This edited collection brings together academics, artists and members of civil society organizations to engage in a discussion about the ideas of living with others, through concepts such as cosmopolitanism, solidarity, and conviviality, and the practices of doing so. In recent years, right wing and populist movements have emerged and strengthened across Europe and North America, rejecting the value of cultural, ethnic and religious plurality. Governments in Europe and North America are weakening their commitment to the international refugee regime, erecting new barriers to entry. Even as governments fail to accommodate growing pluralism, however, civil society initiatives have emerged with the aim of welcoming newcomers, such as migrants and refugees, and finding alternative ways of living together in diverse societies. Motivated by a desire to show solidarity, these initiatives demonstrate enormous creativity in fostering pluralism in an environment that has largely become hostile to the arrival of newcomers. The contributions gathered here seek to explore such initiatives and the important work that they do in fostering ways of living together with others from diverse cultural and religious backgrounds. In focusing conceptually and empirically on discussions and examples of civil society initiatives, this book interrogates why, how and under what circumstances are some communities more welcoming than others.

The book focuses on civil society: established institutions and forums, radical groups, NGOs, and self-organised individuals who are promoting inclusion and welfare of Eastern European Roma in the name of shared ethnic identities, religious closeness, and universal human rights in Greater Helsinki, Finland. Special attention is directed to methodological issues regarding the research for/with/by Roma.

This book discusses the ways civil society initiatives open communities to newcomers and why, how, and under what circumstances some are more welcoming than others, exploring the importance of transgressive cosmopolitanism as a basis for creating more inclusive and pluralistic societies. The question of how to live together in increasingly multicultural, multi-ethnic, and multireligious societies is a pressing political and policy issue, particularly as we witness a rise in right-wing populism and anti-immigrant sentiments. This book addresses the limitations of approaches that seek to secure borders, preventing the arrival of newcomers altogether, or that vacillate between assimilation and multiculturalism. The authors explore the concept of cosmopolitanism and its utility, by theorizing from real-world examples, including Germany’s Welcome Culture and Denmark’s Kind Citizens movements and other smaller-scale initiatives, such as arts and museum projects, kitchen hubs, and shared living accommodation. Interdisciplinary in nature and bringing conceptual discussions together with everyday examples, this book focuses on forms of activity generally left out of wider debates around protest and social movement literature. It emphasizes different types of activities undertaken by civil society groups, who do not necessarily self-identify as political, but whose activities can counter right-wing populism. This dialogue between concepts and everyday politics makes the volume a very useful companion to classroom discussion and will facilitate its own exchange between scholars, activists, and practitioners.

From Sovereignty to Solidarity seeks to re-imagine human mobility in ways that are de-linked from national sovereignty. Using examples from around the world, the author examines contemporary practices of solidarity to illustrate what such a conceptualization of human mobility looks like. He suggests that urban and local scales, rather than the national scale, is a better way to frame human migration and belonging. The book ultimately proposes that solidarity, rather than sovereignty, offers an alternative approach to imagine how human mobility should, and already does, occur. This book will be relevant to upper-level undergraduate and graduate students in disciplines such as Migration Studies, Urban Studies, Human and Political Geography, and Refugee Studies. It is also relevant to researchers, development workers and human rights/environmental activists, and other intellectual practitioners.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-SA 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. This book examines the role of imagination in initiating, contesting, and changing the pathways of global cooperation. Building on carefully contextualized empirical cases from diverse policy fields, regions, and historical periods, it highlights the agency of a wide range of actors in reflecting on past and present experiences and imagining future ways of collective problem solving.

This book explores how feminist movements in the Nordic region challenge the increasing gender, race and class inequalities following the global economic crisis, neoliberal capitalism and austerity politics, and how they position themselves in the face of the rise of nationalism and right-wing populism. The book contextualizes these recent events in the long histories of racial and colonial power relations embedded in Nordic societies and their gender equality and welfare state regimes. It examines the role of whiteness and racism and seeks to decolonize feminist knowledge and genealogies of feminist movements in the region. The contributions provide in-depth knowledge on the different orientations, dilemmas and tactics that feminisms develop in these challenging times and show the centrality of antiracist and decolonizing critiques of feminisms. They further highlight the strategies of feminist and related antiracist and indigenous movements in regards to ideas about hope, solidarity, intersectionality, and social justice. Chapters 6, 7, 9 and 10 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Contending Global Apartheid: Transversal Solidarities and Politics of Possibility offers a collection of critical essays on human rights movements, sanctuary spaces, and the emplacement of antiracist conviviality in cities across North and South America, Europe and Africa.

This book critically challenges the usual territorial understanding of borders by examining the often messy internal, transborder, ambiguous, and in-between spaces that co-exist with traditional borders. By considering those less visible aspects of borders, the book develops an inclusive understanding of how contemporary borders are structured and how they influence human identity, mobility, and belonging. The introduction and conclusion provide theoretical and contextual framing, while chapters explore topics of global labor and refugees, unrecognized states, ethnic networks, cyberspace, transboundary resource conflicts, and indigenous and religious spaces that rarely register on conventional maps or commonplace understandings of territory. In the end, the volume demonstrates that, despite being "invisible" on most maps, these borders have a very real, material, and tangible presence and consequences for those people who live within, alongside, and across them.

This edited volume draws attention to the interlinked yet understudied relationship between the role of cities in dealing with international displacement and forced migration and the influence of forced migration in stimulating spatial, societal, and institutional transformations in and of cities. In 2022, almost 84 million people worldwide were forcibly displaced. More than two-thirds of them reside in urban areas. Displacement and forced migration are an urban experience and an urban story of those seeking protection. This book helps us understanding the conditions of displaced population in cities, and the way cities and urban actors respond to recent migration trends. It applies an urban perspective to the analysis of migration processes, and it provides insights into the urban governance of forced migration and asylum, the production of spaces related to forced migration, and the role of the displaced population as actors of urban change. Thereby, it covers a broad spectrum of topics including migrant dispersal, welfare and social protection, urban humanitarian policymaking and governance, neighbourhood development, migrant solidarity and refugee protest, and new refugee and migrant destinations. Given the increasing mobility and displacement of human populations, this book provides a relevant prerequisite for readers interested in current urban, (forced) migration and asylum trends, and on the intersections of those topics. The book will be of great value to researchers and academics of Geography, Migration and Urban Studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Urban Geography.

This Handbook presents a comprehensive overview of the interaction between migration and development from a range of critical and counter-hegemonic perspectives. Exploring the strengths and weaknesses of existing practices connected with the migration and development nexus, contributing authors provide a clear understanding of their complex dynamics.