In this thought-provoking essay, Martina Tazzioli and William Walters argue that the political concept of solidarity is under-theorised in the academy, particularly as compared to concepts such as justice, equality, citizenship, equality. But in calling for a sharper ‘analytics of solidarity’ they are clear that theory must be informed by practice and that the perspectives of those struggling for migrant and refugee rights in a ‘new era of protest’ are key. By interrogating solidarity within the migration context, they show how the bounded and bordered nature of top-down solidarity, as institutionalised both in EU declarations, charters and policies and the more recent state-model of ‘good refugee hosting’, divides citizen from foreigner, betraying universal values. They contrast the branded ‘paternalistic humanitarianism’ favoured by the European Commission, with the bottomup internationalist (and therefore anti-racist) solidarity of Europe’s citizens’ initiative of solidarity practices at the French-Italian frontier as a case study. This essay takes the attempts to criminalise those NGOs and individuals who create lieux de lie (spaces of life) for migrants and refugees and defend the ‘spaces of sociability’ fostered by migrants themselves as the vantage point from which to expose EU’s repressive approach to migration, as the ‘hostile environment’ (first coined by Theresa May) is generalised across Europe. The authors stress ‘how history continues to shape contemporary practices of solidarity’, a history that migrant struggles draw upon and lessons they reactivate.

It is ‘nativism’, with its rhetorical rallying cry of ‘our own people first’, and its populist vocabulary that reduces ‘non-natives’ to ‘swarms’, ‘invaders’ or, as Italy’s far-right interior minister Matteo Salvini puts it, Africa’s ‘new slaves’, that forms the backcloth to the authors’ concerns. The term xeno-racism, first deployed by A. Sivanandan (Sivanandan, 2001), is used to describe a virulent form of racism meted out to foreigners and its institutionalisation within law and policy through specific measures that segregate asylum seekers and migrants from the rest of society, strip them of human rights and render them vulnerable to deportation.