This chapter explains the reasons for the popularity of the anti-Iranian movie Not Without My Daughter in 1990s Türkiye despite the country’s own harrowing experience with Hollywood’s Midnight Express (1977). In conjunction, I analyze a moment of failed outreach from Iranian woman reformists to a devout, US-educated Turkish woman politician called Merve Kavakçı, who was denied her seat in parliament because of her headscarf in 1999. The chapter demonstrates how US discourses and Iran–Türkiye comparisons influenced the work of Turkish and Iranian women’s activists who sought to expand Muslim women’s political participation and reform repressive clothing codes in the 1980s and 1990s.

This chapter investigates how advantaged group members perpetuate and deepen inequality, setting the stage for Chapter 4, which addresses their actions to reduce inequality in solidarity with disadvantaged groups. The chapter begins by discussing various forms of material, symbolic and systemic advantages that benefit advantaged groups. It then explores the psychological mechanisms that enable these groups to deny their privilege and engage in competitive victimhood, positioning themselves as aggrieved to justify their entitlement to discriminatory and repressive tactics. Further, this chapter also addresses more extreme manifestations of these behaviours, such as repression, hate crimes, genocide, and colonisation. The psychological processes that sustain these actions, including diffusion of responsibility, system justification, and desensitisation, are discussed. The chapter also considers the intersectional nature of privilege, highlighting how different identities, such as gender and economic status, influence the experience of advantage and perpetration of discrimination and violence.

Chapter 7 elaborates on the extensive empirical corpus analysed in the preceding chapters. It reinforces the comparative points and clarifies the general patterns emerging in the book. It also expands our reflections on the meanings of modern transnational war volunteering, especially as seen through the conceptual lens of internationalism. The chapter presents conclusions regarding the ideological and organisational dynamics of transnational war volunteering as a left-wing political practice in the twentieth century. These findings open up new perspectives on mobilisation patterns pertaining to transnational volunteering, potentially moving the discussion away from top-down directives or impersonal indoctrination tools to a greater appreciation of the significance of contingency and horizontal influences shaping volunteer behaviour. Elaborating on these findings, the concluding chapter thus offers new conceptual registers to comprehend the phenomenon of left-wing war volunteering in the twentieth century.

This chapter explores the role of ideologies (i.e., socially shared belief systems) to justify or challenge existing social systems. The chapter begins by defining ideologies and examining their origins, focusing on how they are shaped by socialisation, collective identities, and power relations. It then discusses system-justifying ideologies, such as right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation and belief in a just world, which legitimise inequality and attribute privilege to merit. In contrast, the chapter also explores system-change ideologies that challenge inequality and promote social change, focusing on the psychological processes that lead advantaged group members to embrace these ideologies and become allies. Psychological dynamics underlying allyship and solidarity are also discussed. In sum, the chapter highlights the complexities of allyship, noting that motivations can vary and that intersectional privileges can either foster or undermine solidarity, depending on shared identities and norms within groups.

The rise of the “gig economy” has translated into demands for “flexible,” “creative,” and precarious labor. This development subtends both a decline in reading and cultural representations of decline, which often include a pernicious longing for the disappearing stability of the cubicle and the suburban middle class. Four twenty-first-century US novels, Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris (2007), Zakiya Dalila Harris’s The Other Black Girl (2021), Severance by Ling Ma (2018), and Luster by Raven Leilani (2020), negotiate cubicle nostalgia by representing the work of representation. They ask what comes next, at the end of the novel or the end of the world. They find in the meaning-making industries the remnants of the increasingly futile search for meaningful work. Solidarity, in these books, is sometimes impossible, sometimes elusive and contingent. While neither the publishing industry nor the art markets truly offer a means of survival or validation, some of these novels imagine that those most punished by too late capitalism might train their eyes to see new options. At the end of literature, in the shadow of the climate reports, perhaps clear vision might emerge from a willingness to look both death and our need for each other in the face.

This chapter provides an overview of the emergence of a body of literature that emplots Indigenous material realities and forms of knowledge into Latinx literature’s representational horizon. These texts mark a significant transition, moving away from an understanding of Latinx identity rooted in a mythological Indian past, and focusing instead on a diverse array of issues grounded in Indigenous identities, experiences, and epistemologies. These include explorations of the liberatory potential in transnational feminist solidarities, the thematization of contemporary manifestations of settler colonialism, the foregrounding of land-based knowledge, and the celebration of the creative power and insurgent force of the erotic. Focusing on works by Graciela Limón, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Natalie Diaz, and Alan Pelaez Lopez, the chapter argues that these writings collectively depict Latinx Indigeneity at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and colonialism, raising complex issues with respect to overlapping and ongoing histories of colonization and fostering an opportunity for centering Indigenous experiences while interrogating the multiracial character of Latinidad.

This chapter attends to Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019) as an exemplary text in the burgeoning corpus of Latinx solidarity narratives in the United States in the twenty-first century. The chapter focuses on the narrative innovations that Luiselli orients toward the task of envisioning new terms for pan-ethnic solidarity. The chapter shows how, at a time of renewed Latinx literary attention to the experiences of Central Americans fleeing violence in the isthmus, Lost Children Archive stylizes a narrative of pan-ethnic solidarity through strategies of scrupulous narratorial self-awareness and an ethical refusal to represent the experiences of ethnic others. In spite of these innovations, however, the chapter also demonstrates how the novel reiterates and amplifies certain essentializing expressions of unity that characterize Sanctuary Movement–era narratives from the 1980s and 1990s.

A pragmatic approach to international human rights law involves discussing its premises, principles like human dignity, liberty, equality, and solidarity, and structural principles such as democracy, pluralism, and the rule of law. The chapter also examines the conditions, matters, and actors involved in the discussion. It explores how these principles are applied in practice and the challenges faced in their implementation. The chapter emphasizes the importance of a pragmatic approach that considers the practical realities of applying human rights principles in different contexts. It also discusses the role of various actors, including states, international organizations, and civil society, in promoting and protecting human rights.

The three empirical chapters correlate to the three phases spread over the Nehru years where India first started out by adopting a highly critical stance towards world politics. This constructive phase reached its high point in the Bandung Conference of 1955. This position fell into flux in the latter half of 1956; by this point, the ambiguities once nurtured in order to help define India’s positions on political issues were now used to justify them in a political language. By the early 1960s, non-alignment went into its third phase where it was used to mandate the use of force for the purposes of peacekeeping. The Epilogue considers this movement as discussed in the three phases and offers some final remarks.

This chapter explores the political theory within this educational work. It draws on self-produced works, cassettes, photocopied pamphlets, song sheets, and lyric books collected from people’s own archives as they returned from Khartoum, and the interviews, group translations, and discussions of these works and photographs conducted during their collection. These texts, poems, and songs are engaged in critiques of their authors’ economic, political, racial, and social circumstances; they build competing political philosophies and set out a spectrum of ideas about the future. Together the discussions across these projects centred on the possible shape and extent of a new political community rooted in common Black experience of exploitation and marginalisation, versus a political community drawing on more specific ethnic or localised parameters, based on a more conservative and pessimistic reading of the war economy and its futures. At the same time it contains shared common critiques of the civic and moral failings of the wealthy, apathetic, culturally promiscuous, and politically ignorant.

In this chapter, Ezrahi argues that the massive discrediting of claims of objectivity has deeply weakened the social authority of professional communities and institutions – governments, scientists, and economists – which have heavily resorted to professionalism in order to seemingly depoliticize decisions and empower their legitimacy. The dual role of objectivity norms and objectification strategies in depoliticizing decisions while concealing value-political choices is scrutinized. The delicate balance between overpoliticization and over-objectification is examined, emphasizing the challenges faced by governments in navigating transparency and political functionality. The chapter traces the interconnected erosion of the transcendental concept of Nature, democratic culture, and the rule of law. The loss of objectivity in law, exemplified by challenges to the Israeli Supreme Court, underscores the broader decline in civic solidarity. The chapter concludes with an exploration of the cultural and epistemological crises facing modern democracy, raising critical questions about resources available for shaping new imaginaries of self-governance and justice, drawing on historical cosmological transformations.

Chapter 8 draws together the major themes of the analysis and prompts further thinking on decolonial feminist modes of conflict resolution. This chapter concludes that the UN’s attempt to stay relevant through developing mediation expertise is counterproductive, and contends that it should instead adopt a solidaristic approach that foregrounds politics and aims to produce ‘knowledge encounters’ between different worlds. The bulk of the chapter discusses some principles for decolonial feminist approaches to mediation, which include encounters across different ontologies of peace, decolonising expertise, solidarity, and establishing relations of care and accountability.