Hatred of migrants and outsiders is a defining feature of our current political moment. Far-right racists are gaining power by blaming outsiders for deeply rooted social and economic problems, while social media algorithms fuel our divisions to profit off our attention. Budgets for detention, deportation, and surveillance increase year on year, and well-connected companies and political cronies get fat on government contracts.
Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” allocated $170bn towards deportation. This includes $27.7bn – up from $8.7bn – for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an increasingly lawless agency currently terrorising communities across the US. This is more than many countries spend on their militaries. In 2025, the European Union tripled its migration management budget and allocated €12bn to Frontex, its own border guard dog.
Meanwhile, self-appointed vigilantes have been causing chaos from Iceland to India. In South Africa, Operation Dudula has been conducting illegal raids upon local businesses looking for foreign workers. They have repeatedly blocked non-South Africans from accessing public health facilities in direct violation of the South African constitution. "Dudula" means to "force out" or "knock down" in isiZulu, and the party’s next target is preventing non-South African children from attending school.
Having the ‘wrong’ race, citizenship, religion and/or ethnicity now regularly triggers a right-wing response. In the UK and beyond, social media lights up after acts of violence to speculate on the religion, ethnicity or heritage of the perpetrator. No matter the facts, commentators always find a way to make hate-filled hay.
Bullies are on the rise the world over. Both in the halls of power and on the street, they’re deploying violence and intimidation to hurt, silence and dispatch their enemies. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat observes, they’re using “ritual humiliation to ‘keep order’ in their worlds, fulfil their ego needs, and calm their insecurities”. The cruelty soothes them. The cruelty is the point.
Standing up to bullies
Attacks on rights rarely stop at one group alone. Alongside hostility towards migrants and ethnic minorities, rights and respect are eroding for many other groups, such as trans people, people with disabilities, people who use drugs, and indeed women more broadly. Anti-feminism is evident not only in well-funded attacks on abortion rights, but also the insidious creep of the tradwife movement: a pretty package through which ethnonationalist and white supremacist messaging are being normalised.
We must unite against the bullies before they cow us all. And since they are after so many, a good place to start is by taking seriously the idea that an injury to one is an injury to all and really work to break boundaries down. This involves focusing on things we hold in common, thinking and acting in ways that connect different struggles for justice, and forming communities out of isolated and vulnerable individuals so they may better advance their shared interests and goals.
In short, we need far more solidarity. It’s a term with an old and illustrious pedigree, and a practice that has been foundational to the most important social movements of the last two centuries: labour rights, gender equality, anti-racism, anti-colonialism, disarmament, disability rights, and environmental justice.
Solidarity is not the same as sympathy. It can sometimes be stirred by sympathy, but sympathy can also be a path to saviourism. True solidarity avoids the pitfalls of both ‘rescue’ and paternalism. It also avoids abstract appeals to equality and fraternity that stand entirely disconnected from the practical and political struggles required to bring about real change. Solidarity is demanding. It requires careful deliberation, enduring collaboration, and concrete action.
We will stand with them, as we stand with all people and organisations under attack
Here is an applied example of solidarity in action. In July 2025, Operation Dudula and its allies tried to intimidate “unpatriotic” non-governmental organisations opposed to their migrant hunting efforts. Their main target was the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa (SERI). Hundreds of Dudula vigilantes, many dressed in military regalia, marched on SERI’s downtown offices, bringing with them the prospect of violence. Yet when they made it to their destination they were turned away by a cordon of counter-protestors led by members of Abahlali baseMjondolo – The Residents of the Shacks – a mass movement of the poor based in Durban. The bullies were pushed back.
Explaining their intervention, Abahlali declared that, “SERI is our comrade, and we will stand with them, as we stand with all people and organisations under attack from Operation Dudula, or any other expression of fascist politics”. Instead of sharing Operation Dudula’s xenophobia, they maintained that, “scapegoating migrants for this crisis, and aggressively denying them access to hospitals, is not just cowardly and cruel. It is also a form of public political miseducation that diverts attention away from the real causes of the crisis.”
This is solidarity, both in word and in deed. And, crucially, there is no end to this story. Dudula continues its operations. Bullies are not banished through single events, but held at bay through long-term struggle. The protection of other foundational political goals also requires endless work. As we have seen in many places, not least the US, gains on gender equality, civil rights, anti-colonialism, and economic fairness can be easily un-won if they aren’t robustly defended.
In Southern Africa there’s a phrase that speaks to these challenges: aluta continua.
The struggle continues.
Being a killjoy isn’t enough
This is Beyond Trafficking and Slavery (BTS)’s last feature; after 11 years of publishing we are closing at the end of the month. Most of our 1,100 articles in that time have been pretty gloomy, so we thought it’d be nice to end on a positive note. We have chosen to explore the coal face of cross-movement organising, because unlike most things, the prospect of solidarity beyond silos gives us hope.
‘Solidarity beyond silos’ offers an alternative way of thinking about fighting exploitation. It is markedly different to the currently dominant yet severely limiting anti-trafficking paradigm. If actors re-centred themselves around it, we believe they would be coalescing around an idea that is far more likely to work.
We began laying out this line of argument last May when we published our 10th anniversary feature. In our introduction to that series, ‘Ten years on, have we moved Beyond Trafficking and Slavery?’, we laid bare our motivations for starting this project, reiterated why we think anti-trafficking fails, and suggested at the same time that the critics of anti-trafficking have failed as well.
We argued that this is because critics are necessarily reactive. To do their job, they have little choice but to speak in the terms of the thing they’re criticising. But by doing so, they forego the chance to establish an entirely new frame of debate. This undermines their transformative potential.
We concluded that to escape this trap, actors must stop making anti-trafficking the main character. They must leave it behind, or at least allow it to shrink, by joining up with the many other movements working to end exploitation. And those movements must work together to make real progress.
Subdividing structural problems into issue-specific silos has been a recipe for political failure
In practice, this means going broader in allegiances and being more precise on the issues to be prevented and mitigated. Doing so does not ignore or diminish extreme exploitation. Rather, it allows exploitation to be addressed through the methods championed by longstanding, community-driven movements against sexual violence and economic exploitation, or for migrants’ rights, workers’ rights, and environmental, racial and gender justice.
Solidarity beyond silos enables standing firm against the bullies and fighting for both individual justice and community justice. Anti-trafficking frameworks still have a role, particularly facilitating criminal justice where victims/survivors want that, and ensuring access to rights and protections for whom there is currently little alternative. But they should no longer be the main framework for tackling extreme exploitation.
Solidarity beyond silos
This feature seeks to promote conversations and strategic thinking about how to bring communities from different locations and sectors closer together. Our contributors show, for example, how to draw more links between sex work decriminalisation and drug decriminalisation. How to grapple with the limits of labour formalisation and organised labour. How to learn from decades of work around intimate partner violence and feminist organising. How to take lessons from longstanding organising and resistance at a range of scales. And how to grapple with the ways in which marginalised and disadvantaged communities get pitted against one another.
We fully acknowledge that many people have been working on cross-movement building for a long time, and much of this knowledge and praxis has existed for far longer than we’ve been thinking about it. But it is easily ignored and sidelined in research, media and policy debates that start with anti-trafficking at the centre. This feature is our attempt to challenge that blind spot. Its ultimate goal is to learn from and hopefully contribute to genuinely broad-based, progressive, bottom-up movements.
There is hope out there, but solidarity beyond silos is obviously much easier said than done. One of the biggest political challenges we currently face is the degree to which historical movements – organised labour, anti-colonialism/anti-fascism, feminist organising, peace and disarmament – have been subdivided into smaller, weaker and more manageable groups.
Different actors have learnt to stay in their respective lanes, and to narrowly prioritise ‘their’ issues and concerns. This is partly a function of funding streams, which have incentivised organisations to specialise on topics they know they can get funded. Service providers and high priced consultants are also depoliticised by (and depoliticise others through) their dependence upon government contracts and private commissions. Subdividing structural problems into issue-specific silos has been a recipe for political failure.
Step one of correcting course is resisting the temptation to sort some people into a small pool of idealised ‘victims’, and then fence them off from a larger mass of undeserving ‘others’. This subtle method of exclusion has been wonderfully effective at undermining those fighting to end exploitation. But the fact of the matter is that it is simply not possible to cleanly separate extreme cases from everyday situations. For too many people, the everyday is also extreme. As Sara Ahmed observes:
So much oppression works by becoming ordinary, so that we don’t even notice it. We hammer away at the world by noticing how it is made. We bring what has receded into the background to the front, in order to confront it.
Making oppression visible is both essential and exhausting. Everyday oppression is everywhere once you start looking for it. And once a full accounting of all our problems has taken place it can be tempting to throw up our metaphorical hands, since the path to a better future can feel impossible to find. Here, Ahmed once again provides guidance:
There are so many ways that power and violence work through exhaustion…When we are weary, because we are weary, we need to be in alliance.
Over the rest of November we will publish a series of articles on what being in alliance can look like. We will hear from people with experience of movement building, organising, resisting, and documenting injustice. We have sought out applied examples and lessons learned on the ground, rather than abstract theories. We also asked for strategic reflections on barriers to building solidarities, and potential blind spots and pitfalls. The types of victories that capture headlines and history books matter. But small, local, incremental victories are also vital.
We are not pretending to be experts on solidarity. We know we still have much to learn, and have asked the people who have been doing this work for many years to get us started. We’re platforming their ideas as a way of showing our readers what changing the terms of engagement might look like.
As always, happy reading.
Explore the series
- Solidarity beyond silos is our best bet for fighting exploitationElla Cockbain, Joel Quirk, Cameron Thibos and Melissa Pawson
- We fight for sex workers’ rights. This is what solidarity looks likeChanelle Gallant and Elene Lam
- How Wages for Housework sparked an international solidarity movementJake Hall
- ‘An indictment of the trade union movement’: Why no one is organising seasonal workersEmiliano Mellino
- How one case made unlikely allies of police and sex workersAlex Andrews
- As drug users, solidarity isn’t just important – it’s survivalRATS (Radical Acts to Survive)
- Why can't anti-trafficking be more radical?Sophie Otiende and Chris Ash
- A bizarre new alliance is coming after sexual freedoms. We’re readyMaya Linstrum-Newman
- Clover in South Africa: where workers’ rights met Palestine solidarityMaya Bhardwaj
