ABSTRACT
Solidarity is the most fundamental building block of what many scholars have called “globalization from below,” or the process of creating grassroots linkages and movements in response to pervasive global hierarchies and injustices. While there is nothing new about people using feelings of solidarity to inform political action, the emergence of new media and information technologies in recent decades has altered the conditions of possibility for solidarity movements and for the efforts of powerful actors to respond to such movements. Any attempt to understand contemporary solidarity movements, therefore, must not only place them in historical context, but also examine how they are embedded in the changing dynamics of globalization itself. In other words, to adopt Raymond Williams’s famous terminology from British cultural studies, solidarity movements always include both residual and emergent elements.
