Citizen Initiatives for Global Solidarity and the Ethics of Participatory Ownership

Abstract

A lack of trust in governments and larger NGOs has increased the appeal of folk engagement in which “ordinary citizens” address global poverty and humanitarian crises by starting their own initiatives and volunteering abroad. This dissertation explores the tensions between the extraordinary motivations of ordinary people and the potential for the personal and direct nature of folk engagement to disrupt affective economies and the overall coordination of development and aid. To this end, philosophical perspectives on interrelated aspects of global solidarity are brought into conversation with the concerns of an international research community that engages Citizen Initiatives for Global Solidarity (CIGS). While this dissertation refers to this field of study as CIGS research, there is not agreement that CIGS offers an appropriate label for the forms of citizen aid that this research community studies. This project takes the ambiguity and definitional variety in this field as an opportunity to analyze empirical data, and engage several of the primary ethical concerns that have emerged within CIGS research over the past ten years. Through operationalizing global solidarity in a CIGS context, problematizing that operationalization, and developing a CIGSoriented ethics of participatory ownership, this dissertation offers conceptual clarity and develops new, empirically informed concepts. This ethics of participatory ownership has been developed in two theoretically oriented articles that critically engage influential theories of solidarity from the fields of moral and political philosophy, and three coauthored texts that offer examples of qualitative secondary analysis (QSA). Through interdisciplinary, collaborative re-analysis of the empirical data gathered by my co-authors, this dissertation offers rich and creative accounts of CIGS’ motivations and practices that challenge central assumptions in previous CIGS research and solidarity scholarship. Engaging the contexts of Lesvos, Norway, and Uganda, this analysis details the opportunities offered by global solidarity for projects of self-construction, the development of reflexivity, and the creation of collective, translocal senses of identity. These opportunities are considered alongside the risks of reproducing neocolonial and neoliberal patterns of affect that emphasize the agencies of outsiders with good intentions at the expense of those most affected by crisis and inequity.