The Value of Solidarity

This series has made the case, piece by piece, for why a change in the way humanitarian action operates is necessary, starting with refugee-led organisations as missing actors in this system. Part 1 argued why locally-led rather than merely localised action; Part 2 why equity rather than the equality trap to fix this exclusion; and, in Part 3, why agency rather than just meaningful participation.

This time I want to turn to yet another actor that has been missing in the design of the humanitarian system: ourselves, in the Global North. The only form of engagement most people are ever offered is a donation button after the next disaster leads the news. In many ways, it is the same issue, seen from the other end of it: just as refugee-led organisations are too often treated as mere recipients of aid rather than actors of their own work, the public here is too often treated as a mere wallet rather than a constituency. Fixing one without the other leaves the whole system half built.

I think the “Donate” engagement model has showed its limits, and I don't believe it's a failure of public compassion.

I think the “Donate” engagement model has showed its limits, and I don't believe it's a failure of public compassion. When solidarity is reduced to individual giving, it can only ever be reactive: one crisis, one appeal, one moment of attention competing against the next. There are, simply, too many crises now for that model to hold. Ask anyone in humanitarian communications and they will tell you, often with real anguish, that appeal fatigue is not a myth invented by cynics. It is what happens when the only relationship on offer is transactional, repeated so often that the transaction itself starts to feel hollow. We should not be surprised that people tire of it. We should be surprised that we built so little else.

"Our priorities are here"

We hear the argument constantly now, dressed up in the reasonable-sounding language of national priority: with tight budgets, our priorities are at home, so international aid must be cut. It has the appearance of practical realism. It is, in fact, a false choice, built on the assumption that solidarity abroad and wellbeing at home are in competition.

I want to be direct about this one point, because it matters to me personally as much as professionally: when a government cuts humanitarian funding and calls it a defence of "our priorities", it is not speaking for me, and I suspect it is not speaking for a great many of the people whose taxes it is spending. Not in my name!

Not in my name!

That is a statement I hold to be true and it is also an aspiration for what CALLS Network exists to help build: a constituency in Global North countries willing to say, out loud and somewhere it can be heard, that their priorities are not as narrow, or as zero-sum, as we are told the budget lines suggest.

The retreat from humanitarian solidarity also rarely arrives alone, and it is worth naming the company it keeps. "There is no money" has become the standard justification not only for cutting humanitarian budgets but for underfunding public health, education, public transport, or basic infrastructure many Global North countries used to take for granted. The underlying argument, that these are unaffordable, competing costs rather than choices about how a shared tax base gets spent, belongs to the same conversation that social justice and tax justice advocates have been having about domestic austerity for years. Seen this way, the humanitarian budget line is not a special case. It is the same argument, made loudest about the people with the least power to answer back.

The democracy question underneath the aid question

There is a second argument: the retreat from humanitarian solidarity tends to travel alongside a broader political move: the rise in hate speech, the spread of mis/dis-information, in particular about refugees, the domination of divisive discourses, and the erosion of public spaces where we can debate complex questions such as these. As though they had a simple answer - us here, them elsewhere, no further conversation required. I don't think that is only a humanitarian problem. I think it is a democratic problem too.

I don't think that is only a humanitarian problem. I think it is a democratic problem too.

It is a democratic problem born from there being nowhere left for people to have a complex and informed conversation with people who may see it differently, without that conversation being over-simplified and curdling into hostility and exclusion.

Humanitarian action generates common goods

So here is another part I think gets lost: humanitarian action generates common goods that benefit everyone involved, not only the people it directly serves in the Global South. Public health protection is one of the clearest examples, but water sanitation programmes built to serve displaced communities do not stop their benefits at the camp boundary; and anticipatory humanitarian action helps reduce impact on shared ecological systems and natural resources. The same logic holds for the normative architecture that most of us never think about at all: International humanitarian and human rights law can feel abstract and far removed from daily life in the Global North, but an erosion of rights abroad is an erosion of rights everywhere, including protections we tend to assume, often wrongly, will always hold for us.

There is a useful frame for transnational solidarity, which defines it, at its simplest, as "organization and action between distantly situated others to address adversity based on shared humanity, identity, experience or interest/cause”.[1] Humanitarian solidarity with refugees usually rests on the first of those foundations. But it can just as easily rest on the fourth: a shared interest, in the same way climate action or supply-chain protections do, where the case for acting together has nothing to do with pity or charity and everything to do with a shared stake. That, more than moral appeal alone, is an argument for why this should matter to people who have never met a refugee in a camp and may never do.

The case for solidarity

As the humanitarian landscape faces increasingly complex, prolonged, and interconnected crises, we have a unique opportunity to make and advance the case for solidarity to have its own place in the humanitarian normative framework. Of course, solidarity is not new to humanitarian action. However, explicitly embedding solidarity into modern humanitarianism would reframe affected communities, including refugees, as partners and would acknowledge that human suffering is frequently linked to systemic injustices and political decisions elsewhere.[2] Solidarity is also a collaborative, horizontal working methodology that would further support community-led action and equitable partnerships.

Liana Ghukasyan writes that “Many leading thinkers have called for solidarity as a central ethical principle in this century. Hannah Arendt saw solidarity as the antidote to moral detachment. Pope Francis has framed solidarity not as charity, but as “a social attitude born of personal conversion,” rooted in the common good. Judith Butler speaks of solidarity as the recognition of our shared precarity, while political theorists like Iris Marion Young argue that global justice is impossible without a commitment to shared responsibility.”[3]

That, to me, is why building a movement of local solidarities with refugee-led organisations in humanitarian action in the Global South is not a separate nice-to-have; it is a small and deliberate act of democratic maintenance, at a moment when a great deal of democratic infrastructure is eroding. And it contributes to reshaping the humanitarian system as it speaks yet again to inclusion – the inclusion of an actor that has been kept on the margins: donor publics and constituencies in the Global North.

Solidarity and fundraising – Yes!

At a time when raising funds for humanitarian action has never been more urgent, we have also seen what community solidarity has been able to do in this field. Hungarian civil society's experience over the past decade and a half is instructive: as institutional funding narrowed under sustained democratic backsliding, community philanthropy grew.

“Community foundations appeared in cities across Hungary, creating new opportunities for local giving and local decision-making. Giving circles emerged. Live crowdfunding events brought neighbours, businesses and local initiatives into the same room, not only to raise money but to strengthen relationships and a shared sense of responsibility for their communities.”[4] As György Hámori put it, “none of this required large institutions or significant financial resources, it required relationships.” That is close to the whole argument of this piece in favour of local solidarities and fundraising also becomes another form of civic engagement.

Community solidarities are one of the few remaining spaces for the complex conversations required to re-build humanitarian action. A room, physical or otherwise, where people meet regularly enough to learn, disagree, build relationships, stay in contact with each other and with people directly affected by displacement, rather than retreating to their respective corners, co-design initiatives and raise funds to support community-led humanitarian interventions.

The power of proximity

Underneath everything I have argued so far, however, sits a human problem: distance.  Solidarity can become selective, warmer toward crises that look familiar, colder toward those that don't.  Guarding against that selectivity is exactly why solidarity needs to be structural rather than sentimental: a way of "sticking together while standing one's own ground," rather than a mood that changes with the news cycle.

Modern humanitarian communication has become extraordinarily good at making suffering visible and, in the same motion, keeping the person suffering unknowable. A face on a screen, seen once, in the worst moment of someone's life, then replaced by the next face and the next crisis, is not a relationship and it often raises a diffuse, undirected sadness and sense of helplessness that have nowhere to go and no one to be accountable to.

Proximity is the opposite of that. I don't mean physical proximity - most of the solidarity this series has been arguing for will always be geographically distant, by definition, since it connects the Global North with the Global South. I mean something relational: knowing someone's name rather than their statistic, hearing directly from the people doing the work rather than through an appeal written on their behalf, building an equitable relationship and staying in that relationship long enough to watch it change – and change you - over time.

Rebuilding deliberately this kind of proximity is one of the central design tasks facing any serious solidarity movement today.

Intentional infrastructure design

As I wrote above, I don't believe we are dealing with a failure of public compassion. There are too many examples of outbursts of solidarity to list here. The challenge is to turn these episodic moments into sustained practice. Building Movement Project talk in this regard of “solidarity infrastructure. “When we talk about solidarity infrastructure, this is the intentional architecture that transforms episodic moments of solidarity into sustained transformative practice.”[5]

At CALLS Network, we are convinced that we need a transnational solidarity infrastructure to help solidarity with refugees in the distant Global South last, and a solidarity infrastructure that is inclusive of diverse constituencies in the Global North.

Such solidarities are also close to what scholars of grassroots organising call transversal: people who are differently positioned - by geography, by legal status, by history - coming together not by pretending those differences away but by holding them openly, in dialogue, without either side being asked to disappear and by building a relationship across them, deliberately and over time.[6] That is a more demanding standard than most public debate currently allows, and I think it is precisely the standard democratic life needs to hold onto right now.

How we try to build it, at CALLS Network

At CALLS Network we build this as a network of Local Solidarity Groups, some rooted in university campuses, some in neighbourhoods, others in workplaces, or around an idea or a project. The Local Solidarity Group in The Hague for instance, is made up of refugee and migrant women themselves, organising economic solidarity on their own terms, while in Spain, volunteers have decided to create a formally registered sister organisation, CALLS Network Spain, and focus on supporting refugee economic inclusion programmes specifically.

This cannot be built as a single-country project. The pressures behind this piece - shrinking international aid budgets, retreating civic space, "us first" politics - are moving in similar forms across Europe, in Canada and the United States, and again in Australia and New Zealand. Everywhere, we seek to build the relationships necessary to sustain this solidarity infrastructure.

This is where proximity becomes a design choice. We build direct lines of contact between Local Solidarity Group members and refugee leaders and their teams in the Global South - video calls, shared projects, direct exchanges - in keeping with what practitioners elsewhere in the giving sector are increasingly arguing: community-driven giving works best the less intermediated the connection actually is.[7]

And we ask for very little to start. As Madeleine Ballard has written about organising for change more generally, "when something big won't move, the problem is usually that it's too big."[8] So a new Local Solidarity Group isn't handed a five-year strategy: it organises itself around a public event, a relationship with one refugee-led organisation; it facilitates connections needed by refugee leaders; it raises a small amount that goes straight to the partner refugee-led organisation. A foothold, the kind of small win that will help the group strengthen and take the next solidarity action.

This is, in the end, what researchers studying this kind of organising mean when they describe it as "an active practice of solidarity, deliberately shaped at the grassroots level."[9] None of that happens through appeals alone. It happens because people keep showing up to the same room, month after month, and are supported in their efforts.

That, in the end, is what I mean by solidarity beyond giving: a different relationship, one built to last longer than the next headline, and sturdy enough to hold the argument that our common humanity was never actually divisible by geography.

[1] Margit van Wessel, "Transnational Solidarity: A Comprehensive Definition," Wageningen University & Research.

[2] Marnie Lloydd, "'Sticking Together While Standing One's Own Ground': The Meanings of Solidarity in Humanitarian Action," International Review of the Red Cross 106, no. 925 (2024): 269–300 (quoting Darryl Li, "The Universal Enemy: A Reply," The Immanent Frame, 8 July 2020).

[3] Liana Ghukasyan, “Maybe It’s Time for a New Principle: The Principle of Solidarity”, IFRC Solferino Academy Thought Pieces, 30 October 2025.

[4] György Hámori, Roots and Wings Foundation, "What Grew While Democracy Was Shrinking?," Global Fund for Community Foundations.

[5] Adaku Utah, Building Solidarity Infrastructure as a Survival and Civic Strategy, The Solidarity is This Podcast, 22 July 2026.

[6] Suzan Ilcan, Seçil Dağtaş, and Lana Gonzalez Balyk, "Transversal Community-Building: Fostering Women's Collaboration and Solidarity Across Differences in Cyprus," Migration and Society 8 (2025): 249–264.

[7] Australian International Development Network (AIDN), "From Local to Global: Unlocking Community-Driven Giving," aidnetwork.org.au.

[8] Madeleine Ballard, "Run the Room: The Case for Winning Something Small."

[9] See Suzan Ilcan, Seçil Dağtaş, and Lana Gonzalez Balyk.