Critical Times 7:3

This special issue, “Solidarity’s Challenge,” confronts the difficulties and contradictions of solidarity. Complicating our understanding of solidarity as a force that coheres and coordinates subjects in perfect unity, the issue’s introduction, scholarly essays, activist reflections, and artistic interventions probe the logics of exclusion underlying certain forms of solidarity and look for new models amid contemporary crises. The contributions to this special issue ask: within the restrictive and statist frameworks revealed by police violence, crackdowns on encampments for Palestine, and regimes of neoliberal austerity, what counterhegemonic forms of solidarity remain possible? Across militarized borders and a territorialized earth, can solidarity take us down new paths, leading us through ”modest tunnels," onto “makeshift barricades, broken ramparts, nomadic ships, steadfast olive trees,” and away from the current political order?