Solidarity Activists Research Articles

Tracing the spirals of unsettlement: Euro-Canadian narratives of coming to grips with Indigenous sovereignty, title, and rights

ABSTRACT In settler nations, pervasive national narratives combine with colonizing spatial technologies to constitute a dominant cultural pedagogy: a settler pedagogy that shores up historical-spatial imaginaries serving to rationalize, justify, and ultimately reproduce the on-going displacement of Indigenous peoples. This paper explores processes by which these entrenched imaginaries become unsettled for white settler subjects, through a narrative analysis of the stories 22 Euro-Canadian solidarity activists tell of coming to grips with their implication, privilege, and responsibilities in light of colonizing history and Indigenous sovereignty and territory. The paper traces the experiences, contexts, and critical turning points that prompt these actors to (re)imagine identity, history, land, nation, and home, sparking among them specific and at times competing cycles of reflection, action, and commitment. In elucidating these cycles of learning and unsettlement, and in noting their contradictions, interruptions, and (un)marked whiteness, this inquiry contributes to current conversations regarding the processes by which differently positioned settlers might enter pathways of personal and structural decolonization.

Introduction: The Contentious Politics of Refugee and Migrant Protest and Solidarity Movements: Remaking Citizenship from the Margins

Throughout the world, political mobilizations by refugees, irregularized migrants, and solidarity activists have emerged, demanding and enacting the right to move and to stay, struggling for citizenship and human rights, and protesting the violence and deadliness of contemporary border regimes. These struggles regularly traverse the local and constitute trans-border, trans-categorical, and in fact, social movements. This special issue inquires into their transformative possibilities and offers a collection of articles that explore political mobilizations in several countries and (border) regions, including Brazil, Mexico, the United States, Austria, Germany, Greece, Turkey and ‘the Mediterranean.’ This issue brings into dialog social movement literature, and especially the ‘contentious politics’ perspective, with migration struggles. It connects these to current debates underway within Critical Citizenship Studies and the Autonomy of Migration literatures around rights making, the constitution of political subjectivities, and re-defining notions of the political and political community.

Dying to live: migrant deaths and citizenship politics along European borders: transgressions, disruptions, and mobilizations

Migrants and refugees continue to die as they attempt to cross into Europe. This article explores the issue of ‘dying to live’ to draw attention to the disturbing fact of these deaths in relation to the state, biopolitics, and citizenship, but also to the growing mobilization around refugee and migrant deaths along European borders. The article examines transnational activism in solidarity with migrants, refugees and their families in response to deaths at Europe’s borders as one example of the many political struggles for greater rights undertaken by refugees, migrants, and solidarity activists emerging across Europe and elsewhere. An examination of struggles around rights of the dead and in response to migrant and refugee deaths suggests that they can be transgressive of the logic of modern citizenship.

Ethical Imperatives in Transnational Solidarity

At the height of the “War on Terror,” Gada Mahrouse’s Conflicted Commitments comes at a time when the terms of transnational solidarity face a silent crisis. As efforts of anti-war and peace movements fail to alleviate the harms of war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel-Palestine and Syria, her book invites us to consider the ethical question of what it means to engage in transnational solidarity at a time when solidarity activists are faced with the devastating failure of traditional social movement practices to oppose modern warfare. Her book confronts the ethics of solidarity wherein the desire of activism to “do good” is set within the overwhelming conditions of the present: the West’s military industrial complex, the violence of the crumbling edifices of dictatorships in the Middle East and the rise of groups like ISIS/ISIL.

An Orchestra of Civil Resistance: Privilege, Diversity, and Identification Among Cross‐Border Activists in a Palestinian Village

Fluctuating forms of diversity have evolved as a result of cross‐border interventions by civil resistance activists. Such diversity is nurtured by the inflows and outflows of individuals form very different backgrounds on a local stage of action. Discussing civil resistance as an arena in which such fluctuating diversity produces multilayered patterns of identification, this paper looks at Israeli and international activists who interject themselves temporarily into the local sphere of civil resistance in a Palestinian village. Here, solidarity activists form a highly diverse and shifting assemblage of actors who divide among themselves according to power‐related ascriptions and privileges. As in a musical orchestra, individual activists and groups of activists each follow their own “score,” but align their distinct functions with one another to wage a struggle collectively. Within this orchestra of civil resistance, diversity is not the obstacle to collective action but its very basis.

From Third World internationalism to ‘the internationals’: the transformation of solidarity with Palestine

This paper examines the formation of the concept of ‘the internationals’ in Palestine. The post-Oslo term began to be used in the second intifada to denote white solidarity activists in the colony. In tracing the rise of the concept, the paper charts some of the ways solidarity with the Palestinian people has been domesticated under the Oslo ‘peace process’. Situating and analysing the rise of the concept of ‘the internationals’ within the assemblage of apparatuses and ideological forces inscribed during Oslo, it explains how these material structures have contributed to shifting the notion and praxis of solidarity. Taking Third World internationalist and anti-imperialist feminist practices of solidarity as its starting point, the paper historicises and theorises some of the changes that have taken place over time. It offers an anti-colonial, anti-racist, feminist critique of the individualisation of solidarity and centres indigenous Palestinian perspectives. It concludes by surveying the ways Palestinians are creating alternatives and rebuilding international solidarity.

Palestine, my love: The ethico‐politics of love and mourning in Jewish Israeli solidarity activism

ABSTRACTJewish Israeli left‐wing activists engage in a subversive affective politics when they express love for, and mourn the loss of, Palestinian life. But the affects of love and mourning also bind these solidarity activists to Israeli state violence and sovereignty in various ways, entangling them in the very forms of power they aim to challenge. Loving and mourning the Palestinian Other involves an ambivalent ethics in which the activist subject objectifies the Other, and this objectification is a kind of violence that emerges in the affective becomings of solidarity activism. Activist loving and mourning thus call into question the nature of solidarity and alert us to the difficulty of ethics as troubled relations enmeshed in the violence of politics. [love, mourning, solidarity, ethics, political subjectivity, activism, Israel/Palestine]

Nationalism and the Comparative Study of Religious Ethics Future Trajectories

AbstractDavid Little's work on ethnoreligious nationalism and religion, human rights, and the practice of religious peace-building offers both an important corrective and a conceptual foundation for further research in comparative religious ethics and an effective contribution to the sociological and cultural study of religion, conflict, and peace. Examining the two cases of Jewish Israeli settlers and Jewish American Palestine solidarity activists, the article establishes the centrality of nationalism and the institutions and practices it authorizes as well as the relevance of religious formations, reasoning, meanings, and practices within this context.

Bolivia’s Rocky Path Ahead

A fair yet critical assessment of President Evo Morales and his MAS (Movement toward Socialism) party’s “refounding revolution” in Bolivia, initiated in 2005, presents a challenge to scholars and policy makers. Critics and supporters alike must walk the fine line between political reality and partisan rhetoric and between achievements and setbacks in governance. In their insightful evaluation of the continuity and change in Evo’s Bolivia from 2009 to 2014, two well-established country experts, Linda Farthing and the late Benjamin Kohl, have done precisely that. It would be a mistake to treat this comprehensive, extensively researched, and readable book as anything but excellent scholarship by two solidarity activists who are unafraid to be critical as well as thoughtful and balanced in their assessments of Bolivia’s first indigenousand socialmovements-dominated administration. In this spirit, the authors frame their complex narrative around the Aymara concept of ch’ixi, which is described as something “simultaneously white and not white and black and not black,” a “third state” that superficially appears to be gray, as when black and white threads are woven together, but is not (7). Fittingly, the book is dedicated to the memory of coauthor Ben Kohl, an educator and scholar of Bolivia who died suddenly in 2013, and to that of Domitila Barrios de Chungara, a miner’s daughter and wife and celebrated early women’s activist who suffered under military repression in the 1960s and 1970s and died in 2012. In this context the authors position the rise of Evo Morales along the continuum of struggle for political and socioeconomic rights from the 1952 National Revolution to the birth of “new” social movements in the 1990s. To tap the complexity and contestation inherent in Evo’s Bolivia, they include vignettes from diverse Bolivian personalities that provide interesting and insightful perspectives on the ongoing process of change and continuity. The authors’ interviews indicate that even supporters, both indigenous and nonindigenous, have reservations about or are disillusioned with Morales’s policies, especially concerning the disastrous attempt to cancel the gas subsidy in 2010, the extraction-driven development model, and the ongoing dispute that erupted in 2012 over the proposed new road through the Isiboro Secure National Park and Indigenous Territory. Various MAS supporters feel that the “process of change is stalled” (147) and that the so-called Morales revolution is not a true revolution and remains an “unfinished” transition (144). The country still confronts almost daily protests and roadblocks that are economically costly, yet the fundamental system and structures of economy and state—despite the groundbreaking new 2009 constitution and expansion of politi-

Buying into the Regime: Grapes and Consumption in Cold War Chile and the United States. By Heidi Tinsman (Durham, Duke University Press, 2014) 363 pp. $94.95 cloth $26.95 paper

Buying into the Regime is a fascinating history of grapes and consumption during the Cold War, focusing specifically on the close relationship between the United States and Chile. That single export tied the two countries together in numerous and sometimes counterintuitive ways from the 1960s to the 1980s. The result, in Tinsman’s hands, is a narrative of dictatorship, democracy, and contestation.That the book consciously avoids simple answers makes it an especially welcome addition to the literature on the Cold War in Chile. Consumption is not simple. For example, many labor activists in the United States and Chile decried globalization and market-driven economic policies. Yet, those in the United States believed that local producers, not large firms, should grow grapes. A labor leader in Chile who recognized that small Chilean farms could not produce enough for export, however, remarked, “Workers need to get together and let their voices be heard. But I hope Americans are still planning to eat Chilean grapes” (261).Tinsman details many such contrasts and contradictions. For example, inter-class connections did not foster straightforward protests against the military government even though the rationale of human rights was universally accepted. The United Farm Workers and Chilean organizations were often at cross-purposes: “Chile solidarity activists understood theirs as a fight against authoritarianism abetted by U.S. foreign policy and neoliberal capitalism. Members of the ufw saw theirs as a fight for civil and labor rights within an existing U.S. capitalist democracy” (204–205).Academics from the United States have a place in this variegated history. The Chilean grape industry grew substantially under the market-driven economy of the military government, but it owed its existence to the state-driven policies of the Eduardo Frei and Salvador Allende administrations. Universities in the United States played important roles in both governments: Researchers from the University of California, Davis, gave Chile extensive agricultural assistance during the 1960s, and economists educated at the University of Chicago created the policy architecture for Chilean grapes to be exported during the 1970s and beyond.As Tinsman points out, consumption was central to the historical development of the grape export industry and the long-term responses to it. Depending on vantage point, eating (or choosing not to eat) grapes could denote support for a government, opposition to a government, general nationalism, protest against a repressive global economic system, support for labor, and/or recognition of the human costs of feeding the United States. Those perspectives shift if you are a Chilean or if you are a U.S. citizen, and if you are eating fruit from Chile or from the United States.Tinsman concludes the book with reference to the present, the Occupy movement in the United States and the election of Michelle Bachelet in Chile reviving a focus on inequality as a pressing problem. Given the book’s lessons, we should expect activists in both countries to struggle in their attempt to maintain substantive connections.

‘The Coloniser who Refuses’: Co-Resistance and the Paradoxical Reality of Israeli Solidarity Activists

In the period following the Second Intifada, many Israeli and Palestinian peace activists began to despair of traditional coexistence efforts, turning instead to joint nonviolent political activism against Israeli policies. This mode of joint work came to be known as ‘co-resistance’. It would be fair to wonder if such activism might foster joint Israeli–Palestinian efforts towards a shared society, possibly a one-state solution. However, somewhat counter-intuitively, solidarity can sometimes reinforce separation between the two parties in question. This article uses the Solidarity Movement as case study to explore the political role of Israeli co-resistance activists. Using ethnographic methods and drawing upon Albert Memmi's theory of the ‘coloniser who refuses’, this article illustrates how co-resistance can serve to reinforce and advance separation between Israelis and Palestinians into two distinct national communities.

How “Partnership” Weakens Solidarity: Colombian GM Workers and the Limits of UAW Internationalism

This article examines the ongoing U.S. solidarity campaign with the Association of Injured Workers and Ex‐Workers of General Motors Colmotores (ASOTRECOL), workers fired from the GM plant in Bogotá, Colombia, after suffering injuries on the assembly line. After reviewing some of the factors that facilitated the mobilization of community and rank‐and‐file activists, we discuss the refusal of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union leadership to support the campaign. While the UAW has sometimes engaged in solidarity campaigns with foreign workers, it has not supported ASOTRECOL. We argue that the primary reason is that doing so might jeopardize what UAW leaders consider to be their positive relationship with General Motors. U.S. activists' expectation that the UAW would support the cause strongly influenced their strategic orientation early on, further hindering the chances of success. We suggest that solidarity activists should take unions' bargaining relationships into account when devising strategy.

Pioneering Transnational Solidarity in the Americas: The Movement in Support of Augusto C. Sandino 1927–1934

The movement in solidarity with the national liberation struggle led by Augusto C. Sandino in Nicaragua between 1927 and 1933 was the first modern, networked anti-imperialist campaign in Latin America but has only recently begun to attract scholarly attention. This article identifies some of the key protagonists in the campaign around Sandino and discusses the spaces which they occupied. The solidarity activists employed a variety of devices to spread their message –including literary-political magazines, political parties and supra-national political and socio-cultural organizations, some of which were linked to the Comintern. The article also explores the repertoire of discourses that shaped solidarity action and thinking. Many of these came from a revitalized antiimperialism as well as from Indolatino thought that drew on the work of such diverse actors as José Vasconcelos as well as Sandino himself. The development of a richer and more complex sense of Latin American identity underpinned these new transnational networking practices and discourses. In turn these discourses were also the core of a new form of radical transnationalism that was anchored in expressions of solidarity with the struggles of other Latin Americans.

The 1973 Chilean coup and the origins of transnational human rights activism

AbstractThe 1973 Chilean coup gave rise to an unprecedented growth in a global human rights consciousness. In its aftermath, transnational activists from a diverse array of political and ideological backgrounds found common cause – indeed, a common language of human rights – in campaigns to ameliorate the repressive acts of the Chilean military junta. This article focuses on two models of activism in particular: Amnesty International, whose 1973 investigative mission set the terms of the global debate about human rights in Chile; and transnational solidarity activists, especially Chilean exiles from leftist parties, whose vision of social activism narrowed as their interest in human rights surged. These campaigns – while not without tensions over the role of politics in the moral appeal to human rights – both articulated a transnational discourse of human rights and created new activist techniques to foment moral outrage by revealing the prevalence of torture through the power of personal testimony.

Poland’s New Capitalism, by Jane Hardy

Jane Hardy Poland's New Capitalism, Pluto Press: London, 2009, 258 pp: 9780745324579, 60 [pounds sterling] (hbk); 9780745324562 17.09 [pounds sterling] (pbk) In a crisis-stricken world, the mainstream media continues to set Poland up as an example of a successful transformation and a model of prosperous neoliberal development. But 'the only economy in the EU not to plunge into recession' and 'the future economic powerhouse of Europe' are not the images that Jane Hardy draws in her book. Poland's New Capitalism successfully calls into question a number of popular myths that have been perpetrated about Poland since the EU enlargement, and arguably since the collapse of communism. Hardy looks at a putative 'tiger economy' of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) from a different angle, and through her extensive interviews with activists, managers, workers and others, she manages to capture the sense of disillusionment, exclusion and indifference felt by many Poles, who live alongside the prosperous and well-established elite. The first two chapters provide the reader with the historical context necessary to grasp Poland's new capitalism and its integration into the global political economy. Hardy begins with a short account of the postwar history of Poland. She manages to briefly present the installation of the crisis-prone Soviet-style economy and investigates a series of crises and major rebellions that fostered a process of gradual and unsuccessful reforms, which only pushed the country towards a prolonged stagnation and greater integration with global capitalism. In her examination of the final years of market socialism, Hardy discusses the roots and origins of opposition and devotes special attention to the rise of Solidarity. The main focus here is given to economic and labour-related issues, but the author's analysis oversees both historic and cultural aspects regarding the issue of resistance. Hardy divorces Solidarity from a struggle for national liberation and sees it as mainly a social-democratic trade union that by the late-1980s, due to martial law and repression, 'came to be represented by a small number of individuals ... who were proponents of the free market' (p. 28). Depicting the workers' rebellions as mainly a response to ever-decreasing working conditions and falling standards of living, and ignoring the patriotic dimension of the movement, is, however, somewhat misleading. It ignores the fact that apart from defending workers' rights, Solidarity was also fuelled by very deeply rooted anti-Soviet, pro-Catholic, and national-liberation sentiments. This aspect can by no means be ignored, for many Solidarity activists regarded their actions as a continuation of the fight for independence, and viewed socialism as an unwanted system imposed by the Soviet occupiers. This, in turn, goes towards an explanation of why the post-communist Solidarity-led governments, along with many governments across CEE, willingly turned to market-oriented policies and remained hostile to anything remotely socialist. In the next chapter, the book scrutinises the rapid liberalisation of trade and the disintegration of the state-planned economy, and contrasts the neoliberal and institutionalist accounts of the transformation with historical-materialist arguments that draw from Antonio Gramsci. In regard to the latter, Hardy offers an interesting theoretical analysis. The use of uneven and combined development accurately captures the overnight introduction of neoliberal policies, which she rightly views as a 'leap' rather than a gradual process, while her notion of creative destruction also encapsulates the nature of mass privatisation of state assets and the collapse of the state-directed economy. In her analysis of the new ruling class, Hardy accurately notices that it was 'the cliques of the old nomenklatura and Solidarity', accompanied by foreign capital, that really emerged victorious in the new reality, while the Solidarity-mobilised masses were frequently marginalised, facing unemployment and poverty (pp. …

Between Acceleration and Occupation: Palestine and the Struggle for Global Justice

This article explores the contemporary politics of global violence through an examination of the particular challenges and possibilities facing Palestinians who seek to defend their communities against an ongoing settler-colonial project (Zionism) that is approaching a crisis point. As the colonial dynamic in Israel/Palestine returns to its most elemental level – land, trees, homes – it also continues to be a laboratory for new forms of accelerated violence whose global impact is hard to overestimate. In such a context, Palestinians and international solidarity activists find themselves confronting a quintessential 21st century activist dilemma: how to craft a strategy of what Paul Virilio calls “popular defense” at a time when everyone seems to be implicated in the machinery of global violence? I argue that while this dilemma represents a formidable challenge for Palestinians, it also helps explain why the Palestinian struggle is increasingly able to build bridges with wider struggles for global justice, ecological sustainability, and indigenous rights.

The Polish Solidarity Movement in Retrospect: In Search of a Mnemonic Mirror

The legacy of the Solidarity movement of the 1980s, which was a leading force in the region’s 1989 revolutions, culminating most symbolically with the fall of the Berlin Wall, has yet to be institutionalized in Polish social memory. A spate of official commemorations marking the movement’s 25th anniversary in 2005 provided a palette on which Poles projected—or refused to project—their memories. The movement’s legacy continues to play out in current and contentious electoral politics, since the leaders of the top contending parties are former Solidarity activists. Despite and partly because of this active presence of Solidarity movement players, Polish civil society appears to be in a liminal state of active hesitation over the task of concretizing this movement’s past in commemorative forms. This article proposes six cultural and political explanations for this hesitation. It also recommends that social scientists disaggregate the concept of memory work into various manifestations on a continuum from hesitation to deliberation and agitation to institutionalization. As the article illustrates, hesitation can constitute action. At stake in this exercise is a larger discourse—over the direction of the post-1989 socio-political changes vis-a-vis the aims of the 1989 revolutions and the meaning of democracy and transitional justice in a posttotalitarian context.

Problematyka odpowiedzialności karnej sędziów stosujących przepisy dekretu o stanie wojennym z mocą wsteczną (Glosa do uchwały SN z dnia 20 grudnia 2007 r., I KZP 37/2007)

The decree of the State Council (Rada Panstwa) of 12 December 1981 on martial law imposed martial law in Poland and ended Solidarity period in Polish history. Many Solidarity activists were imprisoned and sentenced on the basis of this decree. The penal provisions from this decree were often applied by judges on retroactive basis. The text analyzes the responsibility of judges for these commitments. The Supreme Court passed a sentence on this issue in 2007. The Supreme Court expressed an opinion that judges were obliged to apply retroactive rules. The author does not share this opinion. He analyzes Polish legal acts and the Convention on Human Rights (art. 15). A part of the text is dedicated to Gustaw Radbruch’s views about human justice, which in critical situation should have been applied despite the fact that written law is different.

Introduction

In 1980, Poles were the first to jump the communist ship and organize outside of the Communist Party, forming a ten-million strong alternative labor union, Solidarity. When the Communist government banned the Union in 1981, Poles refused to dissolve it. They went underground forming Solidarity-sponsored schools, theaters, newspapers, and political groups. In so doing, Solidarity activists created an alternative civil society that emerged nearly intact in 1989 when Poles were the first to throw off Soviet-backed communism. Yet now, in this land of self-liberation and freedom, the highly conservative Law and Justice party, led by Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczyński, won the 2005 elections on a pro-Catholic, antigay, antiabortion, anticommunist, and xenophobic platform. Now the Kaczyński government is hounding government officials, professors, lawyers, doctors, managers, journalists, judges, and bank managers out of jobs for refusing to declare whether or not they collaborated with the communist security forces. Poles, who during the Solidarność era reached out in solidarity to activists around the world, are now redefining Polish citizenship as singularly Polish and Catholic. Founded as a worker's movement, Solidarity has overseen the diminution of the Polish working class, the emasculation of unions, the downward spiral of purchasing power, and one of the highest unemployment rates in Europe.

The Chile Solidarity Movement and its Media: An Alternative Take on the Allende and Pinochet Years

Long before September 11, 2001, September 11 was a significant date for many Chileans, Latin Americans, and North Americans. On that day in 1973, the government of Salvador Allende, the democratically elected socialist president of Chile, was overthrown in a U.S.-backed military coup. Even before that day, North Americans had formed Chile solidarity groups to create and disseminate alternative media products to cover the dramatic changes taking place in Chile and to counter some of the coverage of Chile in the mainstream U.S. press. The solidarity movement's media, particularly the newsletters, provided mass audiences with a non-establishment version of U.S. involvement in Chilean affairs before and during Allende's administration. And after September 11, 1973, they provided an alternative assessment of events during the military dictatorship of General Augusta Pinochet Ugarte and kept his human rights violations in the public eye. The solidarity media also helped create a national network of like-minded North Americans, kept solidarity activists informed and motivated, recruited new activists, and agitated for political and governmental change, especially in the area of foreign policy, among other things. This study, which grew out of an award-winning conference paper, is the first attempt to piece together the history of the Chile solidarity media and catalog its media products.