Make Solidarity Great Again: Mutual Aid, Transnational Alliances and Democratic Renewal

In an era defined by an accelerating polycrisis, in which the climate emergency, rising authoritarianism, and the aggressive financialization of global capitalism converge to erode the very foundations of social cohesion, solidarity demands radical sociological re-imagination. Moving beyond top-down development paradigms, this session examines how civil society organizations (CSOs) and grassroots movements advance movement-driven alternatives to current structural shocks, reinventing solidarity and prefiguring alternative futures. Grounded in the mandates of the Research Committee on Social Transformations and Sociology of Development (RC09) and the Research Committee on Social Movements, Collective Action and Social Change (RC48), this session fosters rigorous international scholarly exchange. Scholars, early-career researchers, and practitioners are invited to explore, using comparative and multi-sited perspectives, on these emergent forms of global solidarity arising from collective action under conditions of systemic crisis. The session welcomes contributions exploring: 1) grassroots and horizontal forms of mutual aid that are being practiced within communities facing displacement, deportations, precarity, and other forms of structural violence (undocumented workers, war refugees); 2) transnational forms of solidarities and alliances forged in the context of developmental projects in Africa, the Americas, the EurAsian region and Asia; 3) the everyday practices of care, resource-sharing, and collective action that sustain communities subjected to structural violence across developmental regions.