I argue that through his account of the meaning of, and need for, solidarity, Rorty offers a non-juridical vision of liberal community built upon a political ethos of hope. This political ethos of hope is necessary to combat the threat posed by pathological individualism to contemporary liberal democratic societies. This ethos is characterised by attention to the cruelty that we inadvertently cause to others through the exercise of our private freedoms. It involves an explicit commitment to curiosity and an implicit demand for humility in our interactions with our fellows. These values have radical and far-reaching implications for Rorty’s account of political conversation – how we approach our dialogues with others, and the language that we use therein – in his idealised liberal community. I contrast these implications with deliberative democratic norms and put distance between Rorty’s view of political conversation and J. S. Mill’s account of free expression in a liberal society and the accounts of epistemic injustice offered by Fricker and Medina. I attempt a nuanced interpretation of Rorty’s understanding of the relevance of identity to politics.

Islam views human dignity as a cornerstone of life, emphasizing self-awareness of one’s dignity for personal growth and societal engagement. Humans are considered God’s deputies on earth, possessing independence, freedom and the responsibility to pursue goodness. This is highlighted by the prostration of angels before Adam, symbolizing honor, knowledge, freedom and moral choice.

Coercion is rejected as a method for elevating human standards, with personal and communal development rooted in dignity being advocated instead. The story of Iblis (the Devil), who refused to bow to Adam due to pride, serves as a warning against hubris.

Islam emphasizes preserving life, with teachings stating that saving one’s soul is equivalent to saving all of humankind. Faith calls for the liberation of the human essence by forbidding the worship of idols or other humans, and stresses the sanctity of the word, urging truthfulness and honoring commitments. Islam promotes a balanced society that recognizes individual needs while fostering cooperation and solidarity.

The 1972 Stockholm Conference marked the emergence of transnational environmental law, with states agreeing on commitments towards a healthy environment. While the 1972 Stockholm Declaration on the Human Environment may have been progressive and innovative at that time, it made no explicit mention of women, girls, or gender equality. Instead, women and girls were subsumed within the category of ‘man’. Through legal interpretation and analysis of policy documents, this chapter maps important progress made in the last 50 years. The article uncovers the untold story of women international lawmakers from the global South not only in advances on women’s rights but also in international law relevant to healthy social-ecological systems more broadly. The article finds that decoupling the notion of vulnerability from weakness and powerlessness and coupling it with agency and solidarity is needed if international law is going to tackle head on the biodiversity, climate change, pollution and water crises and effectively enable Earth stewardship.

Do other people limit or even threaten our freedom and our projects, or are they necessary to their realisation? Do we only answer to ourselves for our actions, or are we accountable to other people as well, and if so, to whom? Do we have a responsibility for the welfare of other people? These questions, which Beauvoir addressed in the works she wrote from the Second World War onwards, have lost none of their relevance. Chapter 3 explores them by analysing many of her works, including The Ethics of Ambiguity, Pyrrhus and Cineas, America Day by Day, and her novels The Blood of Others and The Mandarins, which focus on social responsibility, communal action, and groups. Her anti-individualistic concept of freedom, focussed on projects and solidarity, is contrasted with the so-called negative concept of freedom and versions of the liberal concept of freedom. Beauvoir’s concepts of freedom, solidarity, and responsibility are proposed as tools to reflect on current issues, including some uses of social media, assisted suicide, the environment, and what should be done about historical wrongs such as slavery.

This chapter shows that, while there is reason to be skeptical about the value of public admiration in general, there is one kind of admiration – heroising admiration – that stands out as particularly problematic. Heroising admiration is public admiration of an individual’s or a groups’ supposed heroism. The main issue has to do with the way heroising admiration obscures its targets’ moral status as human beings, by overwriting it with heroic social status. The two are fundamentally in conflict. The imposition of hero status partially deprives targets of their moral status as fellow human beings within a socio-normative realm, so that that they are no longer as eligible for other people’s help or even sympathy, as they were before. It centrally contains depriving people of their social recognisability as human beings who potentially need other people’s help or solidarity. It is argued that there is perfect duty not to contribute to such deprivation.

Chapter 1.2 assesses community-based health insurance. Community-based health insurance (CBHI) is a voluntary, self-organized approach to financing health care for groups of individuals in the absence of other forms of health care coverage. CBHI scheme members organize themselves; collect and pool their insurance premiums; and use them to purchase health services for members. Key learning includes that

• CBHI is not a miracle solution to affordable access to health care.

• – The very poor often do not enroll, and when they do they tend to use fewer health services.

• – Out-of-pocket (OOP) payments are not necessarily reduced.

• Low uptake, poor delivery of promised benefits and challenges around governance undermine the impact of CBHI.

• CBHI does not overcome broader issues such as a lack of financial resources.

• CBHI might serve as a transitionary mechanism towards UHC and offer some financial protection for the most vulnerable provided that

• – Policy-makers create a supportive political and economic environment

• – Social capital can be mobilized

• – Schemes are institutionalized within the health sector.

The final section reflects on the future of white supremacy, challenging the notion that it is an intractable, unchangeable force. While acknowledging its stubborn persistence over three centuries, the final reflection argues that describing racism as “timeless” or “complicated” often serves to justify inaction. It points to recent global protests following George Floyd’s murder as evidence of growing solidarity across different justice movements. These intersecting struggles against various forms of oppression – from police violence to denial of indigenous land rights – suggest increasing recognition of how different systems of power reinforce each other. The conclusion emphasizes that major social systems have fallen before, and encourages readers to imagine a future beyond white supremacy without limiting themselves to short-term or small-scale thinking.

Folk music, and especially in the United States, has frequently been grounded in the fertile soil of labour struggles. Beginning with a cultural analysis of the Industrial Workers of the World and the little red songbook, the argument of this chapter is that folk offers a vision of the worker as a figure in which two contradictory phenomena are experienced at once. The experience of labour, in this account, is to live under a curse but to also embody the promise of collective redemption, to know that, when labour acts strictly as a class, it might yet abolish all classes and with that bring about the conditions of its own emancipation. Counterpoised to its many descriptions of wage work, folk articulates an alternative and hopeful vision of the worker as a collective subject defined by expansive solidarity, class antagonism, and common property. To make this argument, the chapter listens to three well-known folk songs from within the context of their composition and with an ear to the indivisible politics of class and labour: ‘Solidarity Forever’, ‘Which Side Are You On?’, and ‘This Land is Your Land’.

The advancement of technology has significantly altered the characteristics of remote work in general, and cross-border remote work in particular presenting complex regulatory challenges. These challenges, with their linkage to a large set of work arrangements and locations, involve among other matters coordinating the relationship between labor law and social security legislation. An increasing number of remote workers are now able to provide services across borders, to markets and countries where they or their employers have no physical connection. As there are more employment regulations to choose from, this increases the possibility for the employer to exploit lower labor standards in other countries and avoid responsibilities towards their workers. Analysis of the literature and jurisprudence in different cases shows that new interpretations of the place of work are brought forward with the view to better protect cross-border remote workers, both in Private International Law and in Labor Law, considering the increasingly virtual nature of the workplace. However, the principle of territoriality remains a strong argument in the hands of higher courts to limit evolution in that direction.

This chapter examines the relevance of sustainable development to regulation of remote work. It investigates various ways in which the sustainable development goals (SDGs) adopted in the UN 2030 Agenda can be relevant to remote work, offering a perspective that considers not only economic objectives but also the environmental and social pillars embedded in that instrument. It is argued that procedural aspects of sustainable development, such as the human right to freedom of association and effective collective bargaining together with the participatory governance mechanisms promoted by SDGs 16 and 17, will be important for the sustainability of remote work, in order to achieve just transitions which are both digital and green. The chapter then examines the significance of the international institutional response to sustainable remote work, both at the UN and the ILO. It considers the extent to which a corporate social responsibility (CSR) approach, which has ostensibly embraced sustainability, actually corresponds to UN and ILO standards that should govern remote work. It is suggested that this will only be possible if enhanced participatory engagement is enabled in the implementation of due diligence and just transition.

Solidarity is generally emphasized as a social good, particularly by international lawyers keen to stress its integrative function for the international community. This chapter will explore the possibility that solidarity might, on the contrary, occasionally be unwelcome, understood as both objectively and subjectively undesirable. Solidarity constructs certain social bonds through “imaginaries of solidarity” (who one imagines oneself to be in solidarity with) in ways that may be problematic. The chapter will examine different sites of international solidarity, including the inter-state and the transnational. It will distinguish between solidarity that is unwelcome on account of its effects (when solidarity actually makes things worse), on account of who it is offered by (the “intuitu personae” of solidarity), and on account of the burden of gratitude it creates (as part of an economy of gift and counter-gift). Overall, the chapter will refocus attention away from obligations to provide solidarity in favor of a more nuanced appreciation that not all solidarity is equally opportune. It also hopes to be a contribution to understanding what might be welcome solidarity based on a renewed understanding of its non-welcome variant.

This chapter distinguishes solidarity as a legal concept (LS) from solidarity as a social practice (SP). It matters for our understanding of the law to reflect on how, when and why law is able to interact with solidaristic practices. Section 1.1 explores the distinction. Section 1.2 stresses the ubiquity of solidarity in the law, from the traditional private law understanding of obligatio in solidum, to solidarity as a cohesive social force, to solidarity as a source of state duties. Section 1.3 shows that, despite its omnipresence, solidarity is an underinvestigated legal concept. Section 1.4 offers a typology of interactions between SP and the law, to show the many ways in which legal scholars may relate to SP. I list several types of interaction, and object to one. I argue that law cannot command us to act solidaristically since solidarity presupposes an intimate form of identification with others. But law may disrupt solidarities, sometimes in morally justified ways; it may compensate for the failing solidarity, recognizing and integrating it; and it may foster solidarity by its status-generative function, albeit merely in an indirect and not often controllable way.