Between circulation and reproduction: rethinking solidarity in an age of pandemic and war

The call to transform solidarities begs the issue of how to conceptualize international solidarity at a time of in¬creasing global fragmentation, regionalization, and cen¬trifugal multipolarization. Perhaps because our writing collaboration spans two extremities of the world, soli¬darity for us has never been easily localizable. There has always been an elsewhere, which means that practical matters of social relationality, reciprocity, and common¬ality have had to confront the politics of translation, ex¬periences of social discontinuity, and even incommen¬surability. Doubtless, the question of how solidarity works between people who do not know each other or who share little has been a perennial issue for social theory. Yet, the specter of an elsewhere introduces factors that cannot be easily grasped within the geographical frame of scale or the familiar social science binary of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. We understand these di¬lemmas and challenges to be implicit in the concept of migrant society, which informs many contributions to the present volume, even as we recognize that concept to provide a provisional and strategic means of negoti¬ating the workings of solidarity within a frame of social cohesion haunted by classical sociological expectations. In this chapter, we bring together an analysis of solidar¬ity with a conjunctural approach to the contemporary world system, seeking to understand how geopolitical and geoeconomic turmoil inflect and condition possibil¬ities for political alliances and struggles that stretch across the proliferating borders of a planet troubled by climate change, pandemics, and war.