ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides a brief overview of sociology's conceptual legacy with regard to solidarity. It reveals the spatio-temporal contingency of solidarities so often overlooked in social capital research by engaging with human geography scholarship on the socio-spatial processes that make relational places the result, and simultaneously contexts and incubators of new forms of solidarity in diversity. The book investigates the politics of solidarity, or more specifically, how practices of solidarity shape political identification and group formation and how diversity is an outcome, as much as a determinant of practices of solidarity. It emphasizes how practices of solidarity are connected to conflict, power and struggles over citizenship – and in the process shape differences, as much as they are shaped by them – and addresses the apolitical nature of social capital studies.
