I sit down to write about the embodiment of solidarity activism during the early days of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. I work from home because the university campus where I work has recently closed, the vast majority of our students sent home for the semester. My toddler squeals in the background; daycares and schools have been shuttered. State leaders beg for more medical infrastructure, and public health experts attempt to explain the rationale for what some are terming “the new normal.” For many of us living comfortable lives in the Global North, the human body, with all of its vitality and vulnerability, has not in our lifetimes seemed so central to matters political, social, ethical, and epistemological. Nor, perhaps, has our interdependence as a global community ever been so stark.

For nearly a decade, I have been studying, and at points collaborating with, a cohort of activists whose work foregrounds this fundamental interdependence as well as the shared, if unequally allotted, vulnerability of the human body. These predominately white, middle-class activists from the Christian Left protest the racialized violence of US security policies against Latinx migrants, Muslim detainees, and workers in the Global South. These groups include: (1) School of the Americas Watch, which endeavors to close the military training facility at Fort Benning, Georgia; (2) the Migrant Trail Walk, part of the US/Mexico border justice movement; and (3) Witness Against Torture, a grassroots effort to close the Guantánamo Prison. Through “observant participation” (Vargas, 2006), interviews, and archival analysis, I explore how these groups engage in embodied practices of solidarity with the state's targets while contesting US policies of militarism, torture, indefinite detention, and immigration enforcement (Russo, 2018).

Through a political practice I term solidarity witnessing, these activists work to see violence that dominant perspectives occlude and then reveal such violence to broader audiences. Physically demanding and sometimes high-risk tactics, such as fasting, desert pilgrimage, and civil disobedience, play a central role in these groups’ practices of solidarity, allowing them to draw attention to state violence while forging community and long-term commitment to a cause. Their bodily practices of solidarity, intended to generate moral outrage among their audiences, also spur a range of powerful embodied feelings of solidarity, including a sense of close community among activists, deep empathy with the state's targets, and renewed commitment to a struggle for justice.