If Migration was Boring
A friend sends a link to CNN’s website, another report on the Italian coast guard racing to save 400 migrants adrift on a boat, somewhere in the Central Mediterranean, and another boat, with 800 persons, also stranded in the vast expanse of the sea. But the headline and the actual text of the report are contradicting each other as to who it is that is racing to provide help, the headline claims it is “rescue workers,” not the coast guard. We notice the embedded video clip, the familiar banner reads “Migrant Crisis: Italy launches multiple rescues to save hundreds of refugees.
Five Solidarity Vignettes from the South African Anti-Apartheid Struggle
In 1981, the Technical Committee of the African National Congress (ANC) started experimenting with computer programming and the automation of encryption to counter the oppression, violence, and surveillance of the apartheid regime. The goal was to find a way to speed up underground communication between freedom fighters in exile and those on the ground in South Africa.
"Viva Nicaragua Libre!" The Longevity of Political Slogans in Transnational Solidarity Movements
The claim “Nicaragua Libre” has influenced actions and expressions of solidarity with Nicaragua in Germany over the past four decades. Based on the continued identification with the political struggle and revolutionary potential of the Nicaraguan people, this contribution dwells on the temporal and political transferability of slogans surrounding transnational solidarity activism.
A Ubiquitous Wetness
This text was written six months after the cataclysmic 2022 floods in Pakistan. These floods were widely recognized as an unprecedented catastrophe marking the beginning of a new era in the climate crisis. The disaster primarily hit Pakistan’s southern provinces of Sindh and Balochistan and left most of Sindh, the province that I am from, underwater, killing thousands, and displacing an estimated 33 million people. Struggles around water, and resistance against dam and drainage infrastructures in particular, have been constitutive of the political and cultural identity of Sindh since the inception of Pakistan in 1947. This struggle takes many intrepid and ecstatic forms, often bringing together devotion and dissent, protest and prayer. The sounds shared below were recorded during my travels in the region in the months after the floods.
Solidarity between catastrophic singularity and disastrous individualism
There is a mainstream impulse to look at deeply political and social issues like environment, war, racism, etc. as isolated catastrophes limited in time and space, which require urgent response. A catastrophe here carries the connotation of a sudden, unexpected, and singular event detached from the broader social, economic, and political structures that yield these catastrophes and shape the lives of marginalised communities.
The Hole and the Bus: Carceral Infrastructures of Counter-Solidarity
The US prison system is the constantly evolving product of centuries of research and experimentation in the dissolution of solidarity. Of the prison regime’s many programs, which do not always run in neat harmony, counter-solidarity enjoys a special privilege and guides many of the prison’s operations.