Ambivalent North-South Relations: Solidarity and Epistemic (In)Justice Dynamics In Social Movements and Transnational Communities

In an era marked by intersecting global crises—including climate change, armed conflict, democratic backsliding or economic inequality—questions of solidarity have become central. Across the globe, activists and communities mobilize around shared concerns that transcend national borders, generating new forms of transnational solidarity and collective action. Yet such solidarities emerge within deeply unequal global structures shaped by colonial legacies, geopolitical hierarchies, and asymmetrical distributions of resources and political influence. Processes of solidarity are therefore inseparable from dynamics of exclusion, fragmentation, and desolidarization.

This panel explores the ambivalent role of North–South relations in collective action. We invite contributions that examine how solidarities are forged, negotiated, and contested across unequal global contexts, as well as how they are dealing with nationalism, securitization, geopolitical conflict, and competing political interests. Simultaneously, the panel addresses the epistemic dimensions of these relations. Within transnational movement networks themselves, questions of knowledge and recognition are deeply contested: whose experiences count as politically relevant, which concepts travel across contexts, and which do not, and how these asymmetries shape collective action and solidarity practices. Movements and prefigurative communities in the Global South have developed rich traditions of knowledge production, yet these are frequently marginalized. This raises questions about epistemic justice not only in academic research, but within solidarities activists seek to build. By bringing together diverse theoretical, methodological, and empirical perspectives, the panel seeks to advance critical debate on the possibilities and limits of political and epistemic solidarity in a world increasingly shaped by global interdependence and desolidarization.