Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2-24-2025
Source Publication
AJIL Unbound , Volume 119 , 2025 , pp. 13 - 18 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/aju.2025.7
Abstract
In this essay, we examine legal and political challenges to solidarity with and among migrants. We begin by describing the disturbing and powerful turn toward de-solidarity, particularly in some Global North countries, that threatens to undermine the global refugee and migration law regime. Politicians seek to capitalize upon racial fears of migrants from the Global South to reject solidarity (with the latter group) as a concept and pursue anti-immigrant laws and policies. We next examine anti-solidarity, as shown by the criminalization of humanitarian assistance as migrant smuggling. Both de-solidarity and anti-solidarity operate through law and race to constrain human mobility and amplify the vulnerability of humans on the move. Yet then, whereas law and politics seek to prevent solidarity, praxis and resistance fosters it. In other words, solidarity toward and among migrants materializes in the very locations where law exerts violent control, despite and arguably because of the troubling, or even abject nature of those spaces. Anti-solidarity and de-solidarity inflict harm on migrants, at the same time that they can lead to resistance and change. Examining solidarity and its challenges from these three different angles (the de-solidarity trend, the manufacturing of humanitarian assistance as a crime, and the shelter-space) we explore the forms of solidarity and support that, in spite of the law, continue to emerge on the migration pathway and refuse to wane.
Repository Citation
Okafor, Obiora C.; Sanchez, Gabriella; and Soto, Sarah, "The Solidarity Spectrum: De-Solidarity, Anti-Solidarity, and Resistance" (2025). Articles & Book Chapters. 3323.
https://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/scholarly_works/3323
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Comments
© The Authors 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press for The American Society of International Law.
"This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited."