Drawing from the experiences of thirty-two refugee women who fled with their children from Ukraine to two German cities, Berlin and Frankfurt Oder, this article explores how being a refugee and a mother affects the anchoring, along with the un-anchoring and embedding of Ukrainian refugees in their new environment. It illustrates that solidarity practices and (inter)actions play a crucial role in mobility considerations, as the interlocutors engaging in solidarity work find meaning in building lives in their new environment. The identities of the interlocutors as refugees and mothers play an important role in shaping the solidarity they articulate as they work to support others in a similar situation in cultivating agency, which, at the same time, gives the interlocutors comfort in their own struggles. This article also makes a valuable contribution to the scholarly literature on transnational family ties through the case of Ukrainian refugee women in Germany, who often have family members remaining in/returning to Ukraine. The interlocutors positioning as mothers and refugees means that they engage in negotiating mobility considerations with these positions in hindsight — providing new avenues of enquiry into the agency of refugee-mothers, reflecting on life aspirations, and considering their specific positionalities and forced migration context.

During the global COVID-19 pandemic, many countries have expanded the level and coverage of current social insurance and social assistance programs as well as implemented new programs. Based on three separate datasets, V-Dem V-Party dataset; fourteen structured expert interviews; and a dataset of 114 social security measures, we study the link between the welfare regime, pandemic-related social policy measures, and incumbents’ ideological stand. Does the pandemic-related social policy measures mirror the political attitudes of the incumbents? What role did the welfare regime play? We scrutinise eight OECD countries (Denmark, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, UK, and the US) representing three different welfare regimes: corporatist-conservative countries, liberal countries, and socio-democratic countries. The key findings of this article show that the pandemic-related social policy measures did not mirror the political attitudes of the incumbents.

Mounting U.S. research suggests many non-White individuals feel solidarity with, and identify as, people of color (PoC). Yet measurement limitations prevent scholars from testing whether these constructs are empirically different. We explain why these concepts diverge and evaluate our claims with an expanded battery of measures across U.S. Asian, Black, Latino, and Multiracial adults (N = 3402). Using multi-group confirmatory factor analysis, we show these items capture related but distinct concepts among PoC (configural invariance). We then establish that these items uniformly measure each construct across PoC groups (metric invariance), with mean level differences validly reflecting actual heterogeneity between groups, rather than measurement artifacts (scalar invariance). Finally, consistent with our conceptualization, we show that solidarity among PoC mediates the association between PoC identification and support for policies that implicate various communities of color. We end with practical advice for using these items in surveys of racially diverse populations.

Global digital integration is desirable and perhaps even inevitable for most States. However, there is currently no systematic framework or narrative to drive such integration in trade agreements. This article evaluates whether community values can offer a normative foundation for rules governing digital trade. It uses the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Digital Trade Protocol as a case study and argues that identifying and solidifying the collective needs of the African region through this instrument will be key to shaping an inclusive and holistic regional framework. These arguments are substantiated by analysis of the regulation of cross-border data flows, privacy and cybersecurity.

In recent years, anti-refugee hate crimes have soared across Europe. We know this violence has spread fear among refugees, but we know less about its effects on the non-refugee population. This is an oversight, as research suggests political violence often has effects on the broader population. Those effects can range from increased solidarity with the targets of the violence to reduced pro-social behavior and less support for the targets of the violence. In this research note, we examine the effects of exposure to anti-refugee hate crimes in Germany. Our results suggest no direct effect of exposure to anti-refugee hate crimes on support for refugees. These results have several implications for our understanding of political divides over refugees in Europe.

Understanding why citizens are willing to finance public goods is central to development and state capacity. Taxation can contribute to the common good, yet particularly in developing contexts, citizens may not benefit – or contribute – equally from such resources or across their lifetimes. How do taxpayers link solidarity to the practice of paying taxes? Taxation makes solidarity visible, but taxation practices also produce and shape solidarity. To enable further scrutiny of the perceived linkages between taxation, ideas around redistribution, and solidarity we develop a framework of imagined solidarity, which differentiates between affective and calculative solidarity on the one hand, and personal and generalised solidarity on the other hand. Using data from focus groups with formal sector workers in Namibia, we illustrate how taxpayers link solidarity to the practice of paying taxes along these dimensions; demonstrating the usefulness of this framework for the further study of fiscal interconnectedness, also beyond Namibia.

In this article, the author explores the cooperative aspects of mound construction in Late Iron Age Scandinavia. Arguing against the outdated but widely held view that only centralized rule could organize monument construction, he investigates how participation in mound construction affected the people of Sør-Fron in south-eastern Norway. He contends, first, that repeated participation in mound construction helped create a sense of belonging and shared identity, which was maintained through centuries of major environmental and political turmoil. Second, mound construction was part of an active and conscious strategy to limit aggrandizement and prevent centralization and concentration of power. Rejection of Christianity arguably worked in similar ways. The author concludes with considerations of approaches to Iron Age monuments, emphasizing the importance of consensus and community-building and the role of communal opposition to centralized rule.

With a focus on politicians’ and medical experts’ gratitude expressions in UK government COVID-19 briefings, this research describes how perspective and intensity were modulated in expressing gratitude to realise different pragmatic intentions. This corpus-assisted analysis finds that retrospective or prospective gratitude expression was adopted by the two British elite groups to build solidarity (encouraging) and/or make requests (directing) for protecting public health. Gratitude of varying intensities was expressed (e.g. by highlighting metaphorical dimensions such as WIDTH and DEPTH) to correspond to the importance of a benefit (judged by how much the given benefit matches the receiver’s needs and preferences) and/or to implicitly display the evaluation of the benefactor’s responsibility and efforts. We tentatively formulate a dynamic model of gratitude expression in public discourse and shed light on the metaphorical conceptualisation of English gratitude expression and the power of gratitude expression in boosting social cohesion and directing social actions in a discourse of crisis.

Ananya Dance Theatre generates a framework for “contemporary dance” as choreography which enacts its solidarity with the land of Native peoples. Artistic director Ananya Chatterjea mobilizes her contemporary aesthetic, “Yorchhā,” through the company's alliance with Indigenous peoples’ worldviews on land and water protection, especially through their relations with Dakota and Anishinaabe persons. Dance analysis of the pieces “Moreechika: Season of Mirage” (2012), “Shaatranga: Women Weaving Worlds” (2018), and “Shyamali: Sprouting Words” (2017) shapes contemporary dance through its engagement with Native persons’ caretaking labor for the environment and the position of these relations in the choreography. A practice of humility emerges as the cornerstone of solidarity in contemporary dance due to the necessity for longstanding Native invitation and engagement, Indigenous narratives and embodiment in the dance pieces, and lessons learned from the pitfalls in intersecting techniques such as Ananya Dance Theatre's with Native people's lifeways and knowledges.

The notion of solidarity, although not new to the humanitarian sector, has re-emerged in recent discussions about effective and ethical humanitarian action, particularly in contexts such as Ukraine and Myanmar where the traditional humanitarian principles have been facing certain pressures. Because solidarity appears as a good but can also involve selectivity and privilege, and because it risks continued militarism and normalization of civilians participating within that militarism, the notion of solidarity merits rich and rigorous thinking. This article explores how the notion of solidarity is being utilized by those currently re-emphasizing its importance and what it might mean in practice in today's humanitarian contexts. The article argues that if solidary action involves not only a political stance but solidary working methods, the recent calls for solidarity demand respect for the variety of principles and practices within the humanitarian ecosystem, while nevertheless upholding mutual obligations owed within that professional community – that is, within careful limits as to what is considered humanitarian action.