Du Bois and Brazil

In this article, I discuss Black transnational solidarity and liberation in the Americas by analyzing the historical relationship between W. E. B. Du Bois and Brazil from 1900 to 1940. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Du Bois was studying, writing, and publishing about Brazil. He was interested in creating international solidarity and cooperation among Black people. However, Du Bois (as well as other African Americans) promoted the idea that Brazil was a place without racism, a racial paradise. This idea served as a basis for a theory that oppressed Afro-Brazilians—the myth of racial democracy. In this article, I explore Du Bois’s relationship with Brazil, highlighting possible reasons why Du Bois engaged with the myth of racial democracy. In addition, I argue that this historical event teaches us that an Afro-diasporic liberation project must seriously consider global and material inequalities among Black people.

Solidarities Across: Borders, Belongings, Movements

What is the role of affinity, friendship, and care, as well as of conflict and dissonance, in creating possibilities of and hindrances to transnational solidarities? Building on an emergent literature on everyday and affective practices of solidarity, this chapter offers a set of diverse ethnographic accounts of activist work oriented to recognizing and challenging inequalities and relations of oppression based on race, ethnicity, religion, and class, alongside gender and sexuality. Engaging a variety of material from feminist and LGBTI+ activisms, the chapter highlights ambivalences inscribed in the making of collective resilience, resistance, and repair by: First, problematizing activist efforts to build solidarity across geographic and contextual divides; second, highlighting the importance of solidarity as shared labor in challenging state actors and institutions and reversing colonial processes; and third, unpacking the implications of transnational solidarity campaigns in different locales. The chapter ends with reflections on how feminist scholarship can advance conceptualizations of solidarity across difference.

Transnational Dimensions of a ‘German Case’: The Expatriation of Wolf Biermann and the Politics of Solidarity in the 1970s

In November 1976, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) announced the expatriation of the dissident singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann, preventing his return from a concert tour in West Germany. This step attracted widespread press coverage and sparked a substantial expression of solidarity by East German intellectuals. This article proposes an alternative perspective on this well-known episode in German history by highlighting its transnational dimensions and its international contexts. Biermann’s work interacted with broader cultural currents of the period, while his political engagement with events in Chile and Spain testified to the importance of transnational solidarity for left-wing mobilizations. Moreover, the article points to two important international factors that are crucial for understanding the events of 1976: the role of Eurocommunism within left-wing debate on the one hand, and the resonance of human rights discourse during the 1970s on the other.

The “Fate of Minorities” in the Early Afro-Asian Struggle for Decolonization

This article explores the significance of minority rights to postcolonial internationalism by examining an emerging Afro-Asian collective at the United Nations in the late 1940s. As postcolonial nations became UN member-states, they fostered transnational solidarity through the Arab-Asian group, a predecessor of the Afro-Asian bloc, and constructed an anti-imperial project that directly engaged with the making of the new international human rights system. However, the Arab-Asian group did not advance minority rights in their struggle for decolonization at the UN. Instead, they favored a gradual path toward formal self-rule and the recognition of national self-determination that worked within the international order, most clearly expressed through the removal of a minority rights article in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The Crystallization and Erosion of Transnational Solidarity

This chapter provides an interpretation of the regional “appeal” of the Pink Tide in Latin America and its more recent deceleration. It details the legitimation strategies of Hugo Chávez and Chavismo, the political project, movement, and regime led by Chávez, along with his regional allies and successors. The chapter suggests that in legitimizing that political project, Chávez addressed the expectations of wide sectors in the Americas, whose voice he claimed to express. By relying on long-existing visions of “Nuestramerican” (Our American) solidarity and providing material assistance to allies, he invigorated the sense of transnational connection for millions of people in the Americas. This layer of regime legitimacy also provided the basis for Chávez’s global realignment and served his foreign policy of defying the hegemony of the United States and its allies. The chapter reconstructs the rise and partial erosion of the encompassing narrative of transnational solidarity and its political implications for regional dynamics.

Exiles as Representatives

This chapter considers whether exiles can advance valid representative claims and under what conditions. The representative claim is implicit in exiles’ efforts to assist those left behind and to enable transnational solidarity with them. But it is often made explicitly, both by those who have formed themselves into governments-in-exile and those who act less formally. The representative claim is powerful. When valid, it grants exiles authority, placing their political claims and preferences on the same footing as those left behind; it empowers them to negotiate and make settlements; and it obligates third parties to defer to them. This chapter identifies three elements of representation—authorization, acting for, and accountability—and assesses the extent to which exiles can satisfy these elements. It identifies the importance of ‘connecting criteria’ between exiles and their putative constituents in the homeland and the role of third parties in ensuring accountability.

Hospitality and transnational solidarity: revisiting Kant’s cosmopolitanism

This article intends to answer the question of the ethics of hospitality, according to a specific objective, that of raising the hospitality to the rank of a philosophical question, with a view to delivering it, in these days, from the calculating game of politics in search of nationalistic votes, and the media spread of the dominant news on terrorism and migrants. Such an approach presupposes that the concept of hospitality fits into the field of the thinkable, that it is welcomed as a knowable host, figure, and object of knowledge. It is a question of asking for hospitality, the cousin of ethics, to think about the welcome and being-welcomed. One of the objectives of this text is to demonstrate that the concern for transnational solidarity is not a new phenomenon and that more than two centuries ago, Immanuel Kant, without forging the concept, already theorized certain issues. It is also true that most contemporary philosophers have addressed this important subject in one way or another. As the theory of international relations is increasingly shaken by the debate between constructivists and postmodernists (or deconstructivists), it seemed interesting to us, instead of studying the contribution to the understanding of transnational solidarity of the main political scientists involved to one or the other current, to look closely at the attempts at theorizing of the founder who is Immanuel Kant. Emphasis will be placed on the duty of transnational solidarity, which is to say on the ethical aspect.

Transnational Solidarity of Salafi ʿUlama

This chapter examines the history of transnational networks of Salafi ʿulama in the context of Islamism. It looks at the emergence of Salafi cross-border connections which began as apolitical, but gradually mutated, witnessing the development of the activist haraki trend. The chapter then examines how both haraki and quietist ʿulama forged regional alliances to preserve their interpretations of political Islam by endorsing other ʿulama of similar views. These interactions cross national boundaries, and take place within the framework of domestic, regional, and global political circumstances. The chapter analyzes whether these political circumstances foster or destabilize the networks of ʿulama as they attempt to construct and maintain Salafi political or apolitical identity.

Transnational Solidarity Organisations and their Main Features, before and since 2008: Adaptive and/or Autonomous?

This article highlights the importance of crisis-related transformations experienced during the 2008–2016 period by transnationally oriented, citizen-led solidarity organisations, a topic that has received scant scholarly attention. It offers an exploratory, comparative analysis of the main features of these Transnational Solidarity Organisations (TSOs) which rests on a comprehensive conceptual framework of ‘alternative forms of resilience’, referring to the ability to bounce back from hardship and meet human needs in challenging times. We apply a new methodology, Action Organisation Analysis, which is based on information coded from organisational websites of solidarity organisations retrieved from online directories. Using a sample of 1753 TSOs, we examine two types of approaches: adaptive (philanthropic, formal, or reformist) and autonomous (mutual-help, informal, or contentious) ones. We document differential transformations for adaptive and autonomous TSOs, as reflected in their major characteristics, that is, their value frames, partners, and routes to achieve their goals and supplementary actions, across time and in three different issue fields: migration, disabilities, and unemployment. Notable are the increasing shifts towards social change and protests, especially for unemployment TSOs, and less so for migration ones. The findings contribute to debates on the impact of crises on activist solidarity organisations by documenting the dialectics of autonomy and adaptation across contemporary social issues, as well as by highlighting the importance of TSOs’ hybrid features. This analysis will also be useful for future work on transnational solidarity organisations and their transitions in a rapidly evolving global society.

Introduction: Comparative European Perspectives on Transnational Solidarity Organisations

Solidarity with the deprived is a mission that many civic organisations share throughout Europe. The various crises, to which the European Union has been exposed to, have fueled and constrained this collective action at the same time. This article offers an introduction into this special issue. It highlights that the objective is to provide sound empirical findings about the magnitude and structure of the organisational field and to offer theoretical insights into the forces and constraints impacting on it. In addition, it presents the unique and new datasets on which the analyses are based on and stresses their comparative approach, given research carried out across fields (migration/refugees, unemployment, and disabilities) and countries (Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Switzerland, and the UK). Finally, the introduction to the special issue argues that the organisational fields are exposed to transformations that point to a more transnational scope of activities and a more encompassing and inclusive understanding of solidarity.