global solidarity possible essay

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Opening Essay for GTI Forum Can Human Solidarity Globalize?

Richard Falk

The Imprisoned Imagination

As the COVID-19 pandemic slowly subsides, it is not clear what lessons will be drawn by political leaders and publics around the world. Entrenched power, wealth, and conventional wisdom have demonstrated the overwhelming resilience of the global order even while the virus continues to ravage many national societies. Despite some notable exceptions revealing extremes of solidarity or discrimination, efficient competence or irresponsible partisanship, this reversion to the status quo occurred at all levels of social organization from the village to the world, especially the sovereign state.

For the most part, rich and powerful governments used their leverage to corner the vaccine market, allowing a draconian market-driven logic to drive distribution that privileged intellectual property rights and technical knowhow, leading to grotesque disparities in vaccine access between the peoples of the North and those of the South. It has become a truism to observe that no country will be safe from the virus, or its variants, until the entire world is vaccinated. Never had the self-interest of the species so vividly and concretely coincided with an ethos of global solidarity. And yet such an ethos did not materialize. We must search for explanations and correctives.

A people-first approach to the global health emergency would have transcended statist and profit-making domains at all phases of COVID prevention and treatment, and situated them within a global commons framework. Such an approach might have dramatically heightened prospects for the social transformation at the heart of the Great Transition and would at least have restored some confidence that the human species, at least in an emergency, is capable of meeting the challenges of the Anthropocene. As the pandemic instead revealed the resounding strength of statist structures and private sector interests, it seems necessary to acknowledge this tragic interlude as but one more lost opportunity for the human species to awaken from its prolonged slumber before it is too late.

To some extent, the failure has been masked by the newfound generosity of some countries as the sense of a world health emergency receded and such countries' virus supplies exceeded national demands. In a spirit of philanthropy rather than solidarity, shipments of the virus to countries in need were made, recipients often selected on the basis of pragmatic diplomatic advantage. Perhaps charity towards those less fortunate can be considered a weak form of solidarity, even if filtered by political leaders motivated by selfish national interests.

More than ever, we must face the question: can the peoples of Earth, doomed to share a ravaged planet, learn to live together in ways that encourage our species to flourish in an emergent future? The concept of a Great Transition invites us to reimagine such a future by exploring what might be possible, which requires an initial willingness of the imagination to let go of the trappings of the present without engaging in wishful thinking. Such a balancing act is not as straightforward as it sounds. What was science fiction a generation ago is increasingly entering the realm of the possible, and even the feasible in the near future. It is an opportune time to explore the seedlings of possibility sprouting around us, inscribing a more hopeful mapping of the human future in the prevailing collective consciousness.

On What is Possible

“ Some men see things as they are and say ‘why?’ I dream of things that never were and ask ‘why not? ’” — George Bernard Shaw

We must start by rejecting conventional foreclosures of the imagination. We cannot accept that politics is “the art of the possible” if the “possible” remains circumscribed by the play of current forces of stasis, confining the idea of change to policy shifts at the margin or—at the most ambitious—elite-driven national revolutions. The structures of state and market remain essentially untouched and continue to run the show. As long as these constraints are not removed, the Great Transition will be stymied. The first challenge is to find effective ways to subvert and transform these primordial structures. Meeting this challenge starts with liberating the mind from ingrained conventions that solidify the ideological biases of modernity.

If we carefully consider our own lives, we are likely to appreciate how many epochal public happenings had been previously deemed “impossible,” or only seemed possible after the fact. A potent illustration of the tyranny of a status quo bias is Winston Churchill’s derisive attitude toward Gandhi during the early stages of the rise of Indian nationalism. Dismissive of any threat to Indian colonial rule, Churchill described Gandhi as a “malignant subversive fanatic” and “a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace.” The great British war leader displayed his attachment to a Western understanding of power that had little insight into historical circumstances vulnerable to anti-colonial nationalism.

Similar patterns of the seemingly impossible happening are evident in contemporary history, such as the peaceful ending of the Cold War followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union; the American defeat in the Vietnam War despite overwhelming military superiority; China’s half-century rise from mass impoverishment and backwardness to prime geopolitical challenger, including threatening Western mastery of innovative technology such as AI, G5 connectivity, robotics, and genetic engineering; and the abandonment of apartheid by South Africa in the face of nonviolent resistance from within and anti-apartheid solidarity from without.

What these examples demonstrate is that our understanding of the scope of the possible has been artificially circumscribed in ways that protect the interests of various elites in the maintenance of the status quo, making it seem reckless and futile to mount structural challenges however justified they may be morally or bio-politically. Such foreclosures of imagined futures have been key to the protection of institutions like slavery, discrimination, and warfare but often remain limited in scope to specific locales or policy areas. The uniqueness of the Anthropocene is to restrict the possible to unsustainable and dysfunctional structures and modes of behavior, while bringing to a head the question of finding more viable ways of organizing life on the planet and living together in a manner that protects future generations.

Such foreclosures of the imagination inflict damage both by shortening our temporal vision and by constraining our understanding of useful knowledge. Despite what science and rationality tell us about the future, our leaders—and, indeed, most of us—give scant practical attention to what is needed to preserve and improve the life prospects for future generations. Given the scope and depth of the challenges, responsible anthropocentrism in the twenty-first century should incorporate a sense of urgency to temporal axes of concern. We now need a “politics of the impossible,” a necessary utopianism that stands as an avowal of the attainability of the Great Transition. We must begin by interrogating the semantics of the possible as a cultural, political, economic, and ideological construct binding humanity to a system that is increasingly bio-politically self-destructive for the species and its natural habitat.

Closely connected to this foreclosure of our temporal vision has been a scientifically conditioned epistemology asserting the limits of useful knowledge. Within the most influential epistemic communities, an Enlightenment ideology prevails that sets boundaries limiting productive intellectual inquiry. The positive legacies of the Enlightenment in grounding knowledge on scientifically verified evidence rather than cultural superstitions and religiously guided prejudice and dogma are real and important, but there have been costs as well. Notably, a bias against subjectivity discourages normative inquiry and advocacy, which is dismissed as “non-scientific.” The noted Confucian scholar Tu Wei-Ming has powerfully criticized the impact of what he calls “instrumental rationalism” on the capacity of Western civilization to embrace the value of empathy, which he views as integral to human dignity and humane governance.

We need a moral epistemology to achieve responsible anthropocentrism, exploring right and wrong, and distinguishing between desirable and diminished futures, not as matters of opinion, but as the underpinnings of “normative knowledge.” Universities, split into specialized disciplines and privileging work within the Enlightenment paradigm, are largely oblivious to the need for a holistic understanding of the complexities and solidarities with which we must grapple in order for humanity to extricate itself from present structures that divide and fragment the human experience, strangling possibilities.

It may be helpful to distinguish “the feasible,” “the necessary,” and “the desirable” to further illuminate “the pursuit of the impossible.” In short, “the feasible” from the perspective of the status quo seems incapable, under the best of circumstances, of achieving “the necessary” and “the desirable.” We will need to pursue “the desirable” to mobilize the capabilities needed to engage effectively in realizing “the necessary.”

If existing conditions continue, the bio-political destiny of the human species seems destined for dark times. In the past, before the Nuclear Age, we could ignore the future and address the material, security, and spiritual needs of bounded communities, and success or failure had no ramifications for larger systems. Now we must find ways to attend to the whole, or the parts will perish and likely destroy one another in the process. St. Francis found some fitting words for such an emancipatory path: “Start by doing what is necessary, then what is possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible.”

Traditional Worldviews

When seeking alternative worldviews not defined by states, empires, or markets, many have turned toward the pre-modern realities and cosmologies of native peoples. Recovering that pre-modern worldview might be instructive in certain respects, but it is not responsive to the practical contours of contemporary liberation. Retreat to the pre-modern past is not an option, except as a result of a planetary calamity.

Instead of the realities of localism and tribal community, our way forward needs to engage globalism and human community, and to affirm that such strivings fall within the realm of possibility. We must reimagine a sense of our place in the cosmos so that it becomes our standpoint: a patriotism for humanity in which the whole becomes greater than the part, and the part is no longer the dominant organizing principle of life on the planet. Understanding the interplay of parts and wholes is a helpful place to begin this transformative journey. Parts are not only enclaves of space on world maps, but the separate identities of race, gender, class, belief, and habitat. An ethos of human solidarity would not eliminate differences but would complement them with a sense of commonality while sustaining their separate and distinctive identities. Such an ethos would generate new modes of being for addressing the challenges of transition.

For this to happen, a sense of global solidarity must take over the commanding heights of the imagination rather than continue to inhabit echo chambers hidden in underground hiding places far from the domains of policy formation.

Global Solidarity Must Rise as the Great Transition Unfolds

Without global solidarity, the structural features of the status quo will remain too deeply entrenched to allow a more cooperative, peaceful, just, and ecologically mindful world to emerge. Such a benevolent future is blocked by the prevailing consciousness in government and corporate board rooms, a paralyzing blend of ignorance, denial, incrementalism, and most of all, an unconscious respect for and deference to fragmenting boundaries that make global solidarity seem “impossible” to achieve. Assuming the paralysis has been overcome by an enhanced conception of the possible, then what?

Global solidarity would benefit humanity functionally, ethically, ecologically, and spiritually. Its functional role is most immediately obvious from a problem-solving perspective. Whether we consider vaccine diplomacy, climate change, or nuclear weapons, it becomes clear that only on the basis of human solidarity will we treat vaccines in the midst of epidemics or pandemics as part of the global commons rather than as a source of national diplomacy, international property rights, and pharmaceutical profits. With climate change, whether we will manage a displacement of national and financial interests on the basis of general global well-being depends on achieving an unprecedented level of global solidarity. Similarly, with nuclear weapons, will we find the courage to live without such weaponry within a security framing that represents the well-being of people rather than the shortsighted hegemony of a few governments and their self-regarding societal elites?

Higher measures of global solidarity would enhance the quality and nature of global governance. Even if the defining unit of solidarity remained the sovereign state rather than the human being, a sense of global citizenship could underpin a much more robust United Nations whose membership sought shared goals proclaimed by its Charter rather than the competition that has been its dominant experience, especially on issues of peace and security. The world economy would become much less tied to militarized forms of security, freeing resources for peace-building processes. From a broadening sense of global identity we could also expect a much more effective approach to biodiversity, preserving, for example, the rainforests and polar regions as indispensable aspects of our common heritage. And as heightened empathy would accompany global solidarity, there would be a greater tendency to take human suffering seriously, including poverty, displacement, and the victimization that follows from natural disasters and political strife.

Perhaps the greatest benefits of global solidarity would be felt ethically and spiritually. We can presume that the collective self of a world exhibiting high levels of global solidarity would shift loyalties and identities. The enmities of difference (race, nation, religion, gender, class) would lose their primacy, replaced by a different calibration of “otherness”—perhaps with the cosmos regarded as the great other of the earth. It seems reasonable to anticipate the emergence of a less metaphysical religious consciousness inspired by the greater harmonies on earth and a growing experience of cosmic awe as knowledge of this larger realm spreads and is reinforced by mind-broadening experience such as space tourism.

Do We Have the Time?

An ethos of global solidarity led an idealistic group of jurists in 1976 to draft the Declaration of the Rights of People to be implemented by a Permanent Peoples Tribunal, and many inquiries have been carried out since to hold states and their leaders symbolically accountable for violations of international law. People throughout the world have organized many civic initiatives in defense of nature and of peace.

Recently, Bolivia and Ecuador enacted a text devoted to the Rights of Mother Nature. New Zealand passed a law recognizing that animals are sentient beings with a legal entitlement to decent treatment. A movement is underway to regard “wild rivers” as subjects of rights, prohibiting the construction of hydro-electric dams. Civil society groups in Europe and South America have formed the International Rights of Nature Tribunal to protect various natural habitats from predatory human behavior.

Within the wider orbit of UN activities, many quiet undertakings involving health, children, food, cultural heritage, and environment proceed in an atmosphere of global solidarity interrupted by only occasional intrusions from the more conflictual arenas of the Security Council and General Assembly. There are no vetoes, and partisanship is kept at a minimum.

Gestating within the cultural bosom of world civilizations and world religions have been subversive ideas of global solidarity. Philosophic and religious affirmations of unity in ideas of “cosmopolitanism” have garnered increasing numbers of adherents. Growing attachments to nature proclaimed in many forms gives rise to loyalties that find no place on world maps or national boundaries. Fears of future catastrophe by way of nuclear war and ecosystem collapse expand awareness that present arrangements are not sustainable, thereby making many persons receptive to creating other more inclusive forms of organizing life on the planet.

Transition is not off in the distance or only in dreamscapes or science fiction imaginaries; it is happening around us if we only learn to open our eyes and hearts to the possibilities now emerging.

Concluding Thoughts

We cannot know the future, but we can know that the great enhancement of global solidarity would underpin the future we need and desire. Although this enhancement may currently seem “impossible,” we know that the impossible can happen when the historical moment is conducive. This century of interdependent risks and hopes has germinated the possibility of human solidarity globalizing. We know what is to be done, the value of struggling on behalf of our beliefs, and the urgency of the quest. This is the time to dedicate our hopes and indeed our lives to making the Great Transition happen, that is, learning to live in accord with the ethical and ecological precepts of responsible anthropocentrism .

Can Human Solidarity Globalize?

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As an initiative for collectively understanding and shaping the global future, GTI welcomes diverse ideas. Thus, the opinions expressed in our publications do not necessarily reflect the views of GTI or the Tellus Institute.

The Im/Possibility of Global Solidarity

By Catherine Keller

Recently I found myself part of a conversation about the question: “Can Human Solidarity Globalize?” At first, political philosopher Richard Falk’s question sounds straightforward. But as one attempts to frame an answer, it takes on the hint of a Zen koan. An answer of “yes” is barraged by its “but…but…but” so quickly as to empty into impossibility—which leaves us no better off than a blunt “no.” But politics, with wide impact on people’s lives, can’t settle for “no.” As Falk writes, politics is “the art of the impossible,” and the purpose of this art is to liberate the possible.

I would start here: inasmuch as human solidarity does not globalize, it fails to exist. A solidarity of the human is by definition global, for this species has long been spread around the globe. Human solidarity—not divisible into colored fragments denoting countries on a world map or into solidifications of one human collective over against another—is necessarily planetwide. And that is the case even before we take on the ecological meaning of globe as planet .  If there is to be human solidarity, the solidarity of a species across its differences, it would be global solidarity. Which hardly exists. Nor therefore does human solidarity.

So in order to globalize, we face the possible impossibility of the challenge that now confronts us: the challenge to take responsibility for our failure of solidarity not just with each other but with all other planetary species. And to acknowledge that the planet can no longer abide this failure. “Code Red for Humanity,” announces the latest United Nations IPCC report . So the urgency of the contemporary global crisis of climate and therefore of the human itself does mount toward the impossible.

Not accidentally, this epoch comes philosophically framed  as “the impossible possibility of the im/possible” (Jacques Derrida). That slash means to break through the paralysis of merely unrealizable possibilities and merely hopeless impossibilities. Might it crack the impossible open and point the way to  “The Great Transition”? That is the name of a blog focused on the unprecedented levels of change and cooperation now required for a livable human future. It featured the recent month-long conversation with Falk on the possibility of a global solidarity.

Note, though, how even the language needed to express such a “great transition” struggles to capture the requisite global solidarity. The notion of the global must constantly be distinguished from neoliberalism, the globalism that drives the individualism of capitalism.  At the same time, a progressive, planet-embracing globality must be distinguished from modern universalisms that unify an empowered “we” against some not-quite-human race, gender, or nationality, or that homogenize human differences.

We struggle for language that makes clear that the needed globality is pitted against individualism, not individuality, that solidarity thrives on the diversity not just of groups but of persons, and that globalization of solidarity, far from reducing difference, vastly enhances it.

For difference itself is relation: we exist only in and through the interrelations of our differences. And we thrive only in recognizing and strengthening our entangled differences . And then—without fear of our humanity being reduced—we can embrace our entanglement with the multiple layers of the nonhuman world.

In the interest of an ecosocial sustainability, Falk argues for a “responsible anthropocentrism.” Yet here also language, if we get it wrong, can weaken solidarity. I, like most ecotheologians, argue that anthropocentrism is at the root of our irresponsibility—right back through the history of misreadings of human “dominion” (Genesis 1:28).  So I think any appeal to a human-centered universe will backfire ecologically. Yet reading Falk, I certainly can imagine  the strategic value of appeal to an anthropos in whose center all the layers of our evolution and all the tangles/connections with our material ecology meet.

The point is that at the heart of our–human–reality, self-knowledge demands global responsibility. The responsible anthropos then becomes a portal into solidarity and to a “great transition” that may for the foreseeable future seem still impossible.

I wrote The Cloud of the Impossible : Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement (Columbia, 2015) in recognition of how the density of the challenges we face occlude a vision whereby we might address them. The title is a citation of the fifteenth century polymath Nicolas of Cusa, who is speaking precisely of vision. “And the more that cloud of impossibility is recognized as obscure and impossible, the more truly the necessity shines forth and the less veiled it appears and draws near” ( On Learned Ignorance , 1440, in The Cloud of the Impossible , 99].

Cusa’s cloud floats directly from the ancient tradition of negative theology and its “luminous darkness.” There glow in the darkness of the cloud im/possibilities opened by that very “necessity.” Cusa does not mean the necessity of divine control or intervention. Rather, he means the deepest truth of our shared creaturely cosmos. As that truth remains “obscure” and “impossible,” it renders literal notions of divine revelation and causation too simplistic: if they were literally true, they would not be obscure. Might Cusa’s necessary truth today be the necessity of enough of us across the world bonding in great enough solidarity to make the needed difference? Might our mindfulness of the glowing darkness not shed its unwhite light on the necessities we face? Even now, as burning forests cast clouds across the landscape thousands of miles away from the blaze?

Cusa’s “cloud of the impossible” (and therefore mine) is of theological origin. Given the way that religious exclusivisms and supernaturalisms feed the politics of international right wings, can theology also help to strengthen the solidarities against those right wings and towards a political “art of the impossible”? A few political thinkers do gesture toward religion or spirituality in quest for a language and practice of solidarity. Falk encourages a sense of “cosmic awe” that moves between, through, and beyond any particular religion. For as he says, “gestating within the cultural bosom of world civilizations and world religions have been subversive ideas of global solidarity.”

As one of many examples, The Parliament of World Religions earlier this summer sent out word of a new virtual application of their 1993 “Declaration Toward a Global Ethic.” The Parliament, which over the years has been opened by the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela and UN Messenger of Peace Jane Goodall,  advocates across the world religions for social, political, and ecological justice. The Parliament will this year use its new virtual platform to explore and enact the  activist potential of its pluralist and planetary commitments.

In other examples of religion’s potential role: even secular thinkers and activists have some familiarity with Pope Francis’s Laudato Si , the encyclical responding to “the cry of the poor, the cry of the earth.” The decades of efforts by liberation theologians in Latin American and by U.S. Black, Asian, feminist, womanist, and ecological theologies have had insufficient but immense impact. They work in deep solidarity with secular movements. The current work of the Institute for Ecological Civilization , based in Los Angeles and working internationally (with, for example, remarkable influence in China) grows out of process theology , based on the relational cosmology of mathematician Alfred North Whitehead.

Such global movements—broadly ecumenical, social, and ecological—inhabit a universality of the universe, a cosmopolitanism of the cosmos. Its universals of solidarity do not work to homogenize the human. Its cosmic breadth honors the interrelated diversities of all creatures.

Religious institutions are thereby mobilized by those who work not against religion itself but against the conservative narrowings and right-wing deployments of religion. The U.S. Christian right has been particularly galvanized, and dangerously politicized, by its reading of the biblical prophecy of apocalypse.  It fosters an aggressive, use-it-up indifference to the materialities of “this world.” But the secular left be paralyzed by its own  End-of-the-World scenario. For the portal of possibility to global solidarity really may soon slam shut.

But if it has not yet closed, to ignore present possibilities is to betray them.  In the interest of these barely possible possibilities, I recently wrote Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy and Other Last Chances (Orbis, 2021). It deploys the ancient imaginary of apocalypse against contemporary cultures of both climate change denialism and defeatist, fatalistic nihilism (it’s happening; there is nothing we can do….). The surreal metaphors of the biblical Apocalypse rage against global imperialism and global economics, promising against all odds the eco-urban utopia of the New Jerusalem. The word apokalypsis , after all, means not “end of the world” but “unveiling.” Dis/closure, not closure: eye-opening. Dis-closure, seeing Cusa’s “necessary” truths about the planet at present is what enables the possibility of addressing them.

The crisis itself presses possibility out of impossibility. The possibility of a Great Transition? A chance, perhaps, but nothing like a guarantee. Falk—with no biblical inflection—renders the global opening thus: “Transition is not off in the distance or only in dreamscapes or science fiction imaginaries”—or, I add, in archaic apocalyptic visions. “It is happening around us if we only learn to open our eyes and hearts to the possibilities now emerging.”

May I say “amen”?

Catherine Keller is George T. Cobb Professor of Constructive Theology in The Graduate Division of Religion of Drew University. She teaches and lectures across a broad spectrum of pluralist, ecofeminist, process, and political theology. Her most recent book is Facing Apocalypse:  Climate, Democracy and Other Last Chances. Other books include:  Apocalypse Now & Then: a Feminist Approach to the End of the World;  Face of the Deep: a Theology of Becoming; On the Mystery;  Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement; and Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public. She has co-edited several volumes of the Drew Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquium, most recently Entangled Worlds: Religion, Science and the New Materialism

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Photo Credit: Celine Martin

An earlier version of this blog appeared in “Can Human Solidarity Globalize?,”  Great Transition Initiative ,  https://greattransition.org/gti-forum/global-solidarity-keller .

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Global solidarity in the face of COVID-19

June 16, 2020.

Ulrika Modéer

UN Assistant Secretary-General and Director of the Bureau of External Relations and Advocacy, UNDP

Charlotte Petri Gornitzka

Assistant Secretary-General & UNICEF Deputy Executve Director, Partnerships

Robert Piper

Assistant Secretary-General, Director of Development Coordination Office

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended almost every aspects of life as we know it. Even those countries that are supposed to have the means to manage the spread and mitigate the effects are struggling.

Besides the US$5 trillion stimulus package that the G20 economies agreed to deal with the pandemic, individual countries are also devising various measures to shore up their health care systems, stabilize their economies, and assist affected workers and businesses.

Even before the full brunt of the coronavirus outbreak reached some of the poorest countries, the economic impacts are already being felt. With declining global demand for raw materials, breakdown of global supply chain, and mounting debt burden, the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is estimated to exceed US$220 billion.

The urgent shouldn’t crowd out the important

With greater uncertainty and fear of global recession looming, governments are looking for resources needed to lessen the socio-economic pains of the crisis. In this process, official development assistance (ODA) won’t be spared and could come under increased scrutiny.

Decisions made now will have potentially devastating – or transformative – impact for years to come. Despite the economic and political pressure, we must protect ODA, which is needed more than ever.

The spread of COVID-19, especially in places with weak governance and health infrastructures is expected to be overwhelming if the international community does not act now.

In sub-Saharan Africa, many countries have the lowest number of physicians per capita in the world while some experience ongoing conflicts, making it difficult to fight the virus.

Collateral impact

The collateral impact of COVID-19 on health, education and nutrition systems will be extremely damaging, and in many cases irreversible, for children and society at large. And when the world opens up again, the resilience of the weakest health systems will dictate how well we do against future threats.

The UN Secretary-General António Guterres, argued that, “this human crisis demands coordinated, decisive, inclusive and innovative policy action—and maximum financial and technical support for the poorest and most vulnerable people and countries.”

It is critical for the international community to fulfil the humanitarian appeal for COVID-19 response while protecting existing commitments to long-term development and other ‘silent’ emergencies.

Doing so will help protect the most vulnerable people from being exposed to the effects of COVID-19 and preserve hard-earned development gains in fighting global poverty and expanding basic services.

Left to their own devises, fragile nations may risk the breakdown of socio-political order, civil unrest and state collapse, further exacerbating the dire situation.

A humanitarian and development crisis

COVID-19 is not only a humanitarian crisis, but also a development crisis. Development agencies are supporting countries to prepare for, respond to, and recover from the crisis.

The effectiveness of their response to certain degree depends on the flexibility afforded to them in funding and operational procedures.

To tackle this uniquely complex health and development crisis, the adequacy and flexibility of funding to development agencies are pivotal. Flexible “core” funding is already making a difference in the COVID-19 response to reach people in need faster, empower local actors, deploy essential supplies to the frontline, and protect the most vulnerable – children, refugees, women.

Immediately responding to threats

This enabled the communities to practice due diligence and self-driven discretion to immediately respond to threats of the pandemic, while waiting for the pledged assistance to arrive. For instance, in Nigeria, funding flexibility allowed UNICEF to come up with an innovative solution to fight misinformation around COVID-19 while UNDP was able to support the government double the ventilator capacity in the country.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a devastating crisis in history. But it also posits an opportunity to remind the global community why multilateralism is vital to securing the world’s peace, security, and prosperity.

We witness how the health crisis of today’s globalized world interlinks global economy, geopolitics, and social values. Our effective response to the public health crisis should be key to resolving the ensuing economic, humanitarian and development challenges.

A complex reality

Understanding this interlinked and complex reality of COVID-19, governments need to work together closely to take coordinated actions and share scientific information, resources and expertise.

It is this strong motion for collaboration that underpins the UN agencies commitment to reinforce the humanitarian-development nexus to jointly respond to the COVID-19 crisis, working closely through the UN Crisis team, humanitarian response plan, UN Response and Recovery Fund for COVID-19.

In Guinea-Bissau, WHO, UNICEF, UNDP, and IOM joined hands to help build isolation facilities and triage space, and procure necessary equipment for COVID-19, both for the national hospital as well as for the re-modelling of the UN clinic.

With strong solidarity and effective cooperation, the international community will not only arrest COVID-19, but also use the emergency to build back better health systems and a more inclusive and sustainable economy.

This article was originally published here .

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Shared responsibility, global solidarity

Responding to the socio-economic impacts of covid-19.

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In this report by the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres talks "the shared responsibility and global solidarity roadmap":

• Immediate health response – suppressing transmission of the virus to end the pandemic;
• Social dimensions of this crisis – focus on women, youth, low-wage workers, small and medium enterprises, the informal sector and vulnerable groups already at risk;
• Economic dimensions of the crisis  – need for safeguarding people’s lives and their livelihoods;
• Learning  – moving forward from this human crisis to build back better.

This is a call to action; to act together to address the impact of COVID-19 on people.

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"This is, above all, a human crisis that calls for solidarity"

About the author, antónio guterres.

António Guterres is the ninth Secretary-General of the United Nations, who took office on 1st January 2017.

19 March 2020 - We are facing a global health crisis unlike any in the 75-year history of the United Nations — one that is spreading human suffering, infecting the global economy and upending people’s lives.

A global recession – perhaps of record dimensions – is a near certainty. 

The International Labour Organization has just reported that workers around the world could lose as much as 3.4 trillion U.S. dollars in income by the end of this year.

This is, above all, a human crisis that calls for solidarity. 

Our human family is stressed and the social fabric is being torn.  People are suffering, sick and scared. 

Current responses at the country level will not address the global scale and complexity of the crisis.

This is a moment that demands coordinated, decisive, and innovative policy action from the world’s leading economies.   We must recognize that the poorest countries and most vulnerable — especially women — will be the hardest hit.

I welcome the decision by G20 leaders to convene an emergency summit next week to respond to the epic challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic – and I look forward to taking part.

My central message is clear:  We are in an unprecedented situation and the normal rules no longer apply.  We cannot resort to the usual tools in such unusual times.

The creativity of the response must match the unique nature of the crisis – and the magnitude of the response must match its scale.

Our world faces a common enemy.  We are at war with a virus.

COVID-19 is killing people, as well as attacking the real economy at its core – trade, supply chains, businesses, jobs.  Entire countries and cities are in lockdown.  Borders are closing.  Companies are struggling to stay in business and families are simply struggling to stay afloat. 

In managing this crisis, we also have a unique opportunity. 

Done right, we can steer the recovery toward a more sustainable and inclusive path.  But poorly coordinated policies risk locking in -- or even worsening -- already unsustainable inequalities, reversing hard-won development gains and poverty reduction.

#COVID19 is a crisis unlike any in the 75-year history of the @UN . World leaders must come together and offer an urgent & coordinated global response. More than ever before, we need solidarity, hope and the political will to see this through together. https://t.co/4qGoAhTYpe pic.twitter.com/yogPhUio7l — António Guterres (@antonioguterres) March 19, 2020

I call on world leaders to come together and offer an urgent and coordinated response to this global crisis.

I see three critical areas for action:

First, tackling the health emergency.

Many countries have exceeded the capacity to care for even mild cases in dedicated health facilities, with many unable to respond to the enormous needs of the elderly.

Even in the wealthiest countries, we see health systems buckling under pressure.

Health spending must be scaled up right away to meet urgent needs and the surge in demand -- expanding testing, bolstering facilities, supporting health care workers, and ensuring adequate supplies – with full respect for human rights and without stigma.

It has been proven that the virus can be contained.  It must be contained. 

If we let the virus spread like wildfire – especially in the most vulnerable regions of the world -- it would kill millions of people. 

And we need to immediately move away from a situation where each country is undertaking its own health strategies to one that ensures, in full transparency, a coordinated global response, including helping countries that are less prepared to tackle the crisis.

Governments must give the strongest support to the multilateral effort to fight the virus, led by the World Health Organization, whose appeals must be fully met.

The health catastrophe makes clear that we are only as strong as the weakest health system.  

Global solidarity is not only a moral imperative, it is in everyone’s interests.

Second, we must focus on the social impact and the economic response and recovery.

Unlike the 2008 financial crisis, injecting capital in the financial sector alone is not the answer.  This is not a banking crisis – indeed banks must be part of the solution. 

And it is not an ordinary shock in supply and demand; it is a shock to society as a whole.

The liquidity of the financial system must be guaranteed, and banks must use their resilience to support their customers.   

Let’s not forget this is essentially a human crisis. 

Most fundamentally, we need to focus on people -- the most vulnerable, low-wage workers, small and medium enterprises.

That means wage support, insurance, social protection, preventing bankruptcies and job loss.

That also means designing fiscal and monetary responses to ensure that the burden does not fall on those who can least afford it. 

The recovery must not come on the backs of the poorest – and we cannot create a legion of new poor.

We need to get resources directly in the hands of people.  A number of countries are taking up social protection initiatives such as cash transfers and universal income. 

We need to take it to the next level to ensure support reaches those entirely dependent on the informal economy and countries less able to respond.

Remittances are a lifeline in the developing world – especially now.  Countries have already committed to reduce remittance fees to 3 percent, much below the current average levels.  The crisis requires us to go further, getting as close to zero as possible.

In addition, G20 leaders have taken steps to protect their own citizens and economies by waiving interest payments.  We must apply that same logic to the most vulnerable countries in our global village and alleviate their debt burden. 

Across the board, we need a commitment to ensure adequate financial facilities to support countries in difficulties.  The IMF, the World Bank and other International Financial Institutions play a key role. 

And we must refrain from the temptation of resorting to protectionism.  This is the time to dismantle trade barriers and re-establish supply chains.

Looking at the broader picture, disruptions to society are having a profound impact.

We must address the effects of this crisis on women.  The world’s women are disproportionally carrying the burden at home and in the wider economy.

Children are also paying a heavy price.  More than 800 million children are out of school right now — many of whom rely on school to provide their only meal.  We must ensure that all children have access to food and equal access to learning – bridging the digital divide and reducing the costs of connectivity.

As people’s lives are disrupted, isolated and upturned, we must prevent this pandemic from turning into a crisis of mental health.  Young people will be most at risk.

The world needs to keep going with core support to programs for the most vulnerable, including through UN-coordinated humanitarian and refugee response plans.  Humanitarian needs must not be sacrificed. 

Third, and finally, we have a responsibility to "recover better."

The 2008 financial crisis demonstrated clearly that countries with robust social protection systems suffered the least and recovered most quickly from its impact.

We must ensure that lessons are learned and that this crisis provides a watershed moment for health emergency preparedness and for investment in critical 21st century public services and the effective delivery of global public goods.

We have a framework for action – the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.  We must keep our promises for people and planet.

The United Nations – and our global network of country offices -- will support all governments to ensure that the global economy and the people we serve emerge stronger from this crisis.  

That is the logic of the Decade of Action to deliver the Sustainable Development Goals.

More than ever before, we need solidarity, hope and the political will to see this crisis through together.

Download the full statement

S7-Episode 2: Bringing Health to the World

“You see, we're not doing this work to make ourselves feel better. That sort of conventional notion of what a do-gooder is. We're doing this work because we are totally convinced that it's not necessary in today's wealthy world for so many people to be experiencing discomfort, for so many people to be experiencing hardship, for so many people to have their lives and their livelihoods imperiled.”

Dr. David Nabarro has dedicated his life to global health. After a long career that’s taken him from the horrors of war torn Iraq, to the devastating aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami, he is still spurred to action by the tremendous inequalities in global access to medical care.

“The thing that keeps me awake most at night is the rampant inequities in our world…We see an awful lot of needless suffering.”

:: David Nabarro interviewed by Melissa Fleming

Brazilian ballet pirouettes during pandemic

Ballet Manguinhos, named for its favela in Rio de Janeiro, returns to the stage after a long absence during the COVID-19 pandemic. It counts 250 children and teenagers from the favela as its performers. The ballet group provides social support in a community where poverty, hunger and teen pregnancy are constant issues.

Radio journalist gives the facts on COVID-19 in Uzbekistan

The pandemic has put many people to the test, and journalists are no exception. Coronavirus has waged war not only against people's lives and well-being but has also spawned countless hoaxes and scientific falsehoods.

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Global or local solidarity? That’s the wrong question: relationality, aspiration and the in-between of feminist activism in Southeast Asia

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• https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2020.1838759

Introduction

‘global feminism’ and its critique, relationality and aspiration in feminism across difference, solidaritas perempuan indonesian feminism, navigating practices of solidarity: the world march of women in the philippines, acknowledgements, disclosure statement, additional information.

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Global solidarity has increasingly been criticized, particularly in postcolonial-feminist theory. Mohanty exposed ‘global’ sisterhood as a shallow cosmopolitan category based on white/Western feminist experiences that is in danger of erasing difference. Building on her critique, scholars have criticized feminist solidarity across difference itself, preferring ‘local’ activism. Taking seriously the critique of cosmopolitanism advanced by post-colonial feminists, this article investigates how solidarity projects could reach across difference without undermining it. I argue that sharp dichotomies (global/local; general/particular) are unhelpful, because solidarity is a process that sits uneasily between them. Drawing on interviews with the World March of Women in Indonesia and the Philippines, I show that solidarity across difference is possible because their analysis and practice is both: place-based and situated, as well as aspiring to the generalization of solidarity. The global in that way ceases to be a descriptive category and becomes a normative horizon for collective aspiration.

• global justice
• World March of Women

In 2003, the World March of Women, a network which then consisted of 5500 groups from 163 countries and territories (World March of Women, Citation 2003 , p. 234), presented a declaration to the World Social Forum (WSF) in Porto Allegre. The title of the declaration read: ‘Perspective of Women of the World March of Women. Declaration at the 2003 World Social Forum’. The most surprising aspect of this title is an omission. There is no plural to perspective , the women of the World March of Women apparently spoke with one, global, voice. In the same year, Chandra Mohanty published an essay in which she looked back at her seminal text ‘Under Western Eyes’ and reflected upon its public reception. As in 1984 – when the original essay was published – she continued to embrace the central argument that Western feminism has for too long suppressed different feminisms, local movements and particular problems in favour of a ‘global’ sisterhood. Underscoring her critique of this cosmopolitan, white/Western feminism, she concluded that ‘(much) white feminism is not merely different but wrong’ (Mohanty, Citation 2003 , p. 223). It is wrong because it claims to represent all women in a predetermined, generalized category of ‘womanhood’ that overlooks the different forms of problems and struggles in favour of a homogenized category that is analytically in vain and politically in danger of stabilizing imperialist constellations. On the basis of Mohanty’s critique of global feminism, some scholars have gone as far as criticizing the idea of feminist solidarity across difference itself. Felski ( Citation 1997 ), for instance, interprets this ‘emphasis on particularity’ as an argument against any large-scale social theory, and hence against generalization in general. Mohanram ( Citation 1999 , p. 91) similarly connects the necessary call for specificity and particularity to a turning-away from systemic global inequalities. Dhawan ( Citation 2013 ) highlights the complicities of liberal cosmopolitan articulations of solidarity with the global structures of domination which they claim to resist. Global solidarity projects, she argues, are based on global capital as a ‘necessary precondition for the emergence of contemporary cosmopolitan sensibility’ (Dhawan, Citation 2013 , p. 140). This, in her view, is mirrored in the cosmopolitan theories of solidarity which have no effects but to morally elevate those who articulate them. Footnote 1

Taking seriously the critique of cosmopolitanism advanced by post-colonial feminists, this article investigates what solidarity projects could look like if they were to reach across difference without undermining it. While the dualistic understandings of the global/local divide in their critiques may not correspond to the praxis of internationalist feminist movements, their interventions do reflect a sense of crisis in ‘global activism’ that is widely shared in feminist activist circles. For instance, the World Social Forums have in recent years been in a process of decentralization (if not decay), the 2006 one already experimenting with a ‘polycentric’ setup, held in Caracas and Bamako (Conway, Citation 2007 , p. 51). Beyond this decentralization, it is fair to say that this ‘global’ event has generally been decreasing in importance while some regional or national forums have been able to thrive.

What unites the above critiques is a shared skepticism towards ‘global solidarity’ as a frame for emancipatory feminist struggles. Their criticism is directed both at the practice of cosmopolitan solidarity projects and the theories operating at a ‘global level’. The political and the epistemological/analytical are therefore strongly intertwined in this debate. In International Relations (IR), a similar discussion can be observed: while on the one hand, some theorists are trying to create a ‘more global IR’ (Acharya, Citation 2014 ), others have criticized the category of the global as a potentially imperialist one (Escobar, Citation 2001 ; Kamola, Citation 2013 ; Tickner, Citation 2003 , p. 296). Based on fieldwork with feminist solidarity projects, I argue in the following that in order to understand solidarity across difference, sharp oppositions (global/local; general/particular) are fundamentally unhelpful, because solidarity is a process that sits uneasily between these dichotomies. Drawing on interviews with activists of the World March of Women in Indonesia and the Philippines, I show that their solidarity across difference is possible because they understand themselves in relational terms. They overcome an individualist ontology without introducing a cosmopolitan ethics of sameness instead, because their analysis and practice is both: place-based and situated, as well as aspiring to the generalization of solidarity.

The omission in the opening section can therefore be understood from an analysis of the practices that navigate this in-between. I argue that the omission is neither an indicator for a naïve assumption of one-ness within the World March of Women, nor is it a mistake that should be remedied. It signifies a political aspiration rather than a false description. The global is, in this reading, not present as a shared condition. Rather, solidarity builds on relationality, which is strongly place-based. At the same time, however, the global is necessary as a highly normative political horizon. Conceived in such a way, relapsing into sharp distinctions, or ‘levels’ (Onuf, Citation 1995 ) is not only a theoretical error but also a constant danger for activists, because inhabiting the in-between is so exhausting. It involves constant practices of negotiation, particularly between generalization and localization.

In the remainder of this article, I first illustrate the critique of ‘global feminism’ that has been formulated by postcolonial scholars and the calls for a localization of activism in its aftermath. I then argue that this binary thinking is misguided and can be overcome by an activist practice that is relational – highlighting the interdependence and rootedness in community – while constantly aspiring to transcend the borders of this community through a mutually agreed upon generalization across difference. I then show empirically that the World March of Women has been successful in inhabiting the in-between through a commitment to relationality and aspiration. Their solidarity is not intended to homogenize the struggles but to create a temporally limited common position which continually has to be re-articulated. These complicated processes are necessarily entangled with place and scale while transforming these categories in the very process of engaging in solidarity across difference.

In the second half of the twentieth century, a quantitative and qualitative increase in the transnational linkages of women’s movements has been observed (Dufour et al., Citation 2010 , p. 1). The injustices that they were rallying against were increasingly ‘understood to be the consequence of economic and political power relations that have become globalized’ (Eschle & Maiguashca, Citation 2010 , p. 5). From this followed a widening in cognitive and protest practice that had a decidedly utopian character. ‘Another world’ was not only seen as possible, activists proclaimed to ‘hear her breathing’ (Roy, Citation 2004 ). Particularly during the 1980s and 1990s, feminist activists within the Global Justice Movement were able to form a progressive transnational coalition: during painstaking interactions across differences, conflicts, and inequalities, women’s movements worldwide were negotiated ‘under the contested sign of ‘global feminism’’ (Conway, Citation 2012 , p. 380). During the last decade, however, practices and theories of solidarity ‘are being remade’ (Conway, Citation 2012 ). In fact, the ‘globality’ in global feminism has become heavily criticized within the decentralized feminist groups which, increasingly, turn away from the generalization of solidarity towards a localization of their struggles. Footnote 2 This can be explained by caveats regarding ‘global solidarity’, both theoretically and practically: On the one hand, ‘the global’ is increasingly understood as a failed category that re-instantiates transnational capitalism rather than undermining it. On the other hand, building on the partly frustrating experiences of the Global Justice Movement’s ineffectiveness and cooptation, activists have turned away from international politics, refocusing on local and national struggles.

The central critique of ‘global feminism’ is famously articulated by Mohanty ( Citation 2003 ) by way of distinguishing her concept of feminism without borders from ‘borderless feminism’ or ‘global sisterhood’. She highlights that ‘lines between and through nations, races, classes, sexualities, religions and disabilities are real – and that a feminism without borders must envision change and social justice work across these lines of demarcation and division’ (Mohanty, Citation 2003 , p. 2). According to her, notions of complete identification with the other – in a vague category of global sisterhood – are therefore blurring the view for what it actually takes to create feminist solidarity across these lines. She argues that these vague ascriptions lead to the appropriation of the experiences of Non-Western feminists and their struggles by hegemonic white women’s movements (Mohanty, Citation 2003 , p. 18), and may reify the very categories they aim to overcome: by contrasting the ‘Third World Woman’ with the liberated Western feminists, the latter alone become the subjects of any counter-history (Mohanty, Citation 2003 , p. 39). The ‘strategic’ move of categorizing all women as global sisters, connected through the same oppression, has often only been used to elevate those Westerners who belief that they have liberated themselves more from the common oppression, hence objectivizing Southern sisters as victims. Mohanty ( Citation 2003 , p. 33) shows that this move – irrespective of the intentions – is ineffective as a political strategy. Instead, she proposes that ‘it is only by understanding the contradictions inherent to women’s location within various structures that effective political action and challenges can be devised’.

I did not argue against all forms of generalization, nor was I privileging the local over the systemic, difference over commonalities […]. I did not write […] that there would be no possibility of solidarity between Western and Third World feminists. Yet, this is often how the essay is read and utilized. I have wondered why such a sharp opposition has developed. (Mohanty, Citation 2003 , p. 224)

If we accept the critique of global sisterhood, how is solidarity across borders still possible? It is important to note that Mohanty has not concluded from her critique of ‘global feminism’ that solidarity across difference itself is in vain. Unlike Felski and Dhawan, she does not favour inward-looking versions of feminisms focusing on ‘their own’ state rather than reaching out across borders. She challenges us to overcome the ascriptive and naïve versions of global feminism, instead proposing a definition of solidarity ‘in terms of mutuality, accountability, and the recognition of common interests as the basis for relationships among diverse communities’ (Mohanty, Citation 2003 , p. 7). Current feminist movements are therefore in the delicate position to formulate progressive visions of solidarity while evading the pathologies of a naïve globalism that has arguably been coopted by neoliberal forms of cosmopolitanism (Gowan, Citation 2001 ; Johansen, Citation 2015 ). Based on this overall trajectory, I argue that the World March of Women in Southeast Asia is actualized in the in-between: neither do they assume a generalization of global feminist sisterhood, nor do they merely retreat into difference. Footnote 3 The solidarity of the World March of Women lies in the practice of highlighting particularity while constructing commonality. But how does this work? In order to theorize this practice, two concepts shall be introduced, relationality and aspiration.

Relationality

Relationality has been used in various ways by different intellectual traditions. I do not use the term to promote any specific theoretical school but as a useful abstract conception for how the actors of the World March of Women see themselves in the world. I thus stress the self-perception of feminist activists as relational subjects. Relationality can be defined as a form of living together in which meaning, motivation and identity do not mainly arise from individual success or position but from a shared sense of belonging to a community which makes life meaningful and is hence also the major political category and subject. This also means that life and politics are entangled with different forms of oppression such as sexism, classism and racism. The relationality that I refer to here is therefore directed at collective subjects as the agents of history, but also aware of the different potential dividing lines and power relations that run across groups and struggles unevenly and materialize as difference .

In the following, I am concerned with the consequences of this particular way of relating in and to the world. This leaves untouched the ontological question of whether the social in general should be understood as relational and what this would mean. Nevertheless, when analyzing the ways in which the actors who – I argue – perceive themselves relationally, I can utilize the instruments of those academic theories which have described the social world as relational, that is introduce the distinction between an individualist ontology and a relational one. Mohanty ( Citation 2003 , p. 90) assumes a relational nature of identity and highlights the necessary negations that come with the assumption of a singular, fixed, and essential self. Relationality can be understood in opposition to networked individualism, a concept that assumes that ‘people function more as connected individuals and less as embedded group members’ (Donati & Archer, Citation 2015 , p. 11). The core feature of relationality, in contrast, is that society is not a space containing relations, but rather that society is relation (Donati, Citation 2007 ). Yet, this does not imply that parts of a relation collapse into one. Rather, ‘robust singular selves – not individuals – are necessary preconditions for subjects to form relations’ (Donati & Archer, Citation 2015 , p. 13). Relational logic implies that everything is already connected to everything else (Kothari et al., Citation 2019 , xxiv). This encompasses the history and emotions of subjects who are therefore committed to a specific care ethics with a relational model of moral agency (Keller, Citation 1997 ): ‘Inasmuch as ethics and relationality are understood to be directly implicated in each other […], any threat to our relationality must necessarily present as a threat to our capacity for ethical existence’ (Drichel, Citation 2019 , p. 2). This is why relational subjects are more strongly implicated into each other’s lives than it could be imagined on the basis of the social theories that stress autonomous individuals.

The relational activism of the World March of Women in Southeast Asia is based on understanding gender, class and race as interconnected. One concept cannot be approached without the other, because they have entangled histories, that is they have been shaping the identities of women in formerly colonized countries in specific ways that do overlap with the histories of women in other places but are not the same. These histories shape hierarchies between classes, races and genders until today (Randeria, Citation 2006 ). Therefore, the struggles against patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism are inextricably linked in their understanding. From this perspective, it is thus not helpful to imagine an individual or a group that stands outside these relations when mobilizing. Therefore, it would also be a mistake to define feminism only with relation to gender because being a woman is also constituted by race, class, nation, and sexuality (Mohanty, Citation 2003 , p. 55). Relationality is therefore first and foremost an attentiveness to relations of power, which oftentimes figure as ‘difference’. Yet, from a relational standpoint, these relations of power ‘are not reducible to binary oppositions or oppressor/oppressed relations’ (Mohanty, Citation 2003 ) but rather take intricate forms, with complicated consequences like cooptation and mimicry which have been well-documented in postcolonial theory (Bhabha, Citation 1994 ).

One might speak of cultural practices, which have their historical origins in particular places, but this too is somewhat murky. If Buddhism, for instance, is taken as a practice, its origins would go back to the Buddha in India, but that which is referred to as Buddhist practice, can be quite different in the context of Tibet, Thailand or China.

This approach explicitly resonates with relationality, because the authors emphasize that the meaning of the self cannot be detached from the whole (Fierke & Jabri, Citation 2019 , p. 10). Yet, it also is in danger of potentially introducing another cosmopolitanism through the backdoor, because it presupposes a whole without clarifying whose privilege it would be to define this whole inside of which everyone needs to relate to others (Bartelson, Citation 2010 ; Kamola, Citation 2019 ). A postcolonial perspective on relationality would therefore foreground a feminist praxis committed to combating inequalities among women while being sensitive to difference (Conway, Citation 2008 , p. 209) – even if this means that ‘separateness is the point of departure’ (Fierke & Jabri, Citation 2019 , p. 9). That requires to engage in a fragile double-movement by recognizing (the possibility of) a common struggle without erasing differences or ignoring inequalities.

The relationality of the World March of Women navigates along such lines. It posits the centrality of particularism and locality, because the feminists engaged in transnational organizing processes have learned over time that place is important not only organizationally, but that the erasure of difference in the project of asserting a unitary social movement subject also erases their histories and identities and therefore debars instead of spurring relationality. They have therefore been ‘avoiding claims to the universal that accompany the term ‘global’ and the historical project of global sisterhood’ (Conway, Citation 2008 , p. 210).

a double process of complementary and contradictory forces of particularisation and unification that takes place both among the objects perceived and in the realm of perception. The process of unification maintains a common frame of reference despite the dissemblance of the parts (instead of their separation). The process of particularisation maintains difference, despite the processes of homogenisation that result from the pooling of differences.

For plural subjects to engage in a relationship of solidarity, they hence need not have a shared relation to the whole but each need to work on the way they relate to the whole so that it will be mutually compatible for the construction of common goals. The main problem with cosmopolitan visions of ‘one world’ or with ‘global sisterhood’ (but potentially also with Barad’s intra-action) is therefore not the reference to the whole itself but the ahistorical way it is understood: their methodological premise confuses the global as a descriptive instead of a political category (see also Ypi, Citation 2011 , p. 52; Anderl & Witt, Citation in press ). Conway shows that the categories of local and global cannot be thought independently of each other, because they are relational constructs: ‘what we call the “local” or the “global” are not the product of single but rather multiple scalar processes and must, therefore, be understood as mutually constituted’ (Conway, Citation 2008 , p. 212; see also Randeria, Citation 2003 ; Masson, Citation 2010 ). As she argues, terms like transnational and global are not merely analytical but carry ideological weight. This is an important insight. Yet, for solidarity across difference to emerge, it is necessary to not only deconstruct these categories but to politicize them. The equality signified in the cosmopolitan metaphor ‘we are all in the same boat’ is empirically wrong (Dhawan, Citation 2013 ). Yet, the global is still necessary for solidarity across difference to have an avenue for stating a common political vision that transcends incremental, local reforms.

This can be theorized with what Jodi Dean ( Citation 2019 , p. 2) calls ‘a common political horizon’. She develops the figure of the comrade who is not based on identitarian commonality but on a political relation that calls for ‘a set of expectations for action toward a common goal […] – no matter the differences’. The solidarity resulting from this ‘collectivizes and directs action in light of a shared vision for the future (Dean, Citation 2019 )’. Dean develops the comrade as a generic figure for political relations, the horizon of which is communism. Such a horizon is per definition not preoccupied with given administrative units. It is ‘the horizon of political struggle not for the nation but for the world’ (Dean, Citation 2019 , p. 5). At its core, the comrade as a generic political figure embodies the promise of equality for which activists need to confront their prior attachments to given hierarchies, and which takes them ‘away from the suppositions of unique particularity […] towards the sameness of those fighting on the same side’ (Dean, Citation 2019 , p. 15). In developing the comrade as a generic political subject, sameness is thus produced across differently positioned actors by adopting a common political horizon. Understood as such a common political horizon, the global is necessary for feminism across difference, but its purpose is to create a political desire rather than to figure as a given geographical category. It is hence precisely its ideological overload that can be utilized for organizing and practicing solidarity. The global – in such an application – loses its descriptive nature and becomes an aspirational commitment. Yet, in contrast to Dean, I do not want to suggest that the common political horizon is already a given for feminist movements. Rather, I want to stress how these movements work towards such a common political horizon in a process that transcends the own political vision by considering the politics and identities of others, and by commonly working across such difference.

It is during this very work to construct a common global horizon that solidarity across difference takes place. In that, reaching for global solidarity is a process that is only possible with a sense of belonging to a context and awareness of difference. This context is not fixed but continually constituted and altered in exchange with movements from other contexts with whom one does not proclaim sameness but aspires to unite on collectively negotiated terms. The practice of solidarity across difference is, in other words, a process of collectively constructing a common political horizon. This common global horizon may be an unachievable goal, but it is at the core of the feminist praxis because through this aspiration to formulate a global horizon with others will the self be permanently reflected upon and constituted anew in a widening struggle for liberation. In contrast to what Mohanty calls Western, universalist feminism, this common global horizon enables a form of solidarity work lacking a neatly defined political end-state because liberation from patriarchy will likely look different in different places. The common horizon of feminism is defined by what it is opposed to – and the unity that can be constructed during these common struggles. This fits well with the definition of feminism by Finlayson ( Citation 2016 , ch.2) as (i) the recognition of the fact of patriarchy and (ii) opposition to this state of affairs. For feminist solidarity across difference, a sense of ‘the global’ is necessary in order to articulate the interconnected systems, structures and mechanisms of patriarchal oppression, in all their diverse manifestations. While there are universals in almost any political agenda, the major difference is therefore between those political imaginaries that assume universals which simply have to be discovered by those who do not yet subscribe to them, and those who strive for new universals to be constructed in reflexive collaboration with others. Footnote 4

This double-bind, to appreciate and deepen the particularity of place-based feminist movements and their causes, and to reach for global solidarity, may seem like a contradiction. Yet, for solidarity across difference to be successful in a world deeply shaped by intersectional histories of oppression and their lasting hierarchical constellations, this in-between is the space of possibilities. In this in-between, relationality can work because it recognizes and interacts with the other, and it is where aspiration has a place because identity is not fixated to a pre-specified territory. Solidarity can then be expressed by a conscious attempt of articulating a space that is marked out by a twofold principle: It overcomes essentialisms such as the local community/the state through active work of seeking common interest across difference (generalization of solidarity). But it also overcomes cosmopolitan ethics by politicizing difference and particularism. Moving into these in-between zones is exhausting because the self cannot hold on to pre-given rituals, traditions and principles of thought but needs to be open to transcend these categories by listening to their counterparts and trying to establish commonality. While this entails major difficulties and tensions, I show in the following on the basis of feminist activists in Southeast Asia how they have been able to practice solidarity across difference by highlighting and protecting particularity while aspiring to unity.

Solidaritas Perempuan ( Women’s Solidarity , SP) is a feminist movement organization established in 1990 based in Jakarta, Indonesia, which has been consistently fighting for gender justice and defending the rights of grassroots women on the issues of conflict over natural resources and climate change, food sovereignty, migration and trafficking, and religious pluralism. SP is an individual-based membership organization, with 780 registered members, organized in eleven communities and claims to represent almost 6,000 regular supporters who constitute them as a movement. Footnote 5 During the last 25 years, SP has been one of the most influential groups within the broader Indonesian feminist movement. SP has been working for pluralism and human rights from the beginning, drawing strongly on international support, as part of the World March of Women and other transnational coalitions. However, they also related to local traditions, notably in combining feminism and Islam (Rinaldo, Citation 2013 , p. 155). Besides the promotion of women leaders though workshops and seminars, SP is also a fierce critic of exploitative corporate practices and promotes a feminist view on environmental problems. Furthermore, SP has made it a central concern to protect female migrant workers, especially in the domestic realm. Since neoliberal globalization has increased patriarchy and thus the exploitation of women in their analysis, SP is opposed to free trade and criticizes international institutions such as the World Bank. They regularly attend the WSF in an attempt to actively connect local and national struggles of female workers with the transnational movement against corporate globalization.

In order to understand the development of SP, its history in the 1990s is important. During the UN Decade for Women and the Beijing Conference, Indonesia was still ruled by the authoritarian Suharto. This meant that ‘women’s issues’ could only be represented abroad by Dharma Wanita, a curious women’s organization which consists (until today) of civil servants’ wives. Nevertheless, some of SP’s activists travelled secretly to Beijing in 1995 and imported the slogan ‘all issues are women issues’ (Interview SP). When Suharto was forced to step down in 1998, there was a considerable euphoria in SP about finally being able to join into the transnational movement. They immediately reoriented their advocacy efforts towards international politics and integrated strongly with the Global Justice Movement. They hence got involved with lobbying international institutions such as the World Bank Group, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). However, they successively recognized the lacking effects of this international involvement, and there was a growing internal dissatisfaction with this style of advocacy, one interview partner of mine describing it polemically: ‘NGOs get carried away, their meetings are in this hotel, that hotel. There’s no resistance if we always want to be in a hotel’. At the same time, many in the movement were noticing that the democratization in the domestic realm was not as far-reaching as one could have hoped for. Therefore, SP activists grew increasingly impatient of the approach to concentrate on international organizations as part of a ‘global’ movement. A growing part of the movement felt that the work should be concentrated on issues closer to home.

This controversy shortly after 2000 had a strong impact on the movement. The organization changed course, but decisively did not simply localize their activism. Although it has been a difficult process, particularly among the rural membership, SP has made considerable steps to emancipate from the either/or logic of localization or global justice activism, which particularly led to a specification of the overall agenda. This agenda remains grounded in the values of transnational solidarity while putting more emphasis on domestic problems and formulating positions on the basis of the latter. The personal relation to women affected by violence and exclusion are therefore front and centre in their work (Interview SP). Only on the basis of these concrete solidarity relations, generalization is sought where appropriate. As a result, SP did not scale back but diversify its internationally-oriented repertoire. While remaining involved in transnational networks, the activists have since been focusing on UN Women and UNDP as partners on specific issues (such as violence against women), while largely withdrawing from the international financial institutions, particularly from ‘inside’ lobbying.

In the year 2018 when the World Bank Group held its Annual Meeting in Bali, though, SP was highly active in organizing the ‘Gerak Lawan’ counter summit with its slogan ‘World Beyond Banks’. Footnote 6 In this context, SP was able to mobilize a specifically Indonesian experience within the transnational solidarity campaign and hence to contribute beyond the cosmopolitan idea of everyone contributing equally to a transnational discourse. Bräuchler ( Citation 2018 ) has shown how Bali as a place is particularly well-suited for such a relational approach. The negative effects of international tourism with water shortages and rampant capitalization of ‘traditional culture’ have spurred increasing mobilization by local activists who highlight the entanglements of international institutions with local identity and national power politics, contesting the politics of place vis a vis the local and national government while making use of the repertoires of ‘Occupy’ and hence identifying with a wave of ‘global protest’ (Gerbaudo, Citation 2017 ). Tapping into this experience, SP and their coalition-partners were able to connect these diverse arenas and use them in a programmatic fashion. The slogan ‘World Beyond Banks’ shows the aspirational content which is mobilized as the motivational glue for local feminist movements to get involved on the basis of their everyday experiences.

As another major shift, SP has strengthened its focus on migrant domestic workers, an issue neatly suitable for an in-between approach highlighted here. The young women who emigrate from Indonesia, particularly to rich countries in the Middle East, are often without legal or practical support in their new environments and lack the resources to defend themselves in circumstances often shaped by violence and exploitation. SP invested heavily into this field of activism, supporting the affected women and lobbying on their behalf, by that integrating the solidarity-relations with these young and often not formally educated women in a transnationally marketized society, and pointing out the entanglements that make it necessary for feminism to act beyond borders – while still drawing on particular experiences rather than abstracting to a vague ‘global womanhood’.

Despite these successes in mobilizing in aspirational ways that motivate to generalize solidarity beyond the own community, this approach proves to be highly complex and not always practical. For instance, the narratives on domestic labour migration sometimes tip over into nationalist or xenophobic attitudes. Some of my interview partners have reported that while the abuse of Indonesian migrant domestic workers in Arab countries have been sharply attacked, the frequent abuses of domestic workers inside Indonesian households have received less attention. While this was not necessarily a conscious decision, it shows the precariousness of offering solidarity to a particular group, especially when this is legitimized on the basis of their nationality.

Similarly, the complexity of acting in-between the personal relationships with rural women and their ‘local’ problems and the attempt mobilize towards a deeper critique of transnational capitalism has led to awkward situations. For instance, in the course of the campaign against foreign debt, SP mobilized many rural women and took them to Jakarta in busses to demonstrate against illegitimate debt. After the demonstration, some of these rural women approached the organizers, asking when they could get their money back. These women thought that they had demonstrated against their personal debt rather than an issue as abstract as Indonesian debt to international creditors. With many rural families being highly indebted to local landlords in Indonesia, this line of reasoning seems appropriate but was not anticipated by their advocates in Jakarta. Again, the activists were challenged to become more grounded and to relate their understanding of political economy to the rural structures in which they are rendered meaningful for women workers before abstracting problems such as debt to a general campaign.

It is remarkable that SP – upon reflection – approached this apparent problem of ‘too global’ a framing, not through a simple turning away from transnational issues. In contrast, they have been investing into the internal communication and education, creating spaces where their members can relate their local problems to more general trajectory. All members of SP receive two trainings that they call ideologization [ideologisasi]: ‘Feminist training’ and ‘globalization analysis’. The latter is taught from a critical political economy perspective in order to make grassroots groups aware of global mechanisms of exploitation. The World Bank, the WTO and other financial institutions such as ADB figure prominently in these analyses. Targeting particularly rural communities and women’s groups with these trainings and actively connecting their rural life-worlds with these transnational issues, SP epitomizes the idea of a movement that acts in the in-between: their members become aware of the power to frame their daily problems in a globalized analysis, hence emancipating themselves from the idea of individual responsibility in a local exploitative relationship (for instance the landlord). This allows them to knit chains of solidarity with feminists in other places, without assuming that their suffering needs to be the same for mutuality to arise.

While the World March of Women has its origins in Québec, the movement quickly transnationalised during the 1990s and had a first peak on 8 March 2000 (International Women’s Day), when hundreds of national and local women’s marches were organized across the world. One of the biggest of them took place in the Philippines where ‘Kilos Kabaro’ [movement of sisters] was the network driving it. Kilos Kabaro renamed itself ‘World March of Women – Pilipinas’ (WMW-Pilipinas) after that march in 2000, showcasing a tighter integration into the transnational network than their Indonesian sisters from SP which remained more loosely connected (see above). The agenda of the World March of Women in the Philippines is mainly focused on opposing violence against women, militarism and imperialism, trafficking of women, and women’s health. The coalition of 11 groups, some of them coalitions of their own, is decidedly anti-capitalist and consciously connects gender issues with questions of material and ecological justice.

No, that’s so true, they’re very nationalist. We sometimes have to discuss that, because I am uncomfortable with nationalism as such […]. I relate with the labour movement, so we know very much that it’s important not to have our national distinction. If we talk about sovereignties against US colonisation and things like that, I’m like oh Gosh what is this national chauvinism about […]. Now, I’m always in discussion about that with [others in the movement].

The movement has successfully bridged domestic divides through its engagement in international alliance-work (Daphi et al., Citation 2019 , p. 8). This can be explained by their constant mobilization of the in-between: providing a framework that makes it possible for groups with nationalist attitudes to focus on commonalities with movements abroad by creating a common platform that is grounded in, and relates to, domestic grievances, but moves beyond the national frame of reference and broadens the horizons of the involved activists. One important method of bringing women’s groups together has been to gather on the Women’s Marches on March 8. On the first demonstration that was cautiously joined by the nationalists, a common theme was developed which focused on anti-war commitments which nationalists and anti-nationalists shared (Daphi et al., Citation 2019 , p. 11).

During my fieldwork with WMW-Pilipinas, I was struck by the energy the activists invested into transcending the above-described divisions of the Philippine left in their practices of solidarity. When, for instance, a number of farmers were shot by the police because they had been blocking a road and demanding that the government support them with water, many of the feminist elite shrugged off the concerns of the farmers because these belonged to the RAs and were hence seen as violent Maoists. WMW-Pilipinas, on the other hand, made it a point to support those farmers publicly despite them being on the other side of the RA/RJ divide. One activist told me how paralyzing the sectarian character of the left was and how it inhibited the women’s movement to come together. However, she added that the opportunism on the side of the democratic forces was just as bad. Hence, she and the other activists from the WMW-Pilipinas took it on them to formulate a position of solidarity that aspired to transcend both these divides, supporting the farmers despite them being sectarian Maoists, and provoking powerful allies in parliament, NGOs and academia.

In such a vein, the WMW-Pilipinas has been able to build relations with groups from other camps by consciously adopting a relational approach that doesn’t start with a ‘global’ strategy but with mutuality and slow processes of getting to know each other while formulating common aspiration and carrying that into the international networks (Interview WMW). It has generally been a strength of the World March of Women which from early on knew how to link issues such as poverty and violence against women (Moghadam, Citation 2009 , p. 74). This has also been achieved thanks to the cooperation with and inspiration from indigenous women’s groups. As I learnt in interviews, indigenous groups are the only political movements on the Philippine left that are able to evade the allegiance to either RA or RJ: ‘the indigenous communities, unlike other sectors which have been organised and aligned automatically to political blocks, the indigenous communities have enjoyed, a certain independence […] and I find that healthier in terms of being able to cross different networks’ (Interview WMW). The movement was able to actively draw on indigenous self-articulations in order to construct an independent women’s agenda which could potentially be integrating the feminist left at large. The involvement of indigenous women’s movements does, however, come at an organizational cost. Usually, the WMM-Pilipinas has a procedure for groups to become members in their movement in order to ensure durability of cooperation and trust-building. In the case of the organization that brings indigenous voices to the March, the organizational ties are loser. Speaking to one of their leaders in Manila, she told me that her organization’s relations usually emerge with individual member groups of the WMW-Pilipinas, and often are established through personal relationships, and ‘we would be working either separately or together on issues’. She explained that ‘there would be moments where World March of Women would as World March of Women invite [us]. But for particular activities’. That is to say, the organization does not want to become an official member of the WMW-Pilipinas, a situation that requires more flexible arrangements for both sides than is usually the case. This stance is endorsed by the WMW-Pilipinas. It opens spaces of in-between that are awkward at times, but they circumvent the violence of representation for the indigenous women. Their aspiration for ending patriarchy and the exploitation of resources is expressed together without claiming the complete identification with the other. The indigenous women feel the trust they receive by not having to commit to a full-package agenda, and the activists of the World March are assured to receive the solidarity of indigenous activists on particular issues, a meaningful commitment by them in the minefield that is the Philippine left.

This article portrayed two feminist movements affiliated with the World March of Women, the World March of Women – Pilipinas , and the Indonesian Solidaritas Perempuan . In search of the possibility of emancipatory solidarities, I argued that their praxis can be informative for the theory and practice of solidarity across difference more generally. On the backdrop of the recent critique of ‘global justice’ as a cosmopolitan framework for activism which has arguably re-inscribed colonial continuities by morally elevating white, Western feminisms, a turning-away from solidarity across difference has been discussed during the last years. This expresses itself in a new focus on place and particularity as the analytical and normative backbone of a postcolonial theorization of feminist solidarity. Yet, I have argued that the practice of the World March of Women is more complex than that, because it overcomes essentialisms (categorical difference) through the active work of seeking commonalities across difference. But at the same time, it also overcomes liberal cosmopolitan ethics by politicizing particularism. In this oscillation between the generalization of their cause and the protection of particularity, solidarity across difference is observable. On the one hand, this finding hints at possibilities for solidarities across difference. On the other hand, it also explains why such solidarity relations are often unstable and short-lived: their maintenance requires complex and multi-scalar practices of mutual understanding with respect to particular circumstances and needs, while at the same time coming up with temporally limited generalizations for cooperative activism.

I have argued that, therefore, solidarity across difference is successfully expressed in in-between spaces, which makes the activism in such a fashion exhausting. In analyzing this approach, I have shown that two principles are central to its success: relationality and aspiration. The subjects in a solidarity-relationship are strongly implicated into each other’s lives and their histories. This involves the entangled struggles of gender, class and race, all of which keep shaping the hierarchical production of divided societies. In order to deeply relate across the resultant differences and hierarchies, I have shown that long and complex processes fostering mutual understanding and trust-building are necessarily coupled with reflecting on the own practice from the perspective of the other. In many instances, these groups were able to express their solidarity through a conscious attempt of articulating a programme which caters to both, necessities of a particular place and a common aspiration, in effect transforming each of them.

These in-between spaces remain precarious and are haunted both by nationalist impulses that stem from anti-imperialist traditions, and globalist hopes that are fuelled both by neoliberal discourses and feminist victories during UN-conferences. Yet, I have shown that the activists in the World March of Women in Southeast Asia were able to formulate visions that transcend these divisions and share mutual aspirations without claiming complete identification with the other. Some of these experiences were frustrating and could be considered failures, but the most interesting aspect of these experiences for the theory of solidarity across difference are not the acts in themselves but the activists’ readiness to reflect their own practice in accordance with the needs of an ‘other’. It overcomes essentialisms such as the local community/the state through active work of seeking common interest across difference (generalization of solidarity). The global in this context provides a politically charged common horizon for change rather than an analytical ‘level’ defined as a given geographical entity. By constructing such a global horizon, the activists of the World March of Women overcome cosmopolitan ethics by politicizing difference and particularism. The global and the local are, in effect, political devices. When they are reflexively used, solidarity across difference can be constructed ‘in between’.

I am indebted to the activists in Indonesia and the Philippines who shared their knowledge and experiences with me. For helpful comments and critique, I would like to thank Janet Conway, Pascale Dufour, Inanna Hamati-Ataya, Johanna Leinius, Dominique Masson, Rosie Worsdale and two anonymous reviewers.

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

Notes on contributors

Felix anderl.

Felix Anderl is a postdoctoral research associate at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt. He is a member of the Centre for Global Knowledge Studies (gloknos) at the University of Cambridge and worked on this article on the ERC-funded project ARTEFACT. Felix holds a PhD in International Relations from Goethe University Frankfurt. He tweets @felicefrancesco.

1 Dhawan ( Citation 2013 ) suggests that cosmopolitanism mobilizes a logic in which ‘we are all in the same boat’. While there are very different understandings of cosmopolitanisms, for the sake of this argument I use the concept of cosmopolitanism, in line with its critics, to refer to a worldview that assumes equality by focusing on the commonalities of all humans while disregarding their differences.

2 I have observed this in several activist networks connected to or arising from the WSF context.

3 See Adamczak ( Citation 2018 , p. 226) for a complementary conception of solidarity in between the totality (of the state) and individualism (of a single person) for revolutionary theory.

4 Thanks to one of the reviewers for this suggestion.

5 See the website: http://www.solidaritasperempuan.org/tentang-sp/profil-solidaritas-perempuan (accessed 27 March 2020).

6 See the website: https://geraklawan.id/ (last access 27 March 2020).

7 This also led to a different analysis of sex work compared to other groups belonging to the World March of Women. While many other national movements and traditions see sex work as an underregulated but legitimate form of economic activity, most Philipina activists are highly critical of sex work in principle, arguing that the position of legalization misses ‘the reality of patriarchy’ (Enriquez, Citation 2015 ).

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• Published: 27 May 2021

Constructing collective identities and solidarity in premiers’ early speeches on COVID-19: a global perspective

• Martina Berrocal   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4003-8516 1 ,
• Michael Kranert   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0270-7136 2 ,
• Paola Attolino 3 ,
• Júlio Antonio Bonatti Santos 4 ,
• Sara Garcia Santamaria 5 ,
• Nancy Henaku 6 ,
• Aimée Danielle Lezou Koffi 7 ,
• Camilla Marziani   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0660-019X 8 ,
• Viktorija Mažeikienė 9 ,
• Dasniel Olivera Pérez 10 ,
• Kumaran Rajandran 11 &
• Aleksandra Salamurović 12  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  8 , Article number:  128 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

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A Correction to this article was published on 24 June 2021

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The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted a unique global experience, arousing both exclusionary nationalistic and inclusionary responses of solidarity. This article aims to explore the discursive and linguistic means by which the COVID-19 pandemic, as a macro-event, has been translated into local micro-events. The analysis studies the global pandemic through the initial statements of 29 leading political actors across four continents. The aim is to examine discursive constructions of solidarity and nationalism through the social representation of inclusion/exclusion of in-, out-, and affiliated groups. The comparative analysis is based on the theoretical and methodological framework of the socio-cognitive approach to critical discourse analysis and is informed by argumentation theory and nationalism studies. The results of our analysis suggest that leaders have constructed the virus as the main outgroup through the metaphors of the pandemic-as-war and the pandemic-as-movement which have entered the national space. Faced with this threat, these speeches have discursively constructed the nation-as-a-team as the main in-group and prioritized (1) a vertical type of solidarity based on nationhood and according to governmental plans; (2) exclusionary solidarity against rule-breakers; (3) horizontal solidarity that is both intergenerational and among family members, and (4) transnational solidarity. It is not by chance that the world stands as a relevant affiliated group that needs to forcibly collaborate in order to face the main outgroup, the virus itself. A major consensus has been found in constructing the out-group. In contrast, the linguistic and discursive constructions of in-groups and their affiliates display a greater variation, depending upon the prevalent discursive practices and social context within different countries.

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Social pathologies and ideologies in light of Jürgen Habermas: a new interpretation of the thesis of colonisation

Introduction.

Epidemics and pandemics are perennial transnational phenomena, as they had always spread through the increasingly interconnected world along with the networks of trade and travel (Malm, 2020 ; Huber, 2020 ). In the COVID-19 pandemic, however, this trend was realized on an unprecedented scale: the spread of the virus affected nearly everybody and led to a ‘unique shared experience’ (Bieber, 2020a , p. 1) because of the almost simultaneous worldwide reaction of lockdowns and shutdowns. This distinguishes it from other seemingly ‘global’ phenomena, such as the financial crisis or previous epidemics which were confined to one or more regions (e.g., Ebola, SARS, Zika). Within three months, the pandemic developed from a Chinese public health issue into a global health crisis.

The COVID-19 crisis is regarded as ‘a textbook example of contemporary globalization processes’ (Blommaert, 2020 ), with diseases spreading along with the mobile networks of the land, sea, and air travel which facilitate globalization (see also Malm, 2020 ). However, one of the most salient features common to most countries in the very first phase of the outbreak was the nation-oriented reactions (e.g., closure of borders, restrictions of medical and social aid within state borders), which challenged the concept of global solidarity. These circumstances have made nationalism, in all its nuances, an important concept in the discourse of the pandemic. Notably, the concept of solidarity itself has become prominent, both as opposed and linked to nationalism, and/or as a feature of renewed global interrelations. Given this experiential uniformity, the question arises of how such a general social phenomenon has been localized by discursive means. To test how this macro-event has been translated into local micro-events and to highlight similarities and differences, we have performed a comparative analysis of 29 countries across four continents, grounded in Koller’s ( 2012 , 2014 ) notions of in-, out-, and affiliated groups.

Theory and method

We understand political discourse as collective decision making (Klein, 2000 , 2019 ; Fairclough and Fairclough, 2012 ) in which a course of political action needs to be legitimized on the basis of common values and of a shared understanding of the situation and the issue in question (Chilton, 2004 ). Importantly, it is not only the course of action that is socially and discursively legitimized, but also the question of who can act on behalf of whom and how socio-cognitive representations of political collective entities such as states, nations, governments, and institutions are discursively constructed and contested.

Discourses of COVID-19 are evidently crisis discourses, as they concern a perceived threat to life (Gjerde, 2021 , p. 7) which, as with other pandemics, brings about emotional urgency and ‘elicits [an] immediate and widespread response’ (Rosenberg, 1989 , p. 1). Within risk and crisis management communication, the crisis is defined as ‘the perception of an event that threatens important expectancies of stakeholders’ (Coombs, 2010 , p. 99). This perceived disruption or violation of a specific order is then discursively constructed as a crisis (Hay, 1996 ). There is a long tradition of discourse research on crisis discourse, with work in discourse linguistics (Wengeler and Ziem, 2014 ), as well as in sociologically-oriented discourse analysis (Jessop, 2013 ) over the last decade focusing mainly on economic crises. In critical event studies, normally linked to the field of event management, Montessori ( 2016 , p. 132) extends the notion of critical events to global political events, which are driven by media logic. In critical realist fashion, she understands these events as existing outside of discourse but nevertheless gaining significance through discursive processes. Similarly to Jessop ( 2013 ), she warns that it would be a mistake to see ‘events as isolated moments’ (Montessori, 2016 , p. 144).

Zamponi and Bosi’s ( 2016 ) analysis of newspaper representations of the global financial crisis highlights its country-specific manifestation, which reinforces Blommaert’s ( 2010 ) observation that globalization does not lead to materially or linguistically uniform structures (see also Blommaert, 2020 ). Every global crisis, according to De Rycker and Don ( 2013 , p. 19) is, therefore ‘the outcome of local events and trends in specific places and […] is shaped by particular histories. To sum up, the available literature suggests that crises are discursively constructed events, but this construction depends on socio-cultural and political factors at a local level.

One of the salient values addressed and highlighted in the COVID-19 crisis discourse is solidarity. Generally, solidarity is conceived as an element that is essential for social structuring, both on the interpersonal and intergroup levels. If, in line with Durkheim ( 1984 , p. 331), we consider solidarity to be the ‘totality of bonds that bind us to one another and to society, which shape the mass of individuals into a cohesive aggregate’, then solidarity appears to be the basic feature of human interaction and has to be discursively conceptualized accordingly. However, solidarity is neither a homogeneous nor a stable concept. It displays numerous varieties in regards to both form and structure and can oscillate across different periods, such as times of quiescence and times of crisis (Crow, 2010 , p. 59). In addition, the linguistic realizations of these varieties differ considerably across texts and languages.

Starting with the discursive history of the concept, Bayertz ( 1999 ) lists four interrelated dimensions of solidarity: human, including family and blood ties; political, covering group active interest ties; social, relating to feelings, history and cultural ties; and civic, including economic or financial solidarity within a welfare state. Norms of solidarity are mainly of a horizontal nature (interpersonal and intergroup), but also involve a vertical dimension (rulers–ruled). Some authors, therefore, distinguish between institutionalized and informal solidarity (Kourachanis et al., 2019 , p. 680), the former referring to the state as the main carrier of common interests and actions, with the latter pointing to non-state-actors, such as NGO’s or family structures. Noting the increasing individualization of postmodern societies, some scholars speak about ‘solidaristic individualism’ (Rothstein, 2017 , p. 313) and ‘hidden solidarities’ (Spencer and Pahl, 2006 ), referring to the rising relevance of informal social networks such as friendships. Solidarity implies that people bond on the basis of the same or at least convergent interests and/or emotions.

In view of solidarity as a complex phenomenon, we adopt the proposal by Wallaschek ( 2020 ) to analyze solidarity as a meaning-making process focusing on both its content enfolding in discourse and the actors who are included in or excluded from this content. Solidarity is a feature of group building, both in the sense of community and society. Since individuals are members of more than one group, various types of solidarity interlock, as Bayertz ( 1999 , p. 28) emphasizes. Nation, as an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1983 ), is one of these possible social groups. In this vein, Malešević ( 2013 , p. 14, 2020 , p. 1) claims that solidarity is attached to nationhood, as ‘for an overwhelming majority of inhabitants of this planet, nationhood is understood to be the principal form of human solidarity’. In contrast, some scholars have argued that global solidarity is generally being questioned by the rise and strengthening of nationalism during the COVID-19 pandemic, as the nation-oriented reactions to the pandemic were a prominent recurrence during the initial crisis management phase. This can be explained by the fact that responsibility for public health lies with sovereign (nation) states and that ‘the nation-state — the institution—is the gravitational constant that determines politics’ (Ozkirimli, 2020 ). This reflects the power of (nation-)states which are, according to Malešević ( 2020 ), one of the main agents responsible for the unfolding of the organizational power of nationalism.

As with solidarity, nationalism conceptually lacks both homogeneity and clarity. Traditionally, scholars have distinguished between civic nationalism, linked to shared political rights, and ethnic nationalism, tied to distinct cultural markers such as language, religion, or ancestry (Smith, 1998 ). There is, furthermore, a distinction between virulent, aggressive, or exclusionary nationalism (Bieber, 2020b , p. 15) and banal (Billig, 1995 ) or latent (Bieber, 2020a , p. 15) forms of nationalism. Importantly, these differentiations are not to be understood in absolute terms since there is often a gradual transition and overlaps between the forms. Therefore Bieber ( 2018 , p. 521; 2020b , p. 14) suggests that nationalism is better understood against the background of the interplay between levels and grades of inclusion and exclusion, which are the two main principles in constituting any group (van Dijk, 1998 , p. 72). Within the discourse of COVID-19, a crisis has not only provoked the need to mobilize the ‘image of communion’ (Anderson, 1983 ) between all members who do not know each other but has initiated the processes of discursive (re-)identification and (re)building of in-groups and out-groups.

Furthermore, an analysis of the discursive construction of solidarity must also be attentive to the ways in which the coronavirus impacts nationalist constructions and performances in political discourse. More than any event in recent history, the COVID-19 crisis successfully highlights the complicated relationship between nationalism and transnationalism and has increased the relevance of Bieber’s ( 2020b , p. 187) argument that ‘[w]hile nationalism appears to be the antithesis to globalization, it is also closely intertwined with it’. Whilst efforts to curtail the pandemic are more distinct and determined at the level of the nation-state, as ‘it is states that have armed forces; control police; mint currency; permit or refuse entrance to their lands; states that recognize citizens’ rights and impose their duties’ (Archibugi, 2003 , p. 1), the pandemic itself engenders a cosmopolitan/cosmopolitical response from transnational institutions such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and through the circulation of newly-created shared discourses, protocols, and practices associated with the crisis (e.g., shelter in place, social and physical distancing; see Blommaert, 2020 ). The COVID-19 pandemic is an instance of what Archibugi ( 2003 , p. 3) identifies as one of the ‘elements of which spontaneously escapes national government control’. Indeed, it was in response to the WHO’s declaration of a COVID-19 pandemic that the speeches analyzed in this study were delivered. In that sense, there appear to be two interrelated and, in some contexts, competing ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson, 1983 ): the national imaginaire—where the power of the nation-state is directly imposed and felt—and the transnational imaginaire reinforced by the coronavirus’ spread and circulation.

The complex links between nationalism and transnationalism are reinforced by the geopolitical context within which the outbreak of the pandemic has occurred; that is, in a historical moment characterized by a rise in populist nationalism, alongside an emphasis on ‘trade protectionism’ and ‘migration controls’ (see Bieber, 2020b , p. 190 and Woods et al., 2020 , pp. 808–809).

We regard both solidarity and nationalism to be discursive strategies of social grouping based upon inclusion and exclusion. These strategies can be used both complementarily and contrastively. Two heuristics guide our analysis: The social construction of political identities in terms of nationalism and solidarity in the crisis communication reacting to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the argumentative legitimation of political actions.

Contextualization plays a crucial role in analyzing political text and talk. In this respect, we are guided by the three-dimensional model suggested by Norman Fairclough ( 2010 , pp. 131–134) that distinguishes between the macro level (the social and institutional context), meso level (participants, their roles and practices, genre), and micro level of a text.

At the macro level , we have encountered a problem concerning comparative analyses of political cultures and systems. Due to the limited space of this article, it is not viable to incorporate a systematic comparative analysis of political orientations and systems and to critically appraise the existing democracy indexes and their ideological shortcomings (for more details see Munck, 2009 ; Skaaning, 2018 ).

Regarding the meso level , we understand political speeches to be a broad, overarching, and heterogeneous genre of political discourse, inclusive of text types such as a press conference speech, or an address to the nation. This genre involves presenting ‘evidence, authority, and truth, a process that we shall refer to in broad terms, in the context of political discourse as “legitimation”’ (Chilton, 2004 , p. 23). In the context of COVID-19, the legitimation of proposed measures, policies, and representations are closely linked to coercion, exercised by political actors by setting policy, determining topics of discussion, making assumptions about the future development of the pandemic, and controlling representation (Chilton, 2004 ). This is especially relevant in leaders’ COVID-19 speeches, which are mostly consent-oriented, attempting to garner approval from the population, and thus associated with the formation of positive public attitudes towards proposed measures and crisis management process (see Reisigl, 2008 , pp. 251–252).

The research on social categorization as one of the basic processes of social cognition and the linguistic means by which they are expressed is elaborated upon within the socio-cognitive approach to discourse analysis (Koller, 2012 , 2014 ; van Dijk, 2012 ). The distinctive feature of the socio-cognitive outlook lies in inferring the Socio-Cognitive Representations (SCR) from texts produced in a particular social context. SCRs are conceptual structures that Augoustinos et al. ( 2006 , p. 42) describe as ‘organized, coherent, and socially shared sets of knowledge about an object or domain’. Thus, collective identities are seen as socio-cognitive representations ‘comprising beliefs and knowledge, norms and values, attitudes, and expectations, as well as emotions’ (Koller, 2012 , p. 20).

This knowledge can emanate from different sources, such as media, the norms, and values of the community on which expectations are built and evaluations of groups are performed. Such categorizations lead to the construction of group identities in discourse (Koller, 2019 , p. 71) and the discourse space occupied by them (Chilton, 2014 , 2017 ; Cap, 2017 ). SCRs are dynamic and flexible, as they manifest contradictory elements and thus are not necessarily internally consistent, which may lead to their change over time (Augoustinos et al., 2006 , p. 99).

The basis for the distinction between individual groups, mainly in-groups and out-groups , is a construction of difference, also known as bounding: construction of limits and boundaries (Koller, 2019 , p. 71). The in-group construction is based upon self-categorization, being expressed by self-attribution, assignment of action, motivation, and shared values. Besides in-groups and out-groups, Koller introduces the affiliated group as different from the in-group; however, it is ‘sympathetic’ or at least neutral towards the in-group and it shares, at least partially, some of its goals, norms, and values. ‘Members of the in-group and affiliated group are likely to have a positive attitude towards each other. The phenomenon of affiliated groups can be found in a range of social, including institutional contexts, including coalition partners in politics or allied nations ’ (Koller, 2019 , p. 72, emphasis by authors). From the perspective of discourse space theory (Chilton, 2004 , 2014 , 2017 ) and its application within the proximization theory (Cap, 2013 , 2017 ), the affiliated group is located within the in-group discourse space, sharing space and time with the in-group, but differing on the axiological level, which is determined by values, beliefs, and ideology (Wieczorek, 2013 , p. 215).

Based on the discussion above, we aim to answer the following overarching research question:

Does the pandemic crisis discourse challenge or enhance the concept and practice of solidarity, and to what extent is it associated with nationalist discourses?

RQ 1: How is horizontal and vertical solidarity linked to the discursive construction of in-groups, out-groups, and affiliated groups?

RQ 2: Which of the two interrelated and, in some contexts, competing ‘imagined communities’ (the national imaginaire and the transnational imaginaire of the pandemic) dominates the construction of solidarity in the data, and why?

COVID-19 Footnote 1 is the latest manifestation of a collective human event, among which are AIDS, Ebola, and Zika. However, the relative speed and ease with which the virus spreads have caused a staggering impact, the range, and severity of which has never been seen before. Our research performed a comparative analysis of the first statements by leading politicians in 29 countries in 4 continents from the Global North, South, and East (see Table 1 ). In addition to global and local perspectives, the texts in the corpus capture initial frames, arguments, and topoi which have been iterated over the course of the crisis. In addition, we aim to test the level of interdiscursivity by comparing reactions in a broad variety of countries. We have not privileged a particular region; however, we recognize the dominance of texts from Europe and North America. The composition of researchers meant that texts from Europe figure prominently (17 of 29 texts), in comparison to texts from Africa (2), the Americas (4), and Asia (6). Although the corpus was created via a convenience sampling method, it still represents a broad sample in terms of political cultures and will hopefully provide a context for future analyses of COVID-19 discourses, particularly relating to countries not here represented.

We consider ‘leading politicians’ to be the president or prime minister of a given nation. Of course, different political systems emphasize different roles. Presidential systems (e.g., Argentina, United States) confer substantial power to presidents, whilst semi-presidential and parliamentary systems (e.g., Malaysia, Spain) confer power to the prime minister. In considering diverse countries, we selected presidents and prime ministers because their positions are broadly similar, in that they lead the executive branch of government. The president or prime minister is a metonymic spokesperson, being the head of government and speaking on its behalf. Although we are not here distinguishing between the speaker as an animator, author, and principal (Goffman, 1981 , pp. 131–40), we are aware of the complex production format of political leaders’ speeches (Kranert, 2019 , pp. 72–80). We have therefore simplified our analysis, in order to focus on social representations in the text, thus treating the speaker as a unified category. The president or prime minister is the highest-ranking member of the government and is an empowered representative. Their first statements are granted symbolic power (Bourdieu, 1992 ) as they have a broad media reach and frame the discourse that follows.

The ‘first statements’ explain the state of the COVID-19 pandemic in its initial stage in a particular country. These statements take the form of speeches or press conferences, delivered on national television. While the two are different genres in terms of structure, their purposes and audience are shared. These statements are an official political declaration on the COVID-19 pandemic from the government to the population (citizens or non-citizens) in the territory. Moreover, these first statements were delivered shortly after the WHO’s official declaration of a pandemic on 11 March 2020. 23 leaders delivered their statements within a week, with 6 leaders doing so within two weeks. These first statements are emblematic, indicating the very start of a society-wide, government-led approach to handling COVID-19.

The choice of first statements by leading politicians necessitated creating a comparable corpus of texts for analysis. These texts were readily available on the government websites of the respective countries. As such, official transcripts were provided. Whilst these transcripts contain details of spoken language, other multimodal features were noticeably absent, such as facial expression, gesture, and body language. While multimodal features are crucial (Ledin and Machin, 2018 ), the focus of our analysis is at the textual micro level of the first statements. We created a corpus of 29 separate texts, one for every country in Table 1 . Besides English (which accounts for four speeches), the speeches were given in 25 different languages. The examples used in the analysis were translated into English, which is the metalanguage employed by this paper’s researchers.

Affiliated group construction

Affiliated groups in our corpus create discursive alliances with the in-groups and share relatively close ties with them. Accordingly, the in-groups offer them support, express solidarity, and provide aid or receive help from them. In some cases, the affiliated groups of some countries are, however, a target of criticism in speeches of other countries (e.g., EU). For instance, Spain and Italy are seen as countries affected by the virus towards which Serbia is showing sympathy and solidarity, even though the European Union is considered an out-group in the same speech. In general, there are two types of affiliated groups: geographical and institutional. The first group encompasses neighboring and/or foreign countries, including both the most affected by the Covid-19 crisis and countries that were ‘successful' in dealing with it.

The ‘World,’ as a group of countries, is mentioned to emphasize the magnitude of the coronavirus pandemic. For instance, Spain’s President declares that COVID-19 is

…el combate frente al virus que libran todos los países del mundo. (Spain, Sánchez, 13 March 2020)

…the fight against the virus led by all countries in the world.

Similarly, the ‘World’ is also used as an affiliated group to emphasize international cooperation by Brunei’s President:

Tetapi kita bukanlah bersendirian, malah seluruh dunia. (Brunei, Bolkiah, 21 March 2020)

But we are not alone; in fact, the world is with us.

Quite a different perspective is taken by the Cuban President, who claims that his country is affiliated with and ready to help all those who may need it. This seems to be the central objective of Cuba’s foreign relations policy, as the President himself points out:

Esa misma responsabilidad, lo que nos llama es a ser solidarios, a cooperar con todos los que en el mundo necesiten apoyo y esté a nuestro alcance darlo. (Cuba, Díaz-Canel, 20 March 2020)

The same responsibility calls us to solidarity, to cooperate with all those in the world who need our support, as long as we’re able to provide it.

Importantly, the construction of coronavirus as a global threat serves to reinforce the pre-existing alliances between countries and their foreign policies. This is often done by propping up national strengths and values. At the transnational level, the expression of solidarity is more associated with assistance and aid rather than effective cooperation. Alongside the international organizations and alliances, the data show that the construction of affiliated groups in some countries involves foreign citizens and asylum seekers, groups for whom membership in these nations is sometimes contested. This aligns well with Kloet et al. ( 2020 ) who point out that in a time in which ‘geopolitical entities are ranked according to their governance and containment success’, ‘this celebration of biopolitical control does not fall into the classic reproduction of capital but speaks to geopolitical identification’. Unsurprisingly, the crisis situation has not only strengthened national geopolitical identifications but has also reinforced pre-existing geopolitical alliances in terms of affiliated groups or in-groups.

Neighboring countries are analyzed in terms of solidarity and mutual aid, as in the cases of Switzerland offering ‘close cooperation’, and German chancellor Merkel openly showing support:

Natürlich wollen wir unseren europäischen Nachbarn und Partnerländern auch in der Versorgung helfen. (Germany, Merkel, 11 March 2020)

Of course, we want to help our neighbors and partners with supplies.

Cuba and Chile include other countries as affiliated groups, based upon how successfully they handled the pandemic. In the Cuban speech, ‘international experience’ is observed and analyzed ‘systematically’, serving as an example of pandemic management. In Chile and Croatia, successful experience is further specified: South Korea, together with other ‘friendly countries’ is given as an example of successful pandemic management in its early stages.

The institutional type of affiliated groups regards international organizations, such as the European Union, international health organizations, and global and regional economic alliances. These affiliated groups give an insight into the multidimensional discourse of solidarity and the competing representations of national and transnational communities. The countries of the European Union are referred to as ‘colleagues’ by German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Meanwhile, Austria and Switzerland allude to European-level decisions and exchange of ideas. In addition, other instances focus on comparing the national responses and capabilities to deal with COVID-19 with other EU members: For instance, Lithuanian Prime Minister Saulius Skvernelis said:

Pirmieji Europos Sąjungoje paskelbėme ekstremalią situaciją. (Lithuania, Skvernelis, 12 March 2020)

We are the first in the EU to announce the state of emergency.

In Croatia, EU and democratic countries, in general, are emphasized as good examples:

Ohrabruje me na neki način što radimo manje-više sve isto što rade naše susjedne države, članice Europske unije, od kojih su neke najbogatije i najorganiziranije države na svijetu, s najuređenijim sustavima javnog zdravstva, pa se i tamo potkradaju neke stvari koje možemo nazvati greškama. (Croatia, Milanović, 18 March 2020)

I am encouraged in a way that we do more or less everything as our neighboring countries, members of the European Union, some of which are the richest and the most organized countries in the world, with the most organized public health systems, and even there things that can be called mistakes happen.

A completely different position is adopted in Serbia concerning the discourses of solidarity and nationalism. The Serbian President claimed that international and ‘European solidarity does not exist’, while referring to China as ‘friends and brothers of our country’:

Ja sam danas uputio posebno pismo, jer mnogo od toga očekujemo i najveće nade polažemo u jedine, koji mogu da nam pomognu. U ovoj teškoj situaciji to je Narodna Republika Kina. (Serbia, Vučić, 15 March 2020)

I sent a special letter today because we expect a lot from that and we place the greatest hopes on the only ones who can help us. In this difficult situation, it is the People’s Republic of China.

This discursive exception must be seen, first, in the context of the authoritarian ruling style by President Vučić, who decides on political friends and foes depending on what corresponds with his political goals. Second, this is in line with the Serbian national myth of being the eternal crossroad between West and East, expanding the latter in recent years to China.

The second institution which is regularly cited as an affiliated group by countries is the WHO. In Cuba and North Macedonia, it is mentioned as an international authority when stipulating and sustaining national sanitary measures. In Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, it is thanked for its assistance and support. Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro, on the other hand, refers to the WHO General Director to legitimize the country’s strategy against the WHO recommendations, foregrounding the damage a lockdown could inflict on the poorest in society.

Via the analysis of affiliated groups, the discursive multidimensionality of solidarity and competing representations of nationalism and transnational communities can be discerned. The perception of the coronavirus as a global threat is used to reinforce pre-existing alliances between countries and their policies of international relations; each of them aims to support national strengths and values in the face of the threat. On the one hand, neighboring and foreign countries are constructed in terms of solidarity, their success in handling the pandemic, and in terms of the aid provided. On the other hand, restrictions and constraints related to them and to their inhabitants, such as the closing of borders, are announced.

The discursive construction of collective identities and solidarity in the crisis speeches by the premiers of 29 countries presented a complex picture, one that can best be described with Wittgenstein’s idea of family resemblance:

And the upshot of these considerations is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: similarities in the large and in the small. I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than “family resemblances”; for the various resemblances between members of a family—a build, features, color of eyes, gait, temperament, and so on and so forth—overlap and criss-cross in the same way. (Wittgenstein et al., 2009 , p. 36e)

These family resemblances mean that the speeches—and the discourses represented in them—share the main discursive mechanism, as they react to the same political issue in the same genre. We can therefore summarize the main global mechanisms of the first political reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic here, while the outliers from the prototypical speech point to particularities in the local political environment.

Our analysis confirms Wallaschek’s ( 2020 ) idea of solidarity as a multi-layered phenomenon: In our speeches, it is first constructed vertically on the basis of national identity, as these speeches are given by national political leaders mainly speaking on behalf of a national government and addressed to their population. The genre ‘speech of a head of state/government’ targets national audiences and recontextualizes the practice of nation-states as established institutions reacting to global crises. The family resemblances are born at the discursive meso level: the speeches constitute an in-group based around the deictic center of the national governments. The in-groups need to collaborate to control the pandemic and minimize the risk for individual members. The first answer to our research question is that the speeches draw on a national imaginaire, which is enhanced by the genre itself, which presupposes the practice of a vertical type of solidarity (Kourachani et al., 2019 ). Governments and populations share a common aim in curbing the virus, and governments need to mobilize this vertical solidarity for the people to accept and apply proposed actions and decisions. Governments conceptualize this both as a joint interest (e.g., obligations, based on reason, expert opinion, and so on) and moral imperative (emotive appeals, such as to altruism). These results evidence that the practice of solidarity enables existing societal groups to be ‘repurposed’ in handling a new crisis: in this case, COVID-19.

Various mechanisms support the in-group construction on a national level and add layers of solidarity. Firstly, the virus as the common enemy is construed within the national imaginaire: the threat of the virus is constructed as a national threat through war metaphors and the construal of the pandemic as a dangerous movement towards the deictic center of the speech (Gjerde, 2021 ). Secondly, the portrayal of internal out-groups strengthens national solidarity based upon condemnation of the rule-breakers. And finally, almost all speeches refer to social groups closer to the audience and therefore refocus efforts towards horizontal solidarity: families, elderly, and children. The speeches, therefore, communicate a chance for in-groups to come together. The particular in-groups — that is, population, family, elderly, youth, military, and healthcare workers — are discursively constructed through structures that presume unity and hence consensus in actions and decisions to manage COVID-19.

Of course, the speeches also point towards a transnational level of solidarity, particularly as they mostly do not refer to national or regional out-groups. The exceptions are prototypical exclusionary nationalist leaders such as Trump accusing China, Cuba referring to its traditional enemy in the US, and Serbia doubting the solidarity of the EU. Affiliated groups in the speeches mainly reinforce pre-existing geographical alliances between countries but also refer to transnational institutions, such as WHO and EU. The solidarity with the affiliated groups mostly entails the provision of assistance or aid, but not the promotion of active cooperation. Indeed, alliance with the affiliated groups supports national strengths and values in dealing with this threat.

It has been argued that both the contestation of globalization and the absence of global cooperation may be linked to the decreasing superpower status of the US, as well as the growing tensions between the US and China, propelled through a kind of rhetorical war during the pandemic (Enderwick and Buckley, 2020 , p. 99; Woods et al., 2020 , pp. 810–812) and even before it (e.g., the US-China trade war). It is within this complex geopolitical context that one must, for instance, understand the US’ disposition towards the World Health Organisation or choice of ‘Wuhan or Chinese Virus’ over coronavirus, with implications for the reception of people of Asian descent in the West. Thus, constructions of solidarity at the level of the nation-state—based on assumptions of a deictic center—becomes significantly entangled with a ‘deictically organized geopolitical knowledge’ (Chilton, 2004 , 139), complicating our explorations of in-group, out-group and affiliated group constructions in the political responses to COVID-19.

Data availability

All analyzed speeches are available at the OSF repository ( https://osf.io/ug2y5/ ).

Change history

24 june 2021.

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00841-7

All analyzed speeches are available at OSF repository ( https://osf.io/ug2y5/ ).

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Carola Schoor for her help analyzing the speeches from the Netherlands and Belgium, and Thomas Walden for the competent copy-editing of the final version of the manuscript.

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‘Solidarity, hope’ and coordinated global response needed to tackle COVID-19 pandemic, says UN chief

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As public fear and uncertainty grow around the COVID-19 pandemic, “more than ever before, we need solidarity, hope and the political will to see this crisis through together,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said on Thursday in his first virtual press conference.

Unlike any global health crisis in the 75-year history of the United Nations, the coronavirus pandemic is “spreading human suffering, infecting the global economy and upending people’s lives”, he added. 

United Nations

Calling for global solidarity, Mr. Guterres said: “Our human family is stressed, and the social fabric is being torn. People are suffering, sick and scared”.

And as country-level responses cannot single-handedly address the global scale and complexity of the crisis, he maintained that “coordinated, decisive and innovative policy action” is needed from the world’s leading economies.   

Mr. Guterres said that he looks forward to participating in the G20 leaders’ emergency summit next week to respond to the pandemic’s “epic challenge”.

“My central message is clear”, he spelled out: “We are in an unprecedented situation and the normal rules no longer apply”.

Indicating that “we are at war with a virus”, the UN chief stressed that creative responses “must match the unique nature of the crisis – and the magnitude of the response must match its scale”.

And although COVID-19 is killing people and attacking economies, by managing the crisis well, “we can steer the recovery toward a more sustainable and inclusive path”, he said. 

“I call on world leaders to come together and offer an urgent and coordinated response to this global crisis,” he said. 

Health emergency

The UN chief said that tackling the health emergency was his number one concern and advocated for scaled-up health spending to cover, among other things and “without stigma”, testing, supporting health care workers and ensuring adequate supplies.

“It has been proven that the virus can be contained.  It must be contained”, he said, advising to move from a country-by-country strategy to a “coordinated global response, including helping countries that are less prepared to tackle the crisis”. 

“Global solidarity is not only a moral imperative, it is in everyone’s interests”, he stated and urged Governments to fully meet the World Health Organization’s ( WHO ) appeals, saying, “we are only as strong as the weakest health system”.

Global solidarity is not only a moral imperative, it is in everyone’s interests -- UN chief

Response and recovery

As the second crisis priority, Mr. Guterres pointed to social impact and the economic response and recovery.

He cited a new International Labour Organization ( ILO ) report projecting that workers could lose some $3.4 trillion in income by year’s end.

But the world is not experiencing an ordinary shock in supply and demand, “it is a shock to society as a whole”, he said. 

“Most fundamentally, we need to focus on people – the most vulnerable, low-wage workers, small and medium enterprises” explained the UN chief. “That means wage support, insurance, social protection, preventing bankruptcies and job loss”. 

He elaborated that “the recovery must not come on the backs of the poorest – and we cannot create a legion of new poor” and pushed for supporting informal economy workers and countries less able to respond.

Appealing for a global financial commitment, he noted that the International Monetary Fund ( IMF ), World Bank and other international financial institutions would play a key role.  

Mr. Guterres encouraged dismantling trade barriers and re-establishing supply chains.

Coronavirus Portal & News Updates

He also spoke of the pandemic’s impact on women, saying that they are “disproportionally carrying the burden at home and in the wider economy” and on children, noting that more than 800 million are currently not in class, “many of whom rely on school to provide their only meal”.  

“As people’s lives are disrupted, isolated and upturned, we must prevent this pandemic from turning into a crisis of mental health”, the Secretary-General continued, indicating the need to maintain support programmes for the most vulnerable, underlining that “humanitarian needs must not be sacrificed”.  

‘Recover better’

Against this backdrop, Mr. Guterres final point was that we have a responsibility to “recover better”. 

“We must ensure that lessons are learned and that this crisis provides a watershed moment for health emergency preparedness and for investment in critical 21st century public services and the effective delivery of global public goods”, he said.

Pointing to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change , he concluded: “We must keep our promises for people and planet”.

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Confronting Global Apartheid Demands Global Solidarity

Transnational Solidarity | Essays

by Imani Countess and William Minter

Imani Countess is the project director for the US-Africa Bridge Building Project. William Minter is a consultant for the Project and the editor of AfricaFocus Bulletin.

The COVID-19 pandemic has both revealed and deepened structural inequalities around the world. Nearly every country has been hit by economic downturn, but the impacts are unevenly felt. Within and across countries, the people who have suffered most are those already disadvantaged by race, class, gender, or place of birth, reflecting the harsh inequality that has characterized our world for centuries.  

This deepening inequality haunts our global future. According to a report released by Oxfam in January 2021, “Billionaire fortunes returned to their pre-pandemic highs in just nine months, while recovery for the world’s poorest people could take over a decade.”

International scientific collaboration has yielded multiple vaccines against the novel coronavirus. But the most vulnerable people and countries have been last in line for doses, or are not in line at all, threatening a vaccine apartheid. If that continues, it will be impossible to end the pandemic, as the virus will continue to mutate and spread across borders.

“Global apartheid” is more than a metaphor

The term “apartheid” comes from South Africa, notorious in the 20th century as the last stronghold of white minority rule. Political apartheid in South Africa ended in 1994 with free elections open to South Africans of all races. But South Africa and the world are still embedded in an international system of inequality reflecting the history of European conquest and domination.

In this system, wealth and power are still structured by race and place , both within and between nations. Whether or not one labels it global apartheid , there are striking parallels with South African apartheid.

In July 2020, UN Secretary-General António Guterres, in the annual Nelson Mandela lecture , addressed what he called the “inequality pandemic” and called the world to a “new social contract.” Such a contract, it is clear, will not happen quickly. But it will not happen at all unless millions around the world mobilize to make it happen.

South African apartheid was part of a global system of unequal rights

South Africa shares a history of white supremacy with other white settler states, including the United States, as Senator Robert Kennedy acknowledged in a speech to students in Cape Town in 1966 . Its apartheid regime was part of a world order defined for centuries by hierarchies of racial privileges both between and within countries.

Since the discovery of diamonds and gold in the late 19th century, South Africa and its neighbors in the Southern African region had been linked closely to Western economies, particularly the United States, England, and continental Europe. Internally, apartheid in South Africa was a multilevel system of labor control and differential rights, paralleling the global hierarchy. There were gradations of privilege for whites, Asians, “Coloured,” and “natives,” as well as for “natives” in urban areas, those in rural “homelands,” and “foreign natives.”

Beginning in the 1960s, when independent African countries joined the United Nations, the end of political apartheid played out on a global stage. Exposure of the South African regime’s inhumanity, including forced labor, torture, and attacks on neighboring states, led the United Nations General Assembly in 1974 to designate apartheid as a crime against humanity .

Transnational solidarity was essential to the anti-apartheid movement

Over the next two decades, the regime maintained highly visible repression within its borders while also waging proxy wars that devastated the entire Southern African region. The human toll on South Africans and their neighbors mounted into millions of lives lost. South Africa’s Western allies, despite growing willingness to speak against apartheid, stubbornly maintained their military and economic ties with the regime.

In opposing white minority rule, the South African liberation movements relied on mobilizing internal opposition, but they also issued appeals for support worldwide. They called for sanctions against the white minority regime and for direct support for South African liberation, including support for armed struggle. This outreach was essential because of the extent to which rich Western countries both profited from and sustained the South African economy and state.

Those calls were answered in different ways by governments, by multilateral bodies such as the Organization of African Unity and the United Nations, and by hundreds of solidarity organizations in almost every country of the world.

Solidarity was based on the recognition of common humanity

By the 1980s it was possible to speak of a transnational anti-apartheid movement. But it was a movement that drew in many different constituencies, with varying connections to and understandings of the situation in South Africa. For people in Africa and other world regions who had themselves experienced European conquest and colonial rule, the connection was clear. In the United States, too, the long history of the Black freedom movement closely paralleled that in South Africa. And the entire world recalled the anti-fascist struggle of the mid-20th century and its promises of freedom. South Africans seeking solidarity understood that they were speaking to specific audiences, not to an undifferentiated global community, and they strove to meet people where they were.

The fundamental message of the transnational anti-apartheid movement was, and remains, equal rights for all, applicable not only in South Africa but around the world. We must learn to live and work together on the basis of our common humanity, as expressed in the African concept Ubuntu.

That does not mean calling for neutrality or covering up the realities of injustice and oppression. It does mean rejecting the principle of separation (the literal meaning of “apartheid”) and bringing people into more inclusive communities with a common vision of justice for all.

Collective action relied on diverse strategies and multiple constituencies

In the 1980s, activists developed a range of collective action strategies to support South African calls for political liberation. These included divestment of corporate, pension, and municipal funds from institutions invested in apartheid, as well as protests, mobilizations, and campaigns. Local activists used their own experience and knowledge of specific places and specific institutions to craft appropriate strategies and tactics.

The movement drew in politicians and civil servants in national governments, staff of multilateral institutions, leaders of religious, student, trade union, professional, and social justice organizations, and grassroots leaders in local communities. These diverse actors built collective power and worked together for a common cause. In doing so, they had to look beyond racial and national divides, work through internal debates about strategy, and overcome conflicts driven by ideology and personal ambition.

The same general principles apply today to movements confronting a global pandemic, the climate crisis, and rising overt threats from authoritarianism, xenophobia, and racism. But today’s global movements must also confront not only new global realities but also enduring injustices not addressed by the anti-apartheid movement or other national freedom struggles of the 20th century.

The victory against South African apartheid was real but incomplete

The victory we celebrated with the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994 was real, as were earlier   victories in freedom struggles in other times and places. But that victory was by no means complete. Democratic political rights, in South Africa or any other country, are essential prerequisites for social and economic justice – but provide no guarantees. Indeed, the 21st century has brought steadily widening inequality and mounting threats to democracy, in South Africa and in countries around the world.  

Today we have a new set of intersecting crises, with the authoritarian playbook of “divide and rule” gaining ground in many countries. In meeting this moment, we can take inspiration and guidance from the collective victories of earlier generations. We must take seriously the truth that none of us are free until all of us are free. This principle, voiced over the years by Emma Lazarus, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Martin Luther King Jr., must apply across all the intersecting divisions that separate us from each other, including national borders as well as the familiar triad of divisions by race, class, and gender.  

The transnational anti-apartheid movement is one powerful illustration of how this principle can be applied. First, the movement built strong personal and organizational ties across borders in   commitment to a common cause. Second, global leadership came from those most endangered by South Africa’s apartheid regime, namely movements in South Africa and neighboring countries.  

But that movement also had internal shortcomings. The greatest limitation, as in other movements targeting national, racial, or class injustice, was the failure to address gender injustice. Despite public celebration of women in the struggle, failure to listen to women’s voices, and even tolerance of gender violence, was more the rule than the exception. That remains the case today worldwide, despite the profusion of pledges to address gender equity.    

New movements give hope for global solidarity

Over the past decade, as global inequalities have deepened, a wave of movements has been charting new strategies and paths forward. These movements include, to give just a few examples, Black Lives Matter, the climate justice movement, movements for women’s rights and LGBTQ rights, and union organizing among care workers and those in the informal economy, who are disproportionately women and youth.

These emergent movements build on new understandings of history as well as on an analysis of the current moment. As Angela Davis noted in the Steve Biko Memorial Lecture in 2016 , our work must be rooted in history yet must go beyond the limitations of the past. That means building structures that raise the voices of those who have been barred historically from leadership positions in social change movements. From the local to the global level, organizations and movements must feature “inclusiveness, interconnectedness, interdependency, intersectionality, and internationalism,” Davis told the audience at the University of South Africa.

The obstacles may seem overwhelming. But we can redefine the possible, argues Varshini Prakash of the Sunrise Movement , the youth movement that has put the Green New Deal at the center of the political debate on climate change in the United States. “ In your demands and your vision, don’t lead with what is possible in today’s reality but with what is necessary. ”  

Whether on climate, on the Covid-19 pandemic, or on rising inequalities by race, gender, class, and place of birth, joining forces for justice across national boundaries is not a choice. It is a necessity.

The Covid-19 pandemic is an immediate critical test of whether we can put this principle into practice. It will not be the last.

A movement, not just a leader

Nelson Mandela, the imprisoned leader of the African National Congress, was the best-known face of the anti-apartheid movement. Millions around the world watched as Mandela was released from prison in February 1990.  

Two months later, I sat in London’s Wembley Stadium with 70,000 others celebrating Mandela’s release and the start of a difficult but hopeful transition in the movement against political apartheid.  Several Americans sat in front of me. It turned out they were from Pikesville, Maryland; I was born and raised in nearby Baltimore. Pikesville was a majority-white suburb of folks who fled the city in the 1960s and ’70s in response to desegregation efforts.  Nonetheless, there we were in London, joined together in celebrating the success of a transnational solidarity movement led by Black and Brown South Africans.

That movement included not only iconic leaders like Mandela, but also grassroots leaders not in the international public eye. Just as important, it included countless activists around the world – a complicated mix of campaigners, national liberation parties, political formations and organizations, UN agencies, faith-based organizations, unions, students, and scholars.

Such a coalition is just as essential in confronting today’s global apartheid.

— Imani Countess

Selected Resources on the Transnational Anti-Apartheid Movement

Have You Heard from Johannesburg?

7-part video series on the transnational anti-apartheid movement, available as video-on-demand.

The Road to Democracy in South Africa: International Solidarity

Extensive studies by South African and other scholars from the South African Democracy Education Trust. Some chapters downloadable.

African Activist Archive Project

On-line digital documentation (more than 10,000 items) from national and local activist groups in the United States.

The Anti-Apartheid Movement

Brief summary and selected documents from South African History Online.

Walter Bgoya: From Tanzania to Kansas and Back Again

The key role of Tanzania in Southern African liberation struggles.

O.R. Tambo’s forgotten speech at Chatham House

Speech by ANC President Oliver Tambo, 1985.  

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1 Introduction

Mental health is deteriorating far and fast globally. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that approximately one billion people were living with mental disorders in 2019 [ 1 ]. To make an already daunting situation worse, in the first year of COVID-19 alone, the prevalence of anxiety and depression soared by 25% worldwide [ 1 ]. It is important to underscore that mental health is fundamental to both individual health and societal prosperity. In a meta-analysis of studies published between 2020 and 2021, for instance, researchers found that 76.2 million cases of anxiety and 53.2 million cases of major depressive disorder were added to the global mental health burden, which caused a loss of 44.5 million and 49.4 million disability-adjusted life years, respectively, in 2020 alone [ 2 ]. While effective in curbing and containing virus spread [ 3 ], COVID-19 countermeasures like lockdowns introduced a cascade of unintended consequences, ranging from disruptions of already limited mental health services to deteriorations of affected communities’ psychological wellbeing [ 4 , 5 , 6 ]. An analysis of longitudinal data shows that lockdowns in the United Kingdom (U.K.) may have caused 29% of the participants to develop mental disorders, challenges that have lasted even after the restrictions were lifted [ 7 ]. Preliminary findings in the U.K. also show that, due to the pandemic, around 44.6% of people aged between 17 and 22 who face mental health challenges did not seek help [ 8 ].

1.1 Technology-empowered mental health interventions

In times of existential challenges, global mental health solidarity—defined as the ability of the global mental health community to work collaboratively and cooperatively towards achieving the shared purpose of protecting and improving our collective mental health—is increasingly important. At a time when in-person interactions could become fatally contagious, technology was considered ideal for delivering contactless mental health services timely and efficiently [ 9 ]. Starting from the early days of the pandemic, telepsychiatry, virtual consultation services, and online self-help that could be accessed via everyday technologies like smartphones have provided much-needed help and timely interventions for people across the world, especially communities living under prolonged lockdowns or facing mobility difficulties such as elderly people in China [ 10 ]. Advanced analytical tools such as artificial intelligence (AI) also helped health experts identify people who experience acute mental health crises such as suicidal ideation via analysing social media posts in a near-time manner [ 9 ]. However, fragmented and oftentimes suboptimal patient protection measures, along with equity issues, raise questions regarding whether technologies that aim to help may introduce unintended consequences that compromise people’s mental health.

1.1.1 Double-edged impacts

In a study of the 23 most popular women’s health apps on the Apple Store and Google Play in terms of download frequency, for instance, researchers found that 87% of the apps share user data with third parties, often without either the users’ consent or awareness [ 11 ]. Similarly complex, if not more pronounced, relationships between technology and mental health are fast-unfolding in the context of social media [ 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 ]. On one hand, many researchers and scholars rely on social media for participant recruitment, intervention distribution and delivery, key stakeholder feedback, as well as monitoring public mental health [ 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 ], which has strengthened the field on multiple fronts. On the other hand, partly epitomised by the Surgeon General’s call for adding a mandatory warning label on social media—similar to that of cigarette packages—to protect particularly young people’s mental health [ 22 ], concerns have been increasingly voiced about the potential harm of social media on people’s psychological well-being [ 23 , 24 , 25 ].

1.1.2 Digital divide issues

Furthermore, disparities in technologies and high-speed Internet access within society mean that many vulnerable populations, such as people living in rural areas, may have limited or no access to mental health technologies [ 26 ], effectively further deepening health inequities and introducing additional inequalities that digital health solutions should help bridge [ 27 ]. According to research conducted by the Pew Research Centre in 2021, amid COVID-19, approximately 25% of older people (65 years and older) in the United States (U.S.) do not have access to the Internet [ 28 ]. Subsequent 2024 surveys further showed that around 35% of American elderly did not have at-home broadband [ 29 ], while only around 76% of seniors in the country own a smartphone [ 30 ]. Considering that the U.S. is one of the most affluent countries in the world, it is possible that situations are worse in poorer developing countries. Albeit daunting, these hurdles reflect ingrained systematic issues that have been plaguing the global mental health community, from poor awareness to chronic lack of funding. In other words, while cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) have brought new and novel treatment opportunities, they are nonetheless not immune to structural woes that shape the fundamentals of global mental health, such as a lack of evidence-based mental health awareness, fragmented global mental health education and regulation systems, and a chronic shortage of funding for mental health research and development.

2 Strategies and solutions to improve global mental health solidarity

Drawing insights from the literature and our own research, to address the deep-rooted issues that hinder society’s utilisation and optimisation of technological advances in AI to improve global mental health in the post-pandemic era, we proposed three strategies, along with their potential benefits, drawbacks, and balancing solutions (please see Table  1 ), to further our collective understanding of and advances in global mental health improvement.

2.1 Improving mental health awareness and narratives

While substantial progress has been made, there remains a lack of evidence-based awareness and balanced narratives of mental health. It is important to note that the extreme gaps that need to be bridged not only exist between the ideal and actual societal mental health awareness statuses, but also in the divides between developed and developing countries, urban and rural regions, as well as communities that  have varied fluency in mental health literacy [ 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 ]. Recurring evidence, for instance, shows that many people are still living in an environment where discussion or disclosure of mental disorders remains tabooed or avoided. In a study of 1,216 students across 65 countries, for instance, the findings show that stigma against mental health patients is prevalent among these students, with those living in less affluent countries more likely to hold negative attitudes [ 36 ]. Yet it is important to note though improving mental health awareness and fostering balanced narratives associated with mental disorders seem like straightforward solutions, they are not immune to potential unintended consequences, such as a perceived “inflation” of mental health diagnoses.

Amid rising calls for action to invest in developing mental health talents and tools, from well-trained psychiatrists, effective treatment solutions, to easy-to-use and accessible telepsychiatry planforms, questions have also been raised about whether the rising mental health awareness may have “inflated” the prevalence and severity of mental health issues en masse , especially among young people [ 37 ]. It is suggested that, because young people may have limited experience in weathering through stressful events like COVID-19, over-exposed to oftentimes conflicting and polarising digital communications like self-diagnosing advice [ 38 ], they are vulnerable to mistaking life’s daily struggles as mental health stressors. While having a diversity of voices is but a trademark of academia, these diverging views could nonetheless distract researchers and policymakers from committing to safeguarding people’s mental health with meaningfully comprehensive investment in force and unison. To balance these issues, we proposed potential countermeasures along with the strategies (please see Table  1 ).

2.2 Rigorous funding for mental health and development

Greater investments have the potential to materially and meaningfully improve the availability and accessibility of mental health services worldwide. In its June 2022 report, the WHO reveals that, on average, governments across the globe allocate roughly 2% of their overall health budgets to mental health services [ 1 ]. This meagre investment both explains why many people still face access issues though mental health technologies are becoming increasingly ubiquitous for some, and underscores the critical need to build mental health infrastructures—like universal access to high-speed Internet, electronic devices, and eHealth literacy education programs—particularly in underserved communities such as rural residents and older people. Another way to ensure society is well-equipped to meet people’s rising mental health concerns centres on healthcare capacity building, starting from increasing the productivity of the current mental health workforce, preferably with the help of AI tools and technologies, expanding the size and skills of the global workforce, enabling greater international mobility for the free flow of talents, to more rigorous investment in mental health research and development. Take talent development for instance. To motivate interested individuals and free them from avoidable living cost distractions, government and health officials could invest in improving the pay package, career aspects, and social welfare of mental health professionals. Moreover, society should also strive for equal pay on a global level to ensure talents trained in low- and middle-income countries are both morally and financially incentivised to serve the local communities to prevent global mental health disparities from worsening. A more detailed discussion of the benefits of rigorous funding for mental health research development, along with the potential drawbacks and balancing solutions, can be found in Table  1 .

2.3 Standardising global mental health practice and regulation

In light of the size and scale of the global population that faces mental health challenges, better integration of mental health education and awareness programs, such as in the form of required courses for students across school levels, should also be developed to mobilize the agency and ability of individual members of society. When optimally implemented, timely and effective education could not only ensure mental health issues become less stigmatised, but also can help people become more vigilant in identifying and addressing their mental health needs. Not to mention that an increase in resources and talents could substantially alleviate some of the worst debilitating hurdles faced by the medical community—around half of the world’s population lives in societies where there is less than one psychiatrist for every 200,000 people [ 1 ]. To address these issues, in addition to the above-mentioned pay standards to enable a greater yet balanced flow of talent, mental health education, training, and regulations should also be comparable on a global level, so that talents and resources can be readily mobilized across the globe in times of crisis.

Take regulations for instance. While technology could shorten geographical distances between service providers and users, regulatory barriers such as access limitations exerted by individual governments or app stores could prevent people from accessing mental health services in a timely fashion. Having a global mental health regulation system in terms of protection of patient safety, security, and privacy, in turn, has the potential to make interventions readily accessible to users across borders. Other differences are also present. A recent report in China revealed that, even though her recovery was clinically validated by the  physicians, a woman—now in her 30 s—was not permitted to leave the isolated psychiatry ward she was confined to by her parents for the past 14 years because her parents refuse to sign off her release [ 39 ]. Though the revelation is chilling, in light of the chained woman incident [ 40 ], it is hardly an isolated incident that reveals the yawning gaps between the quality of mental health services—from the integrity of the rule of law to the availability of timely help—between developed and developing regions. These realities combined, overall, further emphasise the importance of standardising global mental health practice and regulation.

Comparable training should also apply to technologists who develop mental health technologies. Rather than solely relying on a limited number of AI ethicists or policymakers as oversight mechanisms, the global community could and should ensure technologists receive adequate and appropriate training in ethics to reduce preventable harms in mental health technologies, as well as improve the interoperability of these interventions across contexts. For instance, without a consensus in terms of what “sentient” entails for advanced AI systems among technologists [ 41 ], and how AI systems should be designed to ensure reliable and safe advice, let alone whether and to what extent AI technologies can be regulated, it could be considerably difficult to protect patients worldwide from erroneous advice or treatment insights generated by AI systems that are developed without universal guidelines. The global presence and prevalence of mental illnesses require a whole-of-society approach to tackle. Essentially, it is in every nation’s interest to, preferably via fully and sustainably leveraging the potential of advanced technologies like AI, mitigate their residents, visitors, as well as physical and virtual neighbours’ mental health challenges for the betterment of humanity and society, if not productivity and the economy. A more systematic presentation of the pros and cons of standardising global mental health practice and regulation can be found in Table  1 .

3 Conclusion

Mental health is distinct as it is diverse. The challenges and opportunities associated with protecting and elevating personal and public mental health are exponentially greater on the global stage. In this paper, we proposed three strategies, discussed their advantages and limitations, as well as presented solutions that could help improve the intended results and reduce unintended consequences. Our exploration has been guided and inspired by ethical visions such as the WHO's "Health and a Better Future for All" and the age-old Confucian principle and ideal of " yi nai ren shu " (medicine as an art and artisanship of humanity). We hope the insights of this paper could help health experts and public health officials better think big and think global when developing mental health policies, not least to strengthen our resistance against emergencies like COVID-19. One of the most important lessons from the pandemic that should not be dismissed is the mere fact that, rather than quietly disappearing, ignored public health woes can be transformed by crises like COVID-19 into debilitating and demoralising burdens of once-unthinkable size, scope, and scale. COVID-19 is still here, and the next pandemic might be near. No walls are long or tall enough to departmentalise the Earth—our shared home that is as round as it is one. Such is also the case for global mental health: to survive and thrive, let us strive for unity and solidary instead.

Data availability

Data are available upon reasonable request.

Abbreviations

Artificial intelligence

United Kingdom

United States

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to express their gratitude to the editors and reviewers for their constructive input and insightful feedback.

This project is supported by “The Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities” (4025002306).

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ZS, BLB, DMD, SS, JJ, XY, YL, TA, WD, YD, YF, D, SK, PM, JBN, CPdV, and YTX conceived the work, reviewed the literature, drafted, and edited the manuscript. All authors approved the manuscript for submission.

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Su, Z., Bentley, B.L., McDonnell, D. et al. Global mental health solidarity: strategies and solutions. Discov Ment Health 4 , 40 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44192-024-00087-0

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74th session of the WHO Regional Committee for Europe

Global solidarity across countries and continents needed to fight COVID-19

WHO/Europe today convened an online briefing to exchange guidance, information and experiences from across the European, Western Pacific and African regions with ambassadors and diplomats based in Denmark, Copenhagen.

The WHO regional directors of Europe, the Western Pacific and Africa were united in their calls for solidarity to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic effectively. Dr Hans Henri P. Kluge, WHO Regional Director for Europe, spoke for all when he called on countries to:

• connect with each other and coordinate responses to ensure that measures introduced by one nation do not hamper the response in others;
• continue to support the response with resources, act in solidarity, include all and assure that the most vulnerable are supported; and
• encourage communities and sectors of society to be engaged and to promote an all-of-government response.

Opening the briefing, Dr Kluge provided a short overview of the current situation in the WHO European Region. He noted that with over 40% of confirmed cases of COVID-19 globally now in Europe, the Region is currently at the epicentre of the epidemic.

As of the morning of 19 March, over 75 000 cases were reported in the European Region, with 4 countries – Italy, Spain, France and Germany – accounting for over 77% of all European cases and with case numbers rising rapidly.

Ensure international cooperation, collaboration and solidarity

In his statement, Dr Kluge underlined 3 key points. Firstly, he stated that COVID-19 is a test of solidarity, and that it is important for countries and governments to abide by the principles of international cooperation, collaboration and solidarity.

On this issue, Dr Kluge made a direct appeal for governments to reconsider the steps they have taken to close borders and impose import/export restrictions that are inhibiting the flow of supplies and equipment, including personal protective equipment for frontline health workers. He also urged them to allow WHO experts to travel to, from and within countries freely to provide support.

Invest in health, now and in the future

Secondly, the Regional Director emphasized that health must remain high on political agendas, today and in the future.

“The lives of millions of people in our Region are undergoing radical change. There is, quite simply, a new reality. The role of public health services is understood. The value of health workers is appreciated. Our health systems and services are valued like never before. When the vulnerability and frailty of our way of living are appreciated, health is at the top of the agenda. I ask your governments to keep it there,” said Dr Kluge.

He thanked governments for their contributions, both human and financial, to assist in the global preparedness and response efforts. He also drew attention to WHO response plans and to the just-launched COVID-19 Solidary Response Fund, a joint initiative of WHO, the United Nations Foundation and partners to support the most vulnerable and in-need countries.

Connect and engage with communities

Thirdly, Dr Kluge underlined that all levels of government and all sectors of society have a responsibility to address COVID-19. He reiterated that engaging communities through listening and communicating effectively with the public, local partners and other stakeholders is essential to respond effectively to the pandemic.

To help countries listen to and understand their communities and ensure that their COVID-19-related response activities are relevant and actionable, WHO/Europe just launched a behavioural insights tool for rapid, flexible and cost-effective monitoring of public knowledge, risk perceptions, behaviours and trust.

Update on the situation and response in the Western Pacific Region

Speaking from Manila in the Philippines, Dr Takeshi Kasai, WHO Regional Director for the Western Pacific Region, began his update on a note of optimism. Explaining that today China had not reported any new cases of locally transmitted COVID-19, he noted: “This is an epidemic that can be pushed back.”

Dr Kasai stated that country responses must be tailored and specific, but must have one common factor: mobilizing the whole of society. He also appealed for countries to focus on protecting the most vulnerable, including older people and those with underlying health conditions, as well as health-care workers who are the most exposed and most essential to the response.

Reiterating Dr Kluge’s call, Dr Kasai underlined that this is a time for international cooperation and solidarity. He assured those in the European Region of continuing support from the Western Pacific Region, and thanked the European Region in turn for its support.

Update on the situation and response in the African Region

Dr Matshidiso Moeti, WHO Regional Director for the African Region, joined the briefing from Brazzaville in the Republic of the Congo. She noted that although case numbers are currently comparatively low, the African Region has seen exponential geographical spread of the virus over the past 2 weeks. Cases have now been reported in 28 African countries, primarily imported from Europe.

Dr Moeti also explained that the existing social conditions and economic status of many countries in the Region place added stresses on them. For example, health systems are comparatively weak, and many households do not have running water or the space for placing individuals in isolation.

In recent weeks, countries have been preparing for COVID-19 and making strong progress in strengthening surveillance, point-of-entry screening, contact tracing and laboratory services. Now, 41 countries in the Region have the capacity to test for the virus. However, the greatest challenges remain in infection prevention and control and in critical care provision.

In conclusion, Dr Moeti echoed earlier comments, calling for strategies to tackle COVID-19 that are evidence-based and “mutually supportive and synergistic”. She thanked the European Region and its Member States for their continuing support.

The regional directors and WHO experts responded to a range of questions on issues including hospital preparedness, vaccine production, herd immunity, availability of testing kits and personal protective equipment, possible treatments, and “flattening the curve”.