How refugees work together: the politics of solidarity and ‘invisible’ collective action during COVID-19

ABSTRACT

Recent scholarship on refugee assistance has begun shifting the focus from traditional humanitarian interventions to alternative forms of refugee response, undertaken through more local, informal networks. These forms of humanitarian assistance and solidarity can transcend national refugee politics, and function as an alternative form of political engagement with the issue of refugee protection. Much of this emerging literature focuses on how host communities, diaspora networks, and activist groups support refugees. However, we know very little about how solidarities are generated between different refugee groups in the same host state, which has important implications for understanding the ways in which different refugee groups organise and seek to secure their own welfare in shared displacement. This study draws on evidence from India during the COVID-19 pandemic to analyze how such intergroup cooperation in exile develops. I find, first, that refugees navigate their vulnerabilities through informal, interpersonal forms of care and solidarity, which bolsters identification with shared challenges and goals. Second, such solidarities can generate collective action that helps refugees carve out certain spaces of inclusion in a larger context of structural exclusion. Third, the network structure of these solidarities is shaped by existing policy regimes and social relationships in key ways.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugees
• migration
• cooperation
• collective action
• solidarity

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Lauren Carruth, Lahra Smith, and Chantal Berman, whose research provided the groundwork for this project, and to Chantal Berman and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive and encouraging feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Ankushi Mitra

Ankushi Mitra (@ankushi_mitra) is a PhD student at the Department of Government at Georgetown University. She studies citizenship, forced migration, and how non-citizens shape political economies of development.