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119 AJIL Unbound 1 (2025)

handle is hein.journals/ajilunbo119 and id is 1 raw text is: 







doi:10.1017/aju.2025.1


  INTRODUCTION TO THE SYMPOSIUM ON TRANSDISCIPLINARY APPROACHES TO
                     MIGRANT SOLIDARITY IN THEORY, LAW, AND PRAXIS

                       Alexandra Delano Alonso,*  Violeta Moreno-Laxa &  Jaya Ramji-Nogaleso

   The  essays in this symposium   engage  critically with the relationship between solidarity rights and migration
(as mediated  by law), seeking to explore the conflicts and tensions inherent in responses to the mobility of people
from  the perspectives of solidarity actors (solidarians), legal scholars, and social scientists. This transdisciplinary
conversation  examines  the concept of solidarity and its different manifestations, paradoxes, and possibilities when
it is deployed in response to the needs of migrant populations or as a call to support or accompany their struggles
and  mobilizations. Each  essay reflects a conversation between activists and organizers, social scientists, and legal
scholars, engaging questions around  solidarity, migration, and law from different positions and with different con-
cerns while speaking  to a common   theme.  Solidarity takes different shapes: rights-based, discursive, institutional,
experiential, sometimes  manifested  as transgressive, collective risk-taking, other times as the community-based,
horizontal-egalitarian recognition of shared humanity. The  essays identify the context in which migrant solidarity,
in its numerous  conceptualizations,  currently operates, and  the multiplicity of challenges it faces. The authors
describe a broad range  of reactions to these obstacles, elucidating the spaces in which solidarity locates and lever-
ages power  despite and in direct response to hostility, xenophobia, and oppression. Finally, the conversations dem-
onstrate in theoretical and concrete terms solidarity's promise: the possibility of reconceptualizing approaches to
migration  and law to further emancipatory   ends. None  of these are tidy dialectics with neat solutions; the essays
expose  the messiness  of contemporary   attitudes toward migrants,  engaging with  the profound  pain they inflict,
and  yet locating opportunities for contestation, self-actualization, and transformation.

Solidarity in a Context of Illegalization

   The  conditions  in which  migrant  solidarity currently operates are adverse,  subject to state strategies that
impede  and  curtail solidarity with irregularized populations. Law emerges, in this context, as a system of control
and  subjugation targeting non-citizens. As the essays in this symposium  expose, law is used to stratify status and
create layers of deservingness,  distributing power   unevenly  and introducing   divisions across nationality and
racial lines that become legitimized.1 The  intolerable becomes  legal through  a system that marginalizes  certain


   * Professor of Politics and Global Studies, The New School, New York, New York, United States.
   a ICREA Research Chair, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain & Professor of Law (on special leave), Queen Mary University of London, London,
United Kingdom. The piece was finaliZed while Visiting Professorial Fellow at the Hertie School, Berlin, Germany.
    Associate Deanfor Research & I Herman Stern Research Professor, Temple Law School, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States.
    Authors are listedin alphabetical order to reflect the non-hierarchical solidaristic co-production ofknowledge underpinning this essayv, entailing a trans-disciplinary
collaboration among scholarsfrom different backgrounds and non-academics.
    Lisa Ariemma, Cecilia Bailliet & Nayelli Torres-Salas, Transversal~olidarity as aHuman Right, Shared Goal, and Communiy Action, 119 AJIL
UNBOUND  30 (2025); Joyce De Coninck, Alexandra Delano Alonso & Haddy Gassama, Solidarity as a Force for Systemic Change, 119 AJIL
UNBOUND  36 (2025).

         © The Authors 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press for The American Society of International Law This is an Open  1
         Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecornmons.org/licenses/by/
         4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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