Movements that acknowledge solidarity are necessary – although to the untrained eye, it is hard to witness it is needed to have movements that stand in solidarity

On Solidarity Given the racialized and colonial history of the mainstream environmental movement, it is particularly interesting that academic discussions of solidarity in the environmental movement rarely engage the politics of racialization and colonialism. Nowhere in the literature do we fi nd a substantial exploration of how race and colonialism shape the context of environmental solidarity, either making solidarity all the more necessary in response, or refl ecting on the ways in which solidarity itself may remap racial and colonial logics (Gaztambide-Fernández 2012). Because this is largely overlooked in the writing on environmental coalitions, we look to other social movements that were founded explicitly to do solidarity work. We take this up with the goal of off ering participants in the mainstream environmental movement an expanded language with which to think about how we disrupt the whiteness and settler coloniality of environmentalism. Th e idea of solidarity is taken up in vastly diff erent ways across literatures, from philosophy and political theory (Bayertz 1999; Hooker 2009; Scholz 2008), to feminist theory (Dean 1996; Mohanty 2003), to curriculum studies (Swalwell 2013; Gaztambide-Fernández 2012; Lissovoy and Brown 2013), and beyond. Th e most common thread connecting these ideas is the shared belief that “solidarity” is used inconsistently and is in need of more systematic theorization (Bayertz 1999; Gaztambide-Fernández 2012; Power and Charlip 2009; Sundberg 2007; Wilde 2007). We can see that diversity across articles on solidarity rooted in movement contexts, many of which are written by scholar activists embedded in solidarity campaigns. Th ese articles explore movements including Latin America solidarity (Finley-Brook and Hoy 2009; Olesen 2004; Power 2009; Sundberg 2007), accompaniment (Coy 1997; Koopman 2012; Mahrouse 2014; Weber 2006), anti-sweatshop (Armbuster-Sandoval 2005; Cravey 2004; L. Featherstone 2002; Traub-Werner and Cravey 2002), fair trade (Hussey and Curnow 2016; Polynczuk-Alenius and Pantti 2016; Wilson and Curnow 2013), Palestine (Bakan and Abu-Laban 2009; Gale 2014; Pollock 2008; Stamatopoulou-Robbins 2008; Tabar 2017), HIV/AIDS (Klug 2005), and other movements. In this article, we focus on solidarities that bridge place and power—there is extensive writing about solidarity in the labor movement, recent histories of South-South solidarities, especially those sustaining anticolonial revolutions (Tabar 2017), as well as what Nishnaabe scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2017) labels “co-resistors,” including Black-Brown solidarity (Tuck et al. 2014). While these solidarity praxes may prove quite instructive to environmentalists, they operate from distinctive sets of politics. Th ese examples foreground shared experiences of exploitation across impacted groups, whereas the ideas of solidarity we take up here are predicated on disparate social locations, as we will interrogate in subsequent sections. Works taking up solidarity rooted in movement usage rarely make their defi nition explicit. In most of these discussions, solidarity is understood to be activism in one place—geographical, socioeconomic, political—that works to defend the rights of people in a diff erent place (Passy 2001; Olesen 2005; Sundberg 2007). Various authors outline the core philosophies of solidarity work, suggesting that solidarity is defi ned by its attention to work on behalf of others (Finley Brook and Hoyt 2009; Gould 2007; Power and Charlip 2009; Sundberg 2007), though they also stress that solidarity should be diff erentiated from charitable work on behalf of others (Kraemer 2007). Sara Koopman (2012) recognizes that the diff erence is foundational to solidarity activists, though arguably diffi cult for the untrained eye to recognize. Th ese articles suggest that while charity makes no eff ort to disrupt oppressive systems or imbalances of power but rather helps people within existing systems, solidarity is constructed as a process of amplifi cation (Hechter 1988, Koopman 2012) or standing alongside (Brown and Yaff e 2014, Shohat 2001). Th ese campaigns are understood as being based in shared political vision (Finley-Brook and Hoyt 2009; Gale 2014; Gill 2009; Hussey and Curnow 2016; Mahrouse 2014; Power and Charlip 2009; Rippe 1998; Tabar 2017), though this is not without complication. Solidarity thereby avoids reinforcing power imbalances through mechanisms of empowerment or help, but instead recognizes that the work undertaken is a shared goal of all participants in the solidarity eff ort (Pickerill 2009). With this understanding, North-South solidarity work is not solely for the benefit of Southern activists: it is in service of a more just and livable planet for all, or shared liberation (Routledge 2003).