While solidarity lies at the heart of collective action, it is not easily achieved. Social movements are characterized not only by difference within activist ranks but also by power asymmetries that reflect broader domination and distrust. The concept of intersectional solidarity is central to contemporary social justice movements’ efforts to negotiate these divisions, but how can it be achieved? To answer this question, we offer some guidelines for enacting intersectional solidarity, drawing on a theoretically grounded examination of three contemporary social movements in the United States and abroad (Occupy, Gezi Park, and the Women’s March).

What is the relationship between social movements and polycentric governance? The concept of polycentricity has been at the center of recent debates in environmental governance. While most of this work has analyzed polycentric arrangements in relation to collaborative and adaptive governance, some have recently focused on how political conflicts shape these arrangements. In this paper we build on this work through Luther Gerlach's forgotten framework of polycentric social movements to undertake the task of politicizing polycentricity. This task entails expanding the analytical focus of institutional analyses of polycentricity and examining the social group politics of social movements. To this end, we present a case study of the climate justice movement and its relation to climate change governance. We analyze whether and to what extent the movement has embodied polycentric arrangements throughout its history, and to what effects. We show that show that, in seeking to address the multiscalar nature of environmental problems and the limits of existing institutional arrangements, climate justice groups are increasingly organized in a polycentric fashion. Climate justice groups mobilize multiple strands of environmental justice movements from the global North and South, as well as from indigenous and peasant rights movements, and it is organized as a decentralized network of semiautonomous, coordinated units. We find that this strategy generates new opportunities and challenges for the movement, and thus has important implications for its effectiveness in achieving these transformations. Lastly, we find that through these polycentric arrangements, movements such as that for climate justice are able to exert simultaneous influence on multiple sites of environmental governance, from the local to the global, furthering increased polycentricity in formal institutional arrangements.

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This article offers a theoretical and empirical exploration of a form of solidarity in which one group spontaneously mobilizes in support of another, unrelated group. It is a fleeting solidarity based not on shared identity but on temporarily aligned goals, one aimed less at persistence and more at short-term impact. We call this drive-by solidarity because of its spontaneous, unilateral, and unsolicited nature. We argue that it is a “thinner” form of solidarity in comparison to “thicker” forms usually conceptualized in the social movement literature. We examine the case of Anonymous’s “Operation KKK” (#OpKKK), an online hacktivist campaign to expose Ku Klux Klan members carried out in support of #BlackLivesMatter protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, in November 2014, and we use social media data to show that, while BLM and Anonymous networks temporarily coordinated during the protests, there is no subsequent evidence of long-term coordination.