CCPT seminar: Solidarity, Migration and Imagining Otherwise at Europe’s Borders

Join us for the Centre for Contemporary Political Theory's next research seminar led by Dr Gemma Bird from the University of Liverpool.

Solidarity is an overused but often under-theorised term. One regularly appropriated by EU states to justify their own actions, placing the lives of displaced people secondary to the priorities of border security and nativist politics. But what does it mean to take the concept as it is imagined and enacted by grassroots movements seriously? This paper starts from the assumption that a logic of rights reliant on nation states is failing displaced people seeking asylum at the borders of the EU. It draws on prefigurative politics witnessed and experienced in grassroots solidarity movements as a starting point for theorising a practical logic of solidarity as an alternative. Grounded in seven years of research working with grassroots movements in the Greek border zones of Athens and Samos, this paper, and the broader book of which this is the final chapter, builds a logic of solidarity out of that experience.