Solidarity Witness: Ritualizing Moral Proximity as an Alternative to the U.S. Security State

• In Event: 496 - Regular Session. Peace and Conflict: Building Social Solidarity through Collective Action

Abstract

Global inequality along with the militarized management of abandoned populations are both a target of protest and a practical challenge for social movement groups seeking to enact solidarity across borders. This paper, part of a larger project on collective action against the U.S. Security State, examines how solidarity is imagined and enacted when those with relative privilege seek to respond to transnational others who are tortured, detained, murdered and exposed to life imperiling conditions. Original data are based on a comparative ethnography of three annual protest events: 1) the vigil to close the military training facility at Ft. Benning, Georgia, organized by School of the Americas Watch; 2) the Migrant Trail Walk, part of the U.S. Mexico border justice movement; and 3) the Witness Against Torture week of fasting and civil disobedience to close the Guantánamo Bay Detention Center. I identify a tactical repertoire I term “solidarity witness” in which activists use resistant modes of seeing and being seen to respond to political injustice that does not most immediately impact them. Through an examination of their public rituals, I argue that solidarity witnesses use the tools available to them- affectively potent traditions and scenes, hegemonic spaces and symbols, and their bodies- to contest a culture of security predicated on radical divisiveness. Key to its sociocultural accomplishments, the repertoire of solidarity witnesses ritualizes moral logics and geographies that contest the national security state.

Author

• Chandra Russo, University of California-Santa Barbara