Transnational Solidarity Research Articles

Customary Paths Toward Denuclearization and Decolonization: Mā‘ohi and Kanak Activists Passing Through lo Larzac

ABSTRACT Networks of opposition to French nuclear testing were nourished by transnational solidarities. By the end of the 1970s, links between Kanak and Mā‘ohi expanded through trans-Pacific organizations such as the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) movement. They also grew beyond the shores of Oceania with the active participation of Occitan activists from lo Larzac in southern France. This agricultural plateau, already home to a decade-long fight against militarization, became a transnational hub for anti-nuclear activists. In the early 1980s, a ‘Pape‘ete–Noumea–Larzac’ network emerged through lawyers Jean-Jacques de Félice and François Roux who brought their clients together in networks of solidarity. As brokers, they helped transform lo Larzac into a hub which linked anti-nuclear and anti-colonial struggles. This article examines the roots of rural resistance by focusing on how the links forged by transnational actors, including churches and non-violence groups, helped nourish an Oceania–Larzac activist network.

Reading Irish Solidarity with Palestine through Ireland’s “Unfinished Revolution”

Irish solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for liberation is well documented. The shared experience of resisting state-sponsored colonial violence has helped to embed this transnational solidarity, especially among grassroots activists. Yet despite these similarities, there are critical differences between the two struggles that require careful consideration. In this essay, the author foregrounds the bonds of connection between Ireland and Palestine while arguing for the need to avoid platforming unnuanced, romantic, and mystical sentiments in light of Ireland’s “unfinished revolution” and the Irish government’s largely conservative approach to Palestinian liberation. He concludes that Ireland is far from an exemplar of postcoloniality and stresses that it is the activist community in Ireland that has been leading the call for full Palestinian liberation.

The Transnational Turn: How Women Writers are Engaging with Global Flows in the 21st Century

In a world characterized by unprecedented global flows, women writers have emerged as powerful voices navigating the complexities of the "transnational turn." This research delves into how contemporary women writers engage with issues of migration, economic inequities, cultural transformation, and transnational solidarity, weaving narratives that illuminate the human cost and creative potential of this interconnected world. The contemporary narratives showcase the emotional weight of diaspora, the complexities of navigating cultural expectations across borders, and the persistent questioning of identity within a transnationalized world. The article explores how women writers engage with global flows, specifically focusing on their nuanced portrayals of the shifting sands of cultural practices and the multifaceted construction of identities in a world interwoven with transnational forces. With its intricate web of transnational forces, women writers have emerged as the cartographers of the 21st century’s interconnected yet dislocated world. The ever-evolving construction of identity amidst a chorus of societal expectations across borders in these narratives is no less than a literary expedition across borders offering insights into the complexities and creative possibilities of the interconnected world.

Sport and Transnational Indigenous Solidarity From Turtle Island to Palestine? Examining Iroquois Nationals’ 2018 Trip to Israel

The Iroquois Nationals’ participation in the 2018 World Lacrosse Championship was welcomed by the hosting Israeli state despite the call for boycott from the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement and pro-Palestinian groups’ appeal for Indigenous solidarity. This paper discusses the historical/geopolitical contexts of this event and examines the responses from multiple parties, including the team representatives, pro-Israel groups, and Indigenous media/activists. By bringing together literature in Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, Palestinian studies, and critical sport studies, it highlights the challenges for transnational solidarity in the sport industry as well as the urgency for deepening an internationalist anticolonial/anti-imperialist political consciousness among athletes and sport organizations, Indigenous or non-Indigenous alike.

Transnational In-Group Solidarity Networks in the Case of #Hellobrother

This paper examines the dynamics of one hashtag, #hellobrother, shared on Twitter following the Christchurch terror attack on 15th March 2019. It was analysed as part of a larger study #Contesting Islamophobia: Representation and Appropriation in Mediated Activism which explores the potentials and limitations of counternarratives against Islamophobia on Twitter. Using three ‘trigger events’ (Awan, 2014), Brexit, the Christchurch terror attack, and the Covid pandemic as its starting point, the study analysed six weeks of tweets at different points in time. The data on #hellobrother demonstrates an affective response which, through the affordances of Twitter, gave rise to strong networks of transnational solidarity. It illustrates both the limitations of its potentially transient solidarities but also the capacity of social media to offer visibility to counternarratives, which at specific moments, following specific events can become normative.

Debating Legitimacy and Solidarity in the European Parliament: Patterns of Opposition and Conflict During the Pandemic

AbstractTo cope with the socio‐economic consequences of the Covid‐19 pandemic, the EU has adopted a new approach by launching an instrument aimed at promoting cross‐national solidarity, called Next Generation EU. This could trigger major changes in terms of EU power and authority, calling into question the polity's legitimacy, and the kind of solidarity to be embodied in the European system. As part of the scholarly debate on transnational solidarity, the article focuses on the politicisation of the Covid‐19 crisis within the European Parliament, with a focus on opposition parties. By applying discourse analysis, the article explains how the crisis has acted as a catalyst for framing opposition parties' stances about the relationship between legitimacy and solidarity in the EU polity. Furthermore, the article examines how opposition parties have assessed their competing views on the role of the EU's political system and on future developments in the integration process.

Transnational solidarity in the world of work? Theoretical framework applied to the European Minimum Wage Directive

Taking the European Minimum Wage Directive as an example of solidarity in the EU, we develop a theoretical framework showing different forms of solidary action and discussing them on the transnational level. We reconstruct three types of solidarity-based form of actions that were present in the discussion of the Directive and ask which this forms have been enacted by whom and which role played bridging and bonding elements. We conclude that these elements are important to form interest groups that pushed for the development (or not) of the regulation, which in turn serves as a solidarity measure in the EU.

Transnational solidarity in times of the pandemic crisis in the European sectoral social dialogues of commerce and social services

During the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, social partners were involved into crisis management at different levels. Besides the company and the national level, social partners increased their activities at the European sectoral level. Considering this transnational collective action as an act of solidarity in European employment relations, this paper analyses bridging and bonding as processes allowing for transnational collective acts of solidarity. Based on empirical evidence of case studies of the sectors commerce and social services, the paper shows that the European social partnership serves as a framework allowing for trustful collaboration within which coalition building appears to be “a natural”.

Transcending Borders? Horizons and Challenges of Global Tech Worker Solidarity

While the reach of tech firms has become planetary, the counterpower of their workforces often remains local. The article explores the challenges and opportunities to transnational solidarity among tech workers, the higher-paid employee strata of tech companies. Based on three recent cases of transnational organizing, I argue that three markers stick out in the efforts: informal organizing instead of institutional power-building, the importance of labour migration and the surprising lack of using structural power to this date. The articles concludes that tech worker organizing can learn from the conflicts of lower paid gig workers in the industry and institutional developments geared toward transnational worker representation.

Unwieldy matter: Liquid landscapes of memory in postdictatorship Chilean film

This article considers the haunting presence of the Pacific Ocean in two films about Southern Chile that respond to the aftermath of the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–90). I build from the premise that the heterogeneous materiality of landscapes can provoke reflection on multiple entangled histories, memories and hauntings, potentially enabling a counter-hegemonic form of historiography. Water itself is rarely analysed as ghostly matter. Its liquid materiality resists the emplacing of memorials or the accumulation of human-made debris. And yet, in the documentary El Botón de Nácar (The Pearl Button) (2015) and the narrative film La Frontera (The Frontier) (1991), water is the agglutinating presence that places different pasts in dialogue. Through my analysis, I explore the films’ engagement with the complex temporalities and cultural connotations of the ocean in Southern Chile – the cyclical movement of tides, the inevitability of catastrophic tsunamis and the enduring currents between islands that are invisible to the tourist gaze. I argue that in engaging with these temporalities, the films open alternate ways of thinking about time, history, truth and justice in the Chilean ‘transition to democracy’. This disruption makes room for histories of Indigenous survival, transnational solidarity, natural disaster and ecological destruction that are often absent or erased from postdictatorship memory culture.

Transnational solidarity in feminist practices: power, partnerships, and accountability

ABSTRACT In this paper, I offer a descriptive and normative analysis of the requirements for effective transnational solidarity between southern NGOs and their northern partners. Drawing on interviews conducted with staff members of Senegalese women’s rights NGOs and a private international development foundation, I contend that existing theories of feminist transnational solidarity cannot allow us to properly acknowledge the power asymmetries and obstacles to solidarity that these NGOs are facing. After assessing the divisions related to gender interests and limited resources that characterize this NGO-ized development landscape, I develop a partial theory of transnational solidarity that would center power asymmetries in order to address practical and political obstacles to solidarity. I argue that an effective account of transnational solidarity must include a commitment to disrupting global hierarchies of power as well as to building practices of accountability and attentiveness to power structures.

South Africa-sur-Nemunas1 : Transnational Hinterlands in Dan Jacobson’s Heshel’s Kingdom

The paper investigates the representation of Central Europe and its hinterlands in selected works by 20th-century South African writers. It pays special attention to Dan Jacobson’s Heshel’s Kingdom about Jacobson’s travel to Lithuania in search of the writer’s “middle-European” patrimony. Drawing on previously unpublished archival records, the study argues that Jacobson’s book merges Central European hinterlands (their histories, identities, landscapes) with South African ones in a radical act of re-mapping both areas. The paper also insists on recognising a distinctive mode of conflating Central Europe and South Africa. This hinternational poetics annuls the existing imperial cartography and builds transnational connections between different hinterlands and their pasts. Additionally, the article demonstrates how the need to “unlearn” imperial history allows for a geographic/spatial overlap between the “heart of the country” and the “core of Europe,” as well as creation of a network of transnational solidarity and implication across nations and ethnicities.

Transnational Solidarity and Good Governance: Is the ‘Refugee’ Phenomenon an Extremist Threat for the Eu?

After two decades of refugee waves from post-communist countries, Europe has been facing again this phenomenon in the three last years. During the Syria wars, residents from the Middle East escaped to Jordan, Libya and Turkey. By the extension of these waves refugees’ destination was European countries. By the side of the Middle East refugee wave, last two years European countries have been facing refugees from African countries. These waves are identified as the current European refugee crisis. In the European country's public opinion (even though this phenomenon was not new), sometimes it is evaluated as a threat that contains extremism. This phenomenon may not seem extraordinary in itself, but considering that it happened in European countries characterized by extreme xenophobic attitudes, where the societies have low levels of trust in general, exploited by the Government’s anti-immigration campaign. The different aspects of anxiety and fear connected to the refugee waves, perceived by the receiving society are worth analyzing in today’s Europe, especially in light of the recent terror attacks and other incidents in which immigrants play a significant role worldwide. Xenophobic attitudes, discriminations, social exclusions etc., bring out the clashes between newcomers and residents. Regarding the above explanation, this article will focus on the descriptive analysis of the refugee phenomenon in Europe and whether is it an extremist threat to European society or just the public opinion perceives it like that.
 
 Received: 16 October 2023 / Accepted: 2 November 2023 / Published: 23 November 2023

Researching Latin America in Liverpool: Transnational Connections of Hope and Solidarity

This article examines archival collections at the University of Liverpool and local community archives documenting academic, political, cultural and personal links between Liverpool and Latin America in the second half of the twentieth century. Centring on collections related to Chile and Central America between the 1960s and 1990s, the analysis highlights hidden histories of transnational solidarity, human rights campaigns and academic research connecting Liverpool with Latin America during a turbulent period of dictatorship, repression and opposition. The varied records – from institutional papers to exile ephemera and cultural artefacts – provide multilayered grassroots perspectives on resistance in Latin America and abroad, revealing the diverse motivations underpinning local solidarity activism. Ongoing digitization and community collaborations based on these archives underline their contemporary significance for research and education. This article argues that as key sites of exchange across activist, academic and migrant communities in Liverpool the archival collections represent vital tools for preserving diasporic heritage, as well as raising awareness of the importance of solidarity with Latin America.

Climate change, counter-terrorism and capitalist development in Somalia

ABSTRACT Somalia is often referred to as a ‘failed state’. In addition to ineffective governance, feeble economic development, and a large anti-government insurgency, it faces increasingly severe climate change-induced devastation. This article offers a critical discussion of the role of capitalist interests and ideology as a factor in the climate crisis. It explores interlocking issues of (1) the relationship between the ruling political class of Somalia and capitalist mining interests; (2) the largely covert US-backed ‘war on terror’ in Somalia; and (3) the ongoing, capitalism-induced climate crisis. The article analyses current US and Somali proposals to address these issues. Many of these proposals remain trapped in the politico-ideological deadlock of capitalist developmentalism, oriented towards fossil fuel extraction and militarised accumulation. The trajectory of this current path in Somalia is leading to immiseration, oppression, displacement for millions of people, and the destruction of an already deteriorating environment. Alternative paths to avert these catastrophes require transnational solidarity, cooperation and assistance.

Why Afro Asia

Abstract If postcolonial thinking involves considering art history for a “global majority,” a term invoked by an astonishingly wide range of sources from advocates of Zambian independence in pre-1964 Rhodesia to champions of anti-racist language in post-2020 London, the concept of Afro Asia assumes special urgency. Suggestive not only of the world's population, of which over three-quarters call Asia and Africa home, but also of a supermajority deprived of social and cultural autonomy, Afro Asia compels serious consideration of questions joining different iterations of global-majority life. Three principles in particular emerged through the Asian-African (“Bandung”) Conference of 1955: self-determination, coexistence, and sovereignty. Refracted through the works of Sybil Atteck, Senga Nengudi, Sadamasa Motonaga, and Obiora Udechukwu, these terms move well beyond political recognition, transnational solidarity, and isolationist conceptions of autonomy. Self-determination in this context involves deferring to how the artwork inheres as a self-sufficient entity so that it might fully exercise the privileges of sovereignty, including the right to prioritize open interdependence above closed competition as the basis of coexistence. Requiring attention that itself amounts to an active redistribution of the scarce resource of time, such artwork sovereignty might be described as an assertion of dignity exceeding that conferred by institutional and critical recognition alone.

Letters for Ukraine. Textual and institutional forms of global responsibility

AbstractThis essay analyses the epistolary correspondence between six Ukrainian and German‐speaking authors published by WeiterSchreiben, a literary platform that belongs to the non‐profit organisation WIR MACHEN DAS and which seeks to promote the work of exiled writers from regions affected by war and other humanitarian crises in the German cultural field. The essay argues that the collaborative, self‐reflexive, and short form of the letters is particularly suitable to promote global responsibility and to quickly adapt to situations of political immediacy, thus accelerating literature's reaction capacity to ongoing conflicts such as the Russia‐Ukraine war. While tracing the connections between the genre and the human rights discourse and looking at the politics of address that create a bond of communion between the correspondents and have the potential to foster various kinds of political identification among readers, the essay also explores this literary initiative from a sociological perspective, challenging strict distinctions between textual and contextual dynamics. By drawing attention to the literary and political dimension of non‐profit organisations such as WIR MACHEN DAS, the essay demonstrates that literature constitutes an important tool in civil society, which helps create forms of transnational solidarity and shape collective debates around migration and social injustice that transcend the borders of states.

An Autoethnography of and in Solidarity: Post- and Decolonial Critique and Autoethnographic Positioning Analysis

This article explores autoethnography as a critical research methodology in dialogue with post- and decolonial critique. It draws on an (auto)ethnographic research on and within the transnational solidarity network of the Mapuche people in which encounters of solidarity across difference are understood as postcolonial “contact zones.” This contribution hereby suggests three important opportunities for autoethnographic positioning analysis by looking at (a) different layers of the author’s field access, (b) the author’s strategic membership within the international solidarity activism, and (c) experiences of being rejected. This article argues that the careful and systematic analysis of such ethnographic episodes is able to (a) generate important epistemological insights within a particular research field, in this case transnational solidarity and networked social movement activity, and (b) highlight and reflect upon the researcher’s “complicity” within fieldwork. The first part of this contribution briefly introduces post- and decolonial debates on solidarity across difference and moves on to suggesting autoethnographic positioning analysis as a methodological approach for studying/supporting the transnational solidarity activism, drawing upon the author’s research with the Mapuche.

Solidarity Through the Lens of Functional Constitutionalism

This article investigates solidarity as a concept and/or a norm of EU law from the perspective of functional constitutionalism. It asks how solidarity fits within the normative framework of the EU legal order if we understand this framework as being founded on a functional constitution. Under functional constitutionalism, the EU is understood as a purposive polity and the authority of the legal order is justified, not by reference to popular sovereignty and individual rights, but from the functional requirements ordained by the purposes, or objectives, of that polity. From this perspective, the normative value of solidarity in EU law is contingent on effectiveness. Where the effective achievement of EU objectives requires Member States to act in solidarity to each other, or to exercise transnational solidarity towards citizens of other Member States, then EU law will impose a duty on them to do so. Conversely, if the exercise of national solidarity within the Member State undermines the effective achievement of EU objectives, then EU law will impose a duty on those Member States not to allow such exercise. The article concludes that, through the lens of functional constitutionalism, solidarity has a purely instrumental value within the EU normative order.

Cultures of (im)mobile entanglements

What does the increased reliance on digital communication technologies by migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, migrant communities, governments and researchers reveal about the benefits, limits and politics of everyday mobile and immobile experiences during the pandemic? This introduction to the special issue on cultures of (im)mobile entanglements addresses this inquiry, alongside ten articles covering themes of governance and surveillance, agency and negotiated subjectivities, translocal and transnational solidarity, as well as doing research in pandemic times. Critically engaging with both mobility and immobility in the intersecting field of mobilities and migration research, the special issue centres a multidimensional and multi-scalar perspective on the deep interlinking of various modes of mobilities and stasis in and beyond spatial and temporal conditions mediated by politically and culturally structured digitalization. It endeavours to create a vantage point to critically examine the mobility–immobility continuum as informed by power relations, hierarchies and inequalities in a networked and global society.