The multilayered nature of the topic will provide a more comprehensive view of the issues of overcoming separatist crises. The article identifies the link between separatist demands of subdivisions with different cultural norms, and multicultural policies pursued by the state as a strategic tool for responding adequately to separatist challenges, restoring civic solidarity, and preventing the growth of social conflicts.

On Transversal Solidarity: An Approach to Migration and Multi-Scalar Solidarities

This article develops a conceptualisation of transversal solidarity in relation to migration and migrants. It reflects different ways of practicing, organising and articulating solidarity. We proceed through a conceptualisation of solidarity in terms of ‘transversal solidarity’ relating to three dimensions involved in solidarity practices from below and discuss how to bridge their respective dichotomies: identity and the related in-group and out-group dichotomy; space, in terms of the separation of the local from the national and international; organisation, related to the incompatibility of the social and the institutional. We link this conceptualisation to a typology of solidarity working on three different scales (autonomous solidarity, civic solidarity and institutional solidarity), which reflects these dynamics of solidarity as well as the degree of institutionalisation. We use different examples to illustrate various types of transversal solidarity.

Единство, скрепленное доблестью: участие представителей этнических меньшинств в сражениях за Кубань и Крым (1941–1943)

В статье на основе исследований российских ученых, архивных документов, воспоминаний рассматривается слабо изученная в отечественной историографии проблема участия представителей этнических меньшинств в битвах за Кавказ и Крым в ходе Великой Отечественной войны. В качестве примера автором избраны этнические общности курдов и корейцев. Использованы историко-генетический, историко-биографический и системно-исторический методы. Изучены меры советского командования по формированию национальных воинских подразделений; реконструированы биографии героев войны – корейцев и курдов, участвовавших в освобождении Юга России и получивших боевые награды; прослежена их послевоенная судьба; рассмотрены репрессивные действия советского правительства по отношению к военнослужащим некоторых национальностей. Автор заключает, что представители разных народов СССР, столкнувшись с врагом, проявили стремление к единству и добровольное желание выступить на защиту государства, которое они избрали своей Родиной. The aim of the article is to reconstruct the biographies of participants in the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945), who belonged to ethnic minorities and fought for the liberation of the Caucasus and Crimea from Nazi invaders. As an example, the author selected ethnic communities of Kurds and Koreans. The study was conducted on the basis of research by Russian scholars, archival documents, and memoirs of direct participants in the events. The historical-genetic, historical-biographical and system-historical methods were used. The measures of the Soviet command for the formation of national military units were studied, the biographies of war heroes, Koreans and Kurds who participated in the liberation of the South of Russia and received military awards (including the title Hero of the Soviet Union) were reconstructed. The author describes in detail the military clashes during which these fighters showed military prowess, presents their photographs, and traces their further military path, post-war fate and forms of their memory perpetuation. Quotations from the war veterans’ front-line letters and their relatives’ memoirs are given. The repressive actions of the Soviet government towards the military personnel of certain nationalities, who after the demobilization received the status of “special settlers” and lost their military tickets and award sheets, are also considered. The author emphasizes that the fight against the enemy was a test of strength for the unity of the peoples living in the Caucasus and Crimea. Examples of civic solidarity in the fight against the enemy shown by ethnic minorities in the early days of the war (mass enrollment in volunteers, holding civil rallies) are given. It is noted that representatives of local ethnic communities became the basis of 12 military units that were at the forefront of the defenders of the Caucasus. The paradoxical nature of the situation in which USSR citizens were repressed for various (often far-fetched) reasons is stated; however, during the war they still heroically fought against Nazism with arms in their hands. The author connects the repressions against members of the ethnic minorities with the ethnosocial policy pursued by the Soviet state, as well as the spread of desertion and draft evasion in the North Caucasus and Crimea. It is concluded that representatives of ethnic minorities living in the USSR, faced with the enemy, showed a desire for unity and a voluntary desire to defend the state, which they chose as their homeland.

Trapped in False Antitheses

This paper critically scrutinizes Timothy Snyder’s book The Road toUnfreedom. Russia, Europe, America (The Bodley Head, Vintage, London2018). It claims that the main reason for his failure to present a convincingaccount of the current neo-nationalist and authoritarian turn and outline anadequate intellectual and political response to it is his clinging to an anti-totalitarian framework which he had applied to Eastern Europe in some ofhis previous historical works (Snyder 2003, 2010). The framework reducesthree main ideological alternatives that fought with each other in the lastcentury into two: liberalism was supposedly challenged by totalitarianism.Since Snyder reduces the present crisis to the threat of the return oftotalitarianism, he sees an appropriate response in the revival of the humanand civic solidarity associated with the anti-totalitarian movements of thelast century. The essay outlines an alternative view: it links the present crisisof democracy to the ravaging e!ects of neo-liberal globalization and,accordingly, suggests combining anti-authoritarianism with anti-capitalism– or human and civic solidarity with social solidarity.

Practicing Solidarity: ‘Reconciliation’ and Bosnian Protest Movements

This paper asks whether, and in what sense, civic protests can contribute to some form of ‘reconciliation’. Focusing on the 2014 protests in Bosnia and Herzegovina, it analyses the actions and activities involved in the practice of protesting. In this context, reconciliation can be understood as civic solidarity: a forward-looking commitment to fighting for social justice and against the privileges of political elites. Solidarity is not only built horizontally across social or ethnic groups, but also vertically through opposition to the ruling ethnonationalist elite. Solidarity-building activities such as protests, however, are hindered by an institutional system that crystallises social divisions and dilutes citizens’ efforts.

Criminal legal counterwork of domestic violence in some countries of the European Union

The level of crime associated with domestic violence has been observed in the European Union in recent years. In some countries, for example in France, this is a common problem.The problem of domestic violence is explored in the works of such scientists, as O. Bandurka, A. Blaga, O. Dzhuzha, B. Golovkin, O. Kostenko, R. Perelygina. But the issue of criminal legal counterwork of domestic violence in the countries of the European Union is not researched enough.The experience of criminal legal counterwork of domestic violence in such countries of European Union as the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Poland was researched. It was analyzed criminal laws of Great Britain, France, Germany and Poland, which regulate the counterwork of domestic violence.In our opinion, the positive elements of the system of criminal legal counterwork of domestic violence in the UK is the possibility of prohibiting the contacts of the aggressor with the victim, the failure to admit him to the family home and the possibility of checking the partner on a violent past. In the system of criminal law enforcement of domestic violence in France, it is positive that the crime of marriage or partner is aggravating circumstances for all crimes, the possibility of evicting the offender from home both before and after imprisonment, the criminalization of the incest and the threats of committing a crime against a spouse, a partner who lives with the offender under the civic solidarity agreement. In the system of criminal legal counterwork of domestic violence in Germany, the positive elements are provision for a special norm that establishes criminal liability for theft by relatives or persons living in the same house, criminalization of the incest, the obligation of the offender to leave the home and the possibility of preventing him from staying in certain places, to live in a certain locality or in a certain area. In the system of criminal law enforcement of domestic violence in Poland, positive elements are the creation of a “blue line”, the possibility of an immediate extradition without a court order of a child who is being abused.Based on the analysis of the experience of criminal legal counterwork of domestic violence in the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Poland, we consider it is expedient to include in the legislation of Ukraine norms regarding the recognition of the crime of marriage or partner as an aggravating circumstance for all crimes, the possibility of evicting an offender from home as before and after being imprisoned, prohibiting the offender from staying in specified places, residing in a certain settlement of a certain area, the possibility of immediate removal without a court decision of a child who is suffering from severe illness criminality of incest and treats of domestic violence, the possibility of checking a partner at a violent past.Article received 27.02.2019

Rearranging Differential Inclusion through Civic Solidarity: Loose Coupling in Mentorship for “Unaccompanied Minors”

This article looks into a community-based mentoring programme for unaccompanied refugee minors (URMs), launched in 2015 at the peak of refugee movement in Austria. Leaning on a long-term ethnographic study, it sheds light on dynamic developments in refugee support through civic solidarity. The article proposes that examining the programme from the point of view of dialectic processes of organizing provides a better standpoint for asking what was produced on the programme and what influences those outcomes have had on more contentious political dimensions. Following this, the focus is concentrated on “loose coupling” within a pilot youth mentoring scheme. This reveals how inbuilt ambiguities were given structure, how rationality and indetermination were interdependently organized and how the uncertain was ascertained through mentor training and matching. Thus, unequal but personal relationships were brought about and stabilized. The particular institutionalization of “godparenthoods for URMs” offered possible ways of integrating various elements of a support system in a way which could provide better support than other relationships amongst strangers. I argue that these specific forms of loose coupling opened up a corridor in which aspects relating to the differential inclusion of young refugees were (re-)arranged through adults volunteering, but with mixed results.

The Refugees We Are: Solidarity in the European Constitutional Imagination

The Refugees We Are: Solidarity in the European Constitutional Imagination

“Disruptions” of Collective Memory: Aspects of Diagnosis and Treatment

Collective memory is not a monolithic body of knowledge and ideas; at times it splinters, shifts to parallel modes of existence, and is sometimes disrupted. Disruptions in collective memory create social tension, which is either overcome through special procedures of commemorative “reset,” or else pushed into a voiceless space. The phenomenological approach, particularly B. Waldenfels’ xenological concept, is useful in analyzing disruptions of collective memory. The metaphor of “wounding” in the context of encountering the Alien, and the analysis of “healing” the lived space through interpretation, which uses the tools of the same lived space, prove fruitful in studying commemorative disruptions. The analysis of “suturing” the commemorative disruptions of the 20 th century shows that the very existence of the disruption is made visible through the use of a new narrative, which allows for a new quality of social solidarity. The collective memory of contemporary Ukraine has several lines of disruption, but we can suppose that some of these are not comprehended in society, due to the lack of an appropriate narrative. One example of such a disruption is the collective memory of displaced persons. This disruption finds its reflection in artistic projects, which strive to stress the idea that the creation of a common commemorative space for displaced persons may provoke civic solidarity, which will then help to preclude further social conflicts.

СОЦИОЛОГИЧЕСКИЙ АНАЛИЗ ГРАЖДАНСКОЙ ИДЕНТИЧНОСТИ И ПАТРИОТИЗМА: ОПЫТ ФЕДЕРАЛЬНЫХ И РЕГИОНАЛЬНЫХ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЙ

The article analyzes the experience of sociological research of civil identity and patriotism in Russia. The main theoretical and methodological approaches are considered, the main methods and tools used by Federal research companies are described. An example of a study in a particular region - the Astrakhan region has been given. Conclusions have been made about the possibility of analyzing the indicators of civic identity and patriotism among Russians and residents of Astrakhan. The problem of civic identity, solidarity and patriotic unity is essential for the Astrakhan region which is a border area with polytechnic and polyconfessional population.