A presentation by Eleni Karageorgiou, Danish Institute for Human Rights, and Gregor Noll, Gothenburg University. This event is part of the Fundamental Rights Research Colloquium under the „Transforming Migration Governance: Towards a Solidarity-based Approach“ cluster hosted by the Centre for Fundamental Rights.
What is the problem that solidarity is invoked as a solution to? How are solidarity schemes narrated? Which particular interests are pursued in its name? In this session, Dr. Eleni Karageorgiou and Professor Gregor Noll will present their co-edited volume on The Question of Solidarity in Law and Politics (CUP 2026). In their book, leading authorities in law, philosophy and political sciences respond to the solidarity question, drawing on debates on international law, international aid, collective security, joint action, market organization and neoliberalism, international human rights across the North/South divide, African mobility, transnational labour in the digital age and populism. Noll and Karageorgiou will also present their own contributions to the volume.
Refugees, Migration, and the Promise of Solidarity in International Law (Eleni Karageorgiou)
In her chapter ‘International Law and the Messianic Promise of Solidarity’, Karageorgiou argues that solidarity in international law and human rights discourse, often carries an implicit promise; a reassurance that cooperation, protection, and collective responsibility will eventually lead to justice, fairness and safety. This promise has deep roots in Western theological traditions, where concepts of love, suffering, sacrifice and redemption are central. International legal frameworks, including those governing refugee protection, have secularized this logic: they commit to principles of shared responsibility, yet often defer their meaningful realization to a future that never fully arrives. At a time when border violence, externalisation, and deterrence sit at the core of migration governance, Karageorgiou challenges solidarity as a rhetoric of reassurance and repositions it as a demand for structural accountability, instisting that states are already entangled in the conditions that produce displacement and containment.
Will AI and Digitalization Kill Off Solidarity? (Gregor Noll)
Is solidarity possible in societies characterized by the exchange of data, under conditions of digitalization and AI? Noll’s answer is no. Why? He argues that cybernetics, digitalization and AI undercut the preconditions for solidarity, as they eradicate the sharing of a physical place on the inside of exploitation politics. To support this argument, Noll draws on two historical cases. The first maps German coal and steel workers’ resistance to exploitation during the industrial revolution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The second case explores resistance and community formation by the Maroon, a group of fugitive plantation slaves in eighteenth-century Suriname. From the two cases, two necessary attributes of solidarity emerge: the sharing of a physical place by labourers forming a community in solidarity, and the location of that place on the inside of a politics of exploitation.
