The rise of right-wing populism has provoked a variety of responses. This chapter engages with one such response: Chantal Mouffe’s ‘left populism’. Mouffe’s call for an anti-essentialist, agonistic politics that can shift away from the ‘common sense’ of neoliberalism and reactionary nationalism which underpins right-wing populism is welcome. And yet our concern is that it risks being trapped by its reification of the nation-state. It may also miss the international dimensions of right-wing populism, including how forms of relation between states and corporations figure in its rise and stabilisation. We explore an approach which does not locate politics primarily as a fight over control of the identity and institutions of the state, but which begins in transnational resistance and collective action. We take up Featherstone’s account of transnational solidarity to frame a study of resistance to the Adani conglomerate. In our argument, this can be understood as an example of collective action not reliant on pre-existing (national) identities. Drawing on Featherstone’s account of solidarity as a lens invites us to consider whether transnational practices which decentre the state may offer resources to tackle the international aspects of populism’s rise, and the company-state nexus central to right-wing populism.

Chapter 3 shows how older men, established patriarchs, wrestle with the temptation to sell their land and live lives of ‘fun’, abandoning their obligations to pass on wealth to future generations. Speaking to a rich regional literature on fatherhood and provider masculinity, it unveils a local politics of masculine responsibility, focusing on the question of land sale and fatherly obligation. Adult men from the Ituura neighbourhood who work for wages in the informal economy to support their families are shown to condemn other ‘bad’ men who sell their family land to live ‘comfortable’ lives of short-term consumption. The discourses of self-styled moral men valorise their self-disciplined control of a desire to consume wealth against the grain of immorality they perceive in the neighbourhood and beyond, especially by retaining their ancestral land. Complicating these heroic narratives of economic striving, the chapter explores the life circumstances that force land sale, as well as a growing cynicism amongst working-aged men towards the obligations of patrilineal kinship.

The chapter analyses how racialised differences have been represented in artistic practice in Colombia, and the relationship between negatively racialised artists and the art world. The first two sections cover from the colonial period to the first half of the twentieth century and address the representation and participation of Black and Indigenous people, using examples from visual arts, literature, music and dance. White and mixed-race artists tended to represent racialised subalterns in primitivist and paternalist ways, although some displayed socialist sympathies in depictions of social inequality, without racism coming into clear view. By the 1930s and 40s, Black artists were critiquing social inequalities and explicitly identifying racism. We then analyse the increasing politicisation of Black art practice, which was linked to international currents such as Négritude and Black Power. Also important was the Black social movement in the country, which began in the 1960s and gathered strength with Colombia’s 1991 constitutional multiculturalist reform. The fourth section explores the work of the Colombian artists – mostly but not exclusively Black – who collaborated with us in CARLA to show how their diverse art practices have addressed racism in increasingly direct ways.

This chapter examines prominent solidarity conceptions used in legal discourses in the context of unfair economic arrangements, typically associated with neo-liberalism. It finds that prominent solidarity conceptions are from a legal theory perspective either circular, redundant, or too aspirational. The conceptual shortcomings of solidarity are echoed in standard policy proposals to counter and unwind neo-liberal economic arrangements. Those proposals typically involve imposing new legal duties on dominant economic actors and states, making their effectiveness depend on adopting new national, regional and international laws, on compliance by dominant economic actors, and on enforcement by legal authorities. The proposals imply that the normative resources for change lie outside existing law. This chapter explores an alternative understanding of law based on existing positive law: law as a public service. Dominant economic actors rely on law as a public service. They need legal authorities, especially judges, to declare their neo-liberal economic arrangements legally valid and enforceable. Positive law already offers judges the normative resources to refuse the help of the law whenever neo-liberal economic arrangements structurally lack minimal reciprocity and fairness. Rather than waiting for a global social solidarity movement, judges of Western civil and commercial courts can already make a difference.

This chapter reflects on possibilities for anti-racism in artistic practice. Drawing on the work of the diverse artists we have collaborated with in the project Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America (CARLA), I focus on two types of intervention that I believe help us to think about various ways of doing anti-racism through art. The two types are challenging stereotypes and working with communities, and I explore how various artworks engage with these modes of artistic action and how they create emotional traction and affective intensity. The aim of the exercise is to be productive and helpful in the struggle against racism by providing some tools that artists and organisations can use to think strategically about anti-racism as a practice and reflect on the opportunities and risks that attach to different interventions.

Is solidarity possible in societies characterized by the exchange of data, under conditions of digitalization and AI? If not, why not? To answer these questions, I inquire into the emergence of solidarity in two historical cases. The first maps German coal and steel workers’ resistance to exploitation during the industrial revolution in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. The second case explores resistance and community formation by the Maroon, a group of fugitive plantation slaves in eighteenth-century Suriname. I analyse these cases with the help of four heuristic elements: (1) communal living of labourers entailed by the industrialization of a new technology (steam powered industry and slavery-powered plantation agriculture), (2) under-regulation of ensuing labour relations, (3) the emergence of resistant proto-law amongst labourers and (4) the response of repressive-appeasing law by owners and the state. I extract two necessary attributes of solidarity: the sharing of a physical place by labourers forming a community in solidarity, and the location of that place on the inside of a politics of exploitation. I conclude that cybernetics, digitalization and AI undercut the preconditions for solidarity, as they eradicate the sharing of a physical place on the inside of exploitation politics.

This chapter asks how newborns were cared for and charts the formulaic regimen of encouraging babies to cry, watching them change colour, cutting their navel cord, searching their bodies for impediment, bathing them, swaddling them, putting them down to sleep and, finally, suckling them. Medical guides imagined that it would be mothers that did this care, but middling and elite families often hired nurses to manage this laborious regimen. These individuals were often already servants or recommended by family or friends. In the period, servants and others residing within the household were called ‘family’. In this way, making babies was a family project, albeit one in which family members did not have equal stakes and one in which mothers’ and other women’s procreative work was often subsumed within everyday expectations of domestic labour. Although nurses and others who carried out infant care were sought carefully, details about their lives and perspectives are often hard to find in family paperwork, which was often more interested in what procreative experiences said about the family and its name, rather than valuing others’ work.

This chapter outlines the empirical strategy for studying policy triage, which occurs when limited administrative resources and growing policy stocks force agencies to prioritize certain implementation tasks over others. To measure policy triage, the analysis distinguishes between triage frequency and intensity. These dimensions together provide a nuanced assessment of overall implementation performance. The chapter also details the theoretical predictors of policy triage: whether central policymakers can shift blame for failures, whether implementing agencies can mobilize external resources, and whether they are internally committed to achieving policy goals despite resource constraints. To test these claims, the research design focuses on two policy areas — environmental and social policy — across six countries representing diverse administrative traditions. Data collection involves secondary document analysis and 157 expert interviews with implementation officials. By systematically capturing both formal and informal organizational practices, this methodology reveals the complex trade-offs inherent in modern public administration and underscores how different political and organizational conditions jointly shape policy triage.

Contemporary Brazilian Indigenous art is rising both in production by and public recognition of artists such as Denilson Baniwa, Jaider Esbell, Naine Terena and Daiara Tukano. Indigenous literature is also becoming increasingly visible with writers such as Daniel Munduruku, Ailton Krenak, Davi Kopenawa, Eliane Potiguara and Julie Dorrico. These trends have opened new spaces for a ‘contest of imaginaries’, expanding possibilities for Indigenous rights. For Brazil’s Indigenous peoples, racism is often connected to land and resource control. So anti-racism often takes the form of a struggle to defend ancestral territories and livelihoods, often associated with the ‘multiplication of differences’, opposing monocultures of all kinds and promoting the creation of spaces for the similarities in life and struggle that connect people across differences. First we give an overview of Brazilian Indigenous movements since the 1970s, introducing recurring themes that have concerned writers and artists. Then we describe the development of contemporary Indigenous literature and visual art in Brazil and their relation to anti-racism, with extended case studies from the Brazilian Amazon and the northeast region.

The chapter addresses the different ways in which Sankofa Danzafro’s Afro-contemporary dance company in Colombia constructs anti-racist narratives. From the perspective of dance as a practice of irruption and an embodied practice, we focus on the role of affective traction in its varied manifestations, which work to assemble collective bodies and discourses. Acting as a site of political enunciation and as a way of resistance-in-motion, dance generates affective atmospheres that make visible and challenge the persistence of structural racism. Among the anti-racist strategies channeled through Sankofa’s Afro-contemporary dance are i) challenging stereotypes about Afro-descendant people by focusing on the message of the dance rather than only its performance; ii) delving into the past, seeking out embodied knowledge and Afro self-referentiality as resources; and iii) developing an Afro-contemporary aesthetic project informed by Afro-Colombian traditional dance and music as well as contemporary styles and rhythms. In particular, the chapter explores Detrás del sur, a recent Sankofa dance work, to see how these anti-racist strategies have informed the creative processes behind the work.