Organizing solidarity in difference: Challenges, achievements, and emerging imaginaries

Abstract

This special issue explores how solidarity in difference can be organized as a mutual relation that is based on participation on equal footing, fostering bonds of heterogeneity beyond conceptualizations of solidarity that depend on homogeneity. In this editorial and the five articles comprising this special issue, not only are the challenges to such an endeavor explored, but also the achievements in the present and emerging imaginaries of organizing solidarity beyond an exploitative understanding of difference. The perspectives this special issue brings together include re-centering the Eurocentric concepts of organizing and solidarity, solidarity in research, solidarity as affective practice as well as the political and socio-economic relations that frame them. In addition to promoting an understanding of subjectivity shaped by power relations embedded in multiple social experiences, the articles in this special issue elaborate on solidarity in difference rather than a benevolent solidarity with difference and contribute, accordingly, to an understanding of organizing solidarity that starts from principles of radical interdependence, mutual recognition, and universal participation. Without neglecting the pitfalls and obstacles to organizing solidarity, this special issue hopefully sparks new debates on and informs new practices of solidarity in difference as there cannot be one single way to achieve this.