Research

Organizing for social justice requires subjects to engage in specific practices that upend structurally embedded injustices—discursive, epistemic, affective, among others. Two such practices, solidarity and allyship, stand out as fruitful options for potential organizers. However, these practices differ significantly in their requirements and demands. Solidarity describes a solidary, or unitary, mode of relating built on cooperation. Allyship, on the other hand, speaks to a hierarchical mode of relating—wherein members from the dominant social group lend their agential power to supporting the interests of the oppressed. Solidarity demands that subjects rely on their own moral understanding of the situation to act cooperatively with those most affected by the injustice, while allyship demands that subjects defer to the needs and desires of those most affected when determining the appropriate course of action.

Although solidarity and allyship both aim to promote social justice, solidarity is the more advantageous practice for realizing it. Moreover, when evaluating actions taken in the name of realizing social justice, a theoretical lens of solidarity offers a more fruitful analysis than one of allyship. Whereas the allyship framework of action essentializes oppressed groups and prioritizes the agency of privileged political subjects, the solidarity framework avoids making reductive claims about the nature and needs of oppressed groups, bolsters the agential power of all cooperating subjects regardless of privilege, and strengthens subjects’ moral understanding of the relevant injustice.

When asked to think of ideal cases of solidarity, what often comes to mind are close-knit groups that fight for a specific, localized cause—labor unions, military units, affinity groups, among others. We consider these sorts of groups ideal cases of solidarity because solidarity is a cooperative relationship that disposes subjects to pursue solidary group ends. Solidarity is the bond of an alliance. And in some cases, solidarity is the bond of accomplices. Nevertheless, these localized, close-knit groups are not the kind of solidarity we see most today. Calls for “solidarity actions” are abundant, requiring subjects and groups to coordinate in support of causes that are not their primary focus. Subjects choose to boycott their favorite coffee chain in solidarity with its striking baristas; students risk expulsion, arrest, and deportation for their acts of solidarity with Palestinians facing genocide in Gaza.

Due to the delocalization of solidarity, there is a worrying trend in the literature to bifurcate solidarity into distinct symmetric (bidirectional) and asymmetric (unidirectional) kinds. Solidarity is classified as "symmetric" when its members engage in reciprocal action and "fate sharing," and as "asymmetric" when it lacks both. However, this distinction between symmetry and asymmetry has a problem: it fails to map onto real cases of solidarity. My aim in this paper is to upend the bifurcation between symmetric and asymmetric cases of solidarity by elucidating how all forms of solidarity share the same function and entail the same motivational structure—one that is neither wholly self-interested nor altruistic. I use this paper to directly challenge the inclusion of reciprocity in symmetric solidarity and the absence of "fate sharing" in asymmetric solidarity. In doing so, I tease out how paradigmatic cases of symmetric solidarity do not exist as theorized and always carry some asymmetry. 

In his 2022 monograph, Paul Katsafanas argues that human beings “crave a form of devotion” (Katsafanas 2022, 6). Further, Katsafanas argues that we do (and should) satisfy this craving for devotion by committing ourselves to sacred values—values that we consider significant beyond all others, values that we would not trade or override for other, less important ones. However, a problem arises when we devote ourselves to sacred values; human beings often become fanatically attached to them, willing to commit grievous harm in their pursuit. 

Drawing on Katsafanas’s theory of devotion, I argue that standing in solidarity can promote the expression of devotion in ways that avoid fanatical attachment to one’s sacred values. As a cause-mediated cooperative relationship that unites individuals through shared moral understanding, solidarity defies the motivational dichotomy between self-interest and altruism (Dishaw 2024; Viehoff 2025, 145–146). In many ways, this makes solidarity, motivationally speaking, the autonomous ideal—the alignment of desire and obligation, the want to perform one’s determined role. As Juri Viehoff writes, solidarity can align one’s ethical life with one’s general moral reasons and duties; it provides moral reasons to invest time in personal projects and personal reasons to act on moral duties (Viehoff 2025, 140–141).

Unlike Katsafanas’s fanatic, whose fragility of self entails “need[ing] to treat a value as sacred in order to preserve his identity” (Katsafanas 2022, 164), the solidaric subject embraces the blurred boundary between self and other. Through the centralization of conflict and grounding in shared moral understanding, liberatory solidarity fosters trusting relationships that allow for a playful form of ironic detachment from one’s individual connection to one’s most sacred values, which, per the prescriptive argument that concludes Katsafanas’s monograph, is how we achieve a healthy and generative attachment to our values. Thus, solidarity affords us an avenue for satisfying our craving for devotion without becoming fanatically addicted to a fixed value or a determined end.

Check back soon :)

If solidarity is necessarily exclusionary (us vs. not-us) and requires something shared between members, can it help us combat problems directly threatening all humanity? Can we use it to overcome issues that primarily threaten non-human subjects, such as animals or even the earth itself? In this project, I elucidate the role of solidarity in social perseverance amid environmental crises, focusing on two potential avenues of solidaric perseverance—a solidarity with all of humanity and solidarities with non-human subjects.

Solidarity, as conceived in my dissertation, A Theory of Solidarity: Devotion, Asymmetry, and Interdependence, is “a form of mutual (not reciprocal) cooperation against an imposing problem/injustice, grounded in shared moral understanding and material interdependence” (Grippo, n.d.). Effectively, solidarity is a relational stance responsive to the material interdependence of all subjects. By cohering a shared moral understanding of the relevant problem or injustice, solidaric subjects leverage their unique social position to act in concert toward shared ends, sharing in the stakes with fellow comrades. In my picture, solidarity is neither purely an ontic description of groups and power nor solely an individual disposition or attitude, and it is most certainly not grounds for reciprocal obligations. Solidarity is a way of being an ‘I’ and a ‘we’ simultaneously; it is the collective coordination of desires, of devotion.

My conception of solidarity, like most before it, rests on embedded (or sometimes explicit) humanist assumptions about agency, dependency, and understanding. Requirements such as shared moral understanding (Dishaw 2024) and will-dependency (Viehoff 2025) pose a problem for the possibility of interspecies solidarity. Similarly, my conception of solidarity—again, like most before it—makes solidaric relations necessarily adversarial or exclusionary. To fight for something means necessarily fighting against something, as well. And to fight against something means not cooperating with those who knowingly and actively approve of and contribute to that something. Yet, environmental crises do not discriminate; they can (and often do) affect all—human and non-human alike. Moreover, many human subjects epistemically reject the role they and other humans play in environmental crises and their downstream impacts and harms. Thus, the solidaric relationship is confounded.

Ultimately, this project impacts: (i) social ontology, by challenging longstanding understandings of the shared agency involved in solidarity, and (ii) normative political philosophy, by arguing for the necessity of solidaric organizing in the face of environmental crises. Beyond the discipline of philosophy, this project offers practical insights for implementing policies and structures to mitigate and overcome environmental crises discussed and beyond.

Abstract TBA.