Solidarity and Global Inequalities

This contribution argues for the need of a critical perspective on ideas and practices of (international) solidarity within a context of global inequalities and across colonial, racialised, and gendered hierarchies and differences. It does so by discussing theoretical debates on solidarity within the social sciences, particularly sociology, political sciences, anthropology, (moral) philosophy, law, and history, in four steps. The first part briefly revisits the history of the term solidarity up to the present, while the second part introduces different theoretical and conceptual approaches to different dimensions of solidarity. The third section discusses a series of contemporary debates and controversies surrounding the notion of solidarity, and the last section engages with critical approaches to solidarity across and beyond (global) inequalities from the perspectives of critical race, critical migration, decolonial, and feminist studies. This is because, as this contribution argues, most of the dominant and hegemonic perspectives introduced in the first three parts fall short in addressing (global) inequalities and differences within encounters of solidarity across racialised, colonial, and gendered axes. Therefore, solidarity, particularly in the context of global inequalities, should not remain an isolated concept within disciplinary boundaries but rather requires an intrinsically transdisciplinary field of solidarity studies, which are informed by a wide array of insights from different disciplinary backgrounds as well as the interdisciplinary discussions between those.