Conflicted Commitments

Race, Privilege, and Power in Solidarity Activism

Gada Mahrouse

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780773543638
• eBook ISBN:
  9780773592094
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Conflicted Commitments analyzes a form of non-violent, direct transnational solidarity in which activists from the global North travel to support and protect people in the global South. Gada Mahrouse contends that this brand of activism is a compelling site of racialized power relations and is highly instructive for a nuanced understanding of systems of race.

Mahrouse argues that the individuals who partake in this form of activism consciously deploy their white, western privilege to offer support and protection to those facing threats of violence. Moreover, given that this type of activism asserts itself as an exemplary form of anti-racist commitment, it illustrates that well-meaning practices can inadvertently reproduce racialized power structures that are embedded in imperial and colonial legacies. Mahrouse focuses on Palestine and Iraq in the post-9/11 era to contemplate the contemporary challenges that these regions pose for solidarity activism. By exploring how individual activists manage and negotiate their dominant positioning in these encounters, Mahrouse reflects more broadly on the ethics of social justice strategies in an increasingly transnational world.

A detailed study of the racialized complexities and contradictions inherent in transnational solidarity activism, Conflicted Commitments makes a significant contribution to critical race and feminist studies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Passport or Carte Blanche? On Race, Privilege, and Power in Transnational Solidarity Activism
• 1 Whiteness and the Divergent Responses to Rachel Corrie’s Death
• 2 The CPT Kidnapping: Citizenship, Sexuality, and the Racialized “Politics of Life”
• 3 The Compelling Story of the First-World Activist in the War Zone
• 4 Race-conscious Transnational Activists with Cameras: Mediators of Compassion
• 5 Conflicted Commitments: The “Fine Line Between Advocacy and Imperialism”
• 6 “Split Affinities”: Gender and Sexual Violence in Solidarity Movements
• 7 Liberal Universalism and Pragmatism: Implications for Decolonizing Solidarity
• Afterword: Solidarity Tourism and the Depoliticization of Activism
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index