In the aftermath of the 2018 migrant caravans, the Mexican government arrested two migrants’ rights activists,1 but not because they gave food or donated clothes to the caravaneros. The transgressive nature of their activism consisted of walking and organizing alongside people whose presence in the country was unauthorized. They were charged with smuggling-related crimes; but they were really “guilty” of solidarity. In this essay, we outline what solidarity entails, what compels various actors to join in, and to what end. From an interdisciplinary perspective, we discuss the “what,” “where,” “who,” and “why” of solidarity. The purpose is to open a new epistemological horizon, providing tools to collectively reflect on the complex issues at the intersection between solidarity, migration, and law.

In this essay, we examine legal and political challenges to solidarity with and among migrants. We begin by describing the disturbing and powerful turn toward de-solidarity, particularly in some Global North countries, that threatens to undermine the global refugee and migration law regime. Politicians seek to capitalize upon racial fears of migrants from the Global South to reject solidarity (with the latter group) as a concept and pursue anti-immigrant laws and policies. We next examine anti-solidarity, as shown by the criminalization of humanitarian assistance as migrant smuggling. Both de-solidarity and anti-solidarity operate through law and race to constrain human mobility and amplify the vulnerability of humans on the move. Yet then, whereas law and politics seek to prevent solidarity, praxis and resistance fosters it. In other words, solidarity toward and among migrants materializes in the very locations where law exerts violent control, despite and arguably because of the troubling, or even abject nature of those spaces. Anti-solidarity and de-solidarity inflict harm on migrants, at the same time that they can lead to resistance and change. Examining solidarity and its challenges from these three different angles (the de-solidarity trend, the manufacturing of humanitarian assistance as a crime, and the shelter-space) we explore the forms of solidarity and support that, in spite of the law, continue to emerge on the migration pathway and refuse to wane.

The criminalization of humanitarianism has become prevalent in the Global North.1 Overbroad definitions of the crimes of migrant smuggling and the facilitation of irregular migration are commonplace in Europe and the United States,2 despite their well-known perverse effects on the rights of organizers and civil society at large. The “crimmigration”3 paradigm is so pervasive that there is little debate across the political spectrum on the legitimacy of a criminal law response to solidarity-based engagements with non-citizens,4 especially those in an irregular situation. Countries of destination have normalized hostility vis-à-vis (irregular) migrants and their allies and firmly entrenched it in the legal regime. By contrast, this essay aims to illustrate how law can paradoxically also serve as a medium to articulate solidaristic action following an egalitarian conception and mobilization of legal norms. Challenging state-centric visions, such forms of action transform law into a space of coming together across power divisions, jointly organizing, and collectively countering injustice.

What is the relationship between solidarity and international migration law? For migrants facing a contemporary politics of nationalism and xenophobia, solidarity offers the potential to transcend borders, reshaping the popular imaginary and potentially the law. This essay presents a conversation between a legal scholar, a solidarian, and a social scientist, exploring the challenges that must be carefully navigated to avoid replicating prevailing power hierarchies and undermining existing humanitarian ethics. It engages with three questions: whether international law can further solidarity with migrants; whether human rights law can address the risk that solidarity will replicate existing power hierarchies; and whether solidarity downgrades existing international legal obligations toward migrants, rendering them optional benevolent acts toward “outsiders” rather than legal duties toward “insiders.” The essay contends that a viable path forward must recognize both the ambivalence of solidarity and international law's shortcomings in enabling solidarity.

This essay explores three approaches to understanding international solidarity in contexts of migration: as a human right, as a shared goal, or as community-driven action. From a legal perspective, international solidarity has been enumerated as an enabling right that facilitates the exercise of other substantive human rights. An international solidarity-based approach to rights expands the range of actors, incorporating civil society groups as rights-holders, and international organizations and non-state actors as duty bearers. A social science lens might foreground a transversal approach to international solidarity, embracing difference in pursuit of equity. In other words, international solidarity can be conceptualized as a plurality of actors pursuing shared goals across different struggles while rejecting homogeneity. From the vantage of activism, international solidarity can be understood as a force that can enable migrants and deportees who have been excluded and invisibilized to connect particular and local struggles to different local struggles and even transnational struggles. It can counteract dehumanization and portend hope by highlighting the ripple effect that social movements and their work can have on a range of disadvantaged communities. In all three approaches, international solidarity reinforces human connection but with a different emphasis: on the expansion of opportunities to exercise rights, on the recognition and valuing of pluralism, and on the collective power that can be leveraged to encourage social change.

Invocations of solidarity often appear to be merely rhetorical. In contrast, in this essay we seek to show that solidarity can be a potent force for systemic change. We focus on a particular kind of solidarity—experiential solidarity—which is rooted in shared and lived experiences. In doing so, we de-center the role of states as targets and agents of solidarity and foreground the communities that are actively “doing” human rights by fostering bottom-up social change and collective self-actualization. Our approach to solidarity recasts human rights entitlements across spatial, temporal, relational, and intersectional scales and brings different duty-bearing actors to the fore, thereby emphasizing the transformative potential of collective action. Our account bolsters the agency of non-state actors in pursuing rights-based protection of migrants, thereby enabling strategic and forward-looking action in a politically and emotionally charged domain.

The invitation to consider the “critical aftermath” of international criminal law (ICL) and “what happens next?” raises, for us, the suggestion of a new possibility emerging from the ruins—not only the ruins of atrocity, but also of law's response to atrocity. Yet ICL, we suggest, is lying in wait: it remains a powerful and violent actor, poised to activate and reinforce the prominence and monopoly of carceral justice, even out of the ruins. To counteract the dominance of carceral justice, we suggest learning from the tradition of abolition geography. By this we mean engaging in an act of “reconstruction place-making,”1 whereby we mix our labor with the world and (re)make the world by bending the “narrative arc” toward freedom.2 More specifically, we seek to embrace an abolitionist geography by offering a conception of countercultural visions of justice, drawing from a vignette of the worldwide movement of university encampments for Palestine. With this, we contribute to deepening reflections on a counterculture of international justice rooted in epistemologies of Black feminist and abolitionist praxis.3

Black feminists in the United States have made sophisticated arguments for the abolition of the prison industrial complex, of which criminal law is a crucial component. This literature offers a materialist critique of the carceral system, demonstrating the centrality of prisons for processes of both dispossession of Black communities, and accumulation of capital through the extraction of Black labor inside prisons. In this essay, I explore the potential and limits of an abolitionist critique of international criminal law (ICL), and I argue that there is a danger of losing the radical edge of Black feminist scholarship if its insights are transplanted without its explicitly anti-capitalist politics.

Inspired by the symposium editors’ call to reclaim and reimagine some or all of the space that is currently populated by international criminal law (ICL), we take this opportunity to engage in what we are calling feminist dreaming—that is, we seek to reimagine accountability as it could be, viewed through a feminist lens. Drawing on the work of standpoint feminists, such as Nancy Hartsock, we examine how the punitive mindset has taken hold from the top down, with little regard for or consideration of what those most acutely harmed, who are often women, want. Instead, international actors, often elites educated in the West, have mandated a certain ideal of justice from above through legal principles like the duty to prosecute. This focus on punishment narrows the lens through which “justice” is perceived and administered. It imposes a single perspective—that of a supposedly uniform global community—on affected communities, preempting other forms of justice that may have greater healing potential, including those with restorative or redistributive aims. In this sense, ICL can be seen as inflicting a form of epistemic violence.1 Instead of inquiring into, and respecting, the perspectives of victims, survivors, and their broader communities, it seeks to impose a viewpoint: only punishment will produce justice. This contribution takes a small step toward reimagining justice under the international legal order.2 We employ a standpoint feminist lens to first surface some of the harms ICL inflicts and then suggest a course correction that centers the voices of the most marginalized—in other words, we begin feminist dreaming.

Every May 18, mourners gather near the sandy beaches of Mullivaikkal, a small strip between Chundikulam and Mulltaitivu in the Northern province of Sri Lanka, to commemorate the 2009 genocide against the Tamils. Mullivaikkal is where approximately three hundred thousand Tamil civilians found refuge as they fled the military bombardment between January and May 2009.1 Starting in 2010, the remembrance day commemoration attracts thousands of locals, coming together near the beach to reflect and remember. Increasingly, the commemoration also attracts transitional justice experts, along with diplomats and international governmental organization workers. In my contribution, I reflect on the work of the local and diaspora Tamil transitional justice experts as they begin to gather evidence from the families of victims for the newly created 2024 Commission for Truth, Unity and Reconciliation. Drawing on Homer's The Odyssey and the story of the “lotus eaters,” I frame these experts as “truth eaters,” preoccupied with collecting victim narratives for the purpose of personal gratification. As they engage in the repeated collection of particular elements of the victims’ truth—elements predicated on the demands of the field of transitional justice—the truth eaters are oblivious to the root causes of the war. I explain how attention to root causes through a Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) lens can avoid the effects of the dominant liberal modes of truth seeking reflected in the work of these truth eaters.

This essay examines the unfinished as both a diagnostic and a tactic for how we engage with the terrain of international criminal law (ICL). The diagnostic: recognizing that justice struggles against a five-hundred-year racial-capitalist world order are unfinished and ongoing. The tactic: seeking opportunities for strategically interrupting ICL procedures to keep the ends of justice an open question. In articulating this notion of the unfinished, this essay analyzes the implications of this diagnostic for challenging and troubling how justice is defined and delimited within the terms of ICL, while also exploring the strategy and tactics of “unfinishing” in reframing the ends of ICL.