International Solidarity as a Human Right, Shared Goal, and Community Action

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.