 there we go. Okay. You're good. Okay. Three, two, one. Good afternoon, everyone. And welcome to the IR and ethics panel for this year's school security studies research conference. My name is Becca Friedman. I'm a senior lecture in the war studies department and theme lead for the IR and ethics research team. I'm delighted to be co chairing this panel. And welcome to the themes PhD representative, Maria Yelenick. The conference theme for this year is order and disorder navigating global crises. The IR and ethics panel is titled solidarity during the global health crisis and beyond reimagining communities. We've decided to focus our conversation this afternoon on solidarity. Solidarity is often invoked in a wide range of public discourses. It is not clear what it entails. What is solidarity? And what does it mean to act in solidarity with others? We are thrilled to have three very interesting speakers with us here today, who will through the lens of their respective research, explore the notion of what solidarity means, and whether it can help us in reimagining communities in a post pandemic world. Maria will now introduce our excellent speakers and their topics. Thank you, Becca. I'm Maria Yelenick, and I am a PhD candidate here at the department. And I'm also the PhD web for the IR and ethics research team. As Becca said, we're very pleased to have three brilliant speakers with us here today. Our first presenter is Lola Frost. Lola is a practicing artist and a visiting fellow at the department of war studies. In her presentation, Lola will explore the contours of an ethics of being common without identity. Our second presenter is Caroline Fabriere. Caroline is a PhD student here at the department and she will explore how solidarity can be reimagined through the lens of feminist foreign policy. Finally, our third presenter is Aitin Oran, who's a teaching fellow here at the department. Aitin will discuss some challenges for solidarity from the mind's perspective. The format of today is that we will have three short presentations examining the subject of solidarity. After this, Becca and I will ask our presenters a few questions. Some of these questions will be directed to all of the panelists, while others will be individualized. Finally, we will open up for questions and answers. If you do have a question, please put it in the chat box or raise your hand and you can ask it in person. Please also note that this is being live streamed on YouTube. And you can follow this conversation on Twitter and at KCL security with the hashtag order and disorder. So without further ado, I'll hand it over to Lola. Hello. Thank you very much, Maria, for the introduction. I'm just trying to get my slideshow going. And yeah, I am going to talk to you on the topic of being in common without identity. And it's sorry, this presentation explores some of the contours of an ethics of being in common without identity. And my claim that such an ethics is lodged in a multitude of sense-based practices that address and negotiate the problematics and possibilities of mutual recognition in encounter. Sorry, I'm a bit lost here. Can you hear me? I'm just not sure if you can hear me. We can hear you. You just need to use the share screen button at the bottom of your. Okay, there we go. There we go. Okay, there we go. So can you can you see me and can you hear me? We can see you just need to draw up your PowerPoint at the bottom. There we go. Okay, sorry about that. There we go. Excellent. Thank you. I just didn't have any notice that I was actually with you. Okay, so the title of my show, my talk is being in common without identity. And this presentation explores some of the contours of an ethics of being in common without identity. My claim is that such an ethics is lodged in a multitude of sense-based practices that address and negotiate the problematics and possibilities of mutual recognition through encounter. In this paper, I will argue that such a being in common without identity, realized in the aesthetic experience of art, involves the performance of a pluralizing commonality that offers an ethical alternative to those values and practices that service identity politics, securitization, technological control, and cognitive or territorial mastery. In the context of this panel's focus on reimagining communities, my contribution is to argue for the often neglected and repressed potential of a widespread ethics of being in common without identity by focusing on its role in mobilizing processes of mutual recognition with reference to the disordering, but transformative effects of aesthetic experience in art. So time being short in this presentation, I cannot go into the immense philosophical efforts of the many theorists who have framed the problematics of mutual recognition, encounter and aesthetic experience. The insights I deploy in this paper are gleaned from Judith Butler's idea of performative negativity, Ned LeBeau's insights into the pluralities of identity, Movenfrost's Hegelian-inspired insights into the constitutive ethics of practices and the transformative dynamics of dialectics. But most particularly, I draw on Fiona Jenkins' engagements with an ethics of being in common without identity in aesthetic experience and its role in negotiating the problematics and possibilities of mutual recognition. So my painting title between here and there is visually arresting, but difficult to describe. Consisting of an intricate web of dynamic fractals that pulse and quiver, some of us might struggle to identify what we are seeing. Is this a body part or a landscape? Simultaneously a field, sorry, a field of dynamic folds and a portal. This painting registers both spatial extension and inwardness, body and landscape, figure and ground. And I start by noting an important proviso, an ethics of being in common without identity does not reside in any description of the aesthetic effects of works of art. The ethical force only appears through each viewer's encounter and interpretive experience of such artwork or via the artist's creative processes in making it. Yet we do and can bring concepts and words to our experiences and in the interest of illuminating what is at stake here. I offer some thoughts on my struggles, both creative and interpretive, to address that pluralising aesthetic spectrum between affect sense and verbal representation that opens us up to the risky potential of mutual recognition. So for example, in this painting titled In It Together, which emerged from my encounter with the early morning light illuminating the cliffs of Murangi Bay near Auckland in New Zealand, that encounter itself was framed as a set of recognitions of the call of the landscape on my imagination, where the landscape itself seemed to have a form of agency and where this call metaphorically resonated with my sense of being a part of a whole that was not me. As such, I understand this painting unsettles the distinctions between body and landscape, self and not self, inside and outside. Furthermore, this painting also confounds our expectations for a recognisable subject. This double faced figure looks both backwards and forwards and simultaneously reads as a hybrid figure and a landscape. Aesthetically, the viewer is caught up in a process that slides across cognition, affect, cultural expectation and norms. Or to say it differently, the viewer is provoked into risking and imaginative, affective and disordering experience that exceeds his or her cognitive mastery. It is via such aesthetic processes, I suggest that the viewer takes up the problematics and possibilities of mutual recognition and in so doing is inscribed into an ethics of being in common without identity. Furthermore, this painting In It Together demonstrates something of an object agency or liveliness lodged in the ever proliferating folds and flows of what I call a non-identical life force that shapes a reciprocal and ever folding relation between the landscape, myself, the artwork, you, the viewer, to produce a sense of correlational psychic admittance. Marianne Monner's psychoanalytic insights are instructive here. I quote, the problem of the relation between the painter and his world then is basically a problem of one's own need and the needs of the other, a problem of reciprocity between you and me and with you and me, meaning originally mother and child. Peter Fuller argues that such an ethics of recognition has been eclipsed ever since the Renaissance by the individualising and territorialising effects of fixed point perspective in painting and by the subsequent emphasis on form and genre in art, which extend to what he called those post-structuralist tendencies to art in terms of power, ideology and representation. From a psychoanalytically inclined aesthetic perspective, Fuller makes claims to the value of art being lodged in something like an ethics of being in common without identity, whose origins are lodged in those pre-conscious and psychically foundational struggles with the problems of reciprocity that each of us risk in our own neediness in a context of another's power and need. For Judith Butler and Fiona Jenkins, that risky dialectic is also tied up with an ethics of recognition lodged in sensei practices. Drawing on Hanaira's ideas of the politics of public performances, Butler has argued for the potential of what she calls a sensei democracy, to critique those power relations that sustain inequality, injustice and identity. For example, Butler cites forms of public activism like singing the American national anthem in Spanish as a form of dissident collectivity or an ecstatic sociality, realized as a collective and pluralizing being in common that contests the power strategies of hegemonic authority and fixed identity. Whereas Jenkins explores the intricate and subtle interface of war poetry to explore an ethics of reciprocity or what she calls a being in common without identity, in which our engagements with art and poetry exceed those philosophical language games that sustain identity and logos to undo the self and to suspend thinking. For Jenkins, such a sense based ethics of reciprocity involves, quote, traversing the impossible by an oscillating interface between oppositions. Seen in this way, artworks set up a dynamic and pluralizing interface that stages a reciprocal ethics of mutual recognition within each viewer as he or she grapples with his or her responses to such provocation. As such, certain works of art are philosophically impossible and inhabit an impossible dialectical object agency that invites an ethics of being in common without identity across multiple differences. That invitation, I suggest, is not confined to genre or to culture. It is offered by those artworks and sense based practices that resist the cognitively and normatively patrolled borders that regulate many of our social interactions. My claim is that such an ecstatic sociality can be realized in several practices and processes like love, faith, compassion, sexuality, even in practices of encounter, like waiting in hospitals, as Lisa Barriesta has argued, and in many genres and mediums of art, from popular culture to classical music, all of which invite audiences and individuals to risk the precariousness of an ethics of being in common without identity that is inclined towards reciprocity and not mastery. For example, Zanelle Maholes' photographic practice, recently on show at Take Modern, was framed as a subversive art practice that foregrounds LGBTQIA plus identity politics to raise awareness of injustice and aims to educate and create positive visual histories for under and misrepresented LGBTQIA plus communities. The first past of Maholes' exhibition included photographs and video artworks of individuals who have suffered because of their sexual orientations, ranging from corrective rape to physical violence and othering. On view were images that celebrate sexual difference, portraits of moments of intimacy, etc. But the work I want to talk about here is a selection, is this selection of an ongoing collective portrait of approximately 500 faces, titled Faces and Phases, also on show, that was also on show at Take Modern, and is something of an archive which commemorates and celebrates the lives of Black lesbians, transgender and non-conforming individuals. Yet my experience of that vast work exceeded such cognitively and politically accessible verbal framings. I found myself being both effectively and compassionately taken up by a sense of all these faces, their bodies, their uniqueness, their vulnerability, their pride, which as an ensemble had its own image object agency. That sense and critique made me feel as if I was simultaneously estranged from their representations of these individuals and also somehow part of them. And the effect of shock of such recognition entirely changed my otherwise beautiful appreciation of the political achievements of this body of work. In crossing that border or becoming in common without identity with those anonymous photograph subjects, my presumptions about the LGBTQAI plus project have been irrevocably changed by the disordering, such disordering aesthetic experience. So in conclusion I've sketched something of the transformative potential of those artworks and sense based processes that experientially engage the problematics of mutual recognition and of encounter. Such a pluralizing and aesthetically motivated practicing of commonality is not only at odds with the fixities and fears of identity politics but is also not available to rational or purpose of reason nor even to description. Instead such an ethics of being in common without identity is necessarily tied to the risky dialectical and performative dynamics of those practices that span and wrestle with this contradiction and difference. So in the context of this conversation about commonality and solidarity, I suggest that an aesthetically motivated ethics of being in common without identity realized in art and sense-based practice cannot be subsumed into the idea of solidarity, which I understand and I might be wrong, I think we'll probably talk a lot about that, issues the productive problematic dynamics of contradiction in favor of the order of ideontarian ethics or being in common with identity. I do not think that in the context of this conferences focus on order and disorder and technological truth, sorry but I do think in the context of this conferences focus on order and disorder and technological threats to security. A reappraisal of the pluralizing ethics of being in common without identity lodged in multiple practices of encounter that transform and provoke us to engage with the problematics and possibilities of mutual recognition is long overdue. So thank you very much and I I give over to Carolina to take you further. Thank you. Thanks so much Lola and thank you to the conference organizers, to Lizzie for all the tech work, to Rebecca Maria for inviting me. I'm really delighted to be here on this and this brilliant panel today. In my presentation I will take a slightly different perspective and will ask if and how feminist care ethics helps us to reimagine foreign policy so that acting and solidarity actually becomes possible in the global realm. And to answer that question I will first outline how foreign policy is understood traditionally. I will then consider how this traditional understanding limits the possibilities for acting and solidarity with others and finally I will explore how feminist care ethics might allow us to rethink foreign policy in a way that solidarity becomes possible. And the aim of my talk today is really to challenge those taken for granted assumptions that we normally make about foreign policy making and to offer just one way of reimagining global relations and communities. So let me start out by outlining how foreign policy is understood traditionally and by traditionally I mean really the existing docs are that guides foreign policy making globally so the taken for granted and questioned truths if you will. And the current docs of foreign policy making has been summarized quite brilliantly I think by David Campbell. He wrote in 1998 that we the international relations scholars but also practitioners regularly understand and are quote here foreign policy as the external deployment of instrumental reason on behalf of an unproblematic identity. So in this short sentence we find three aspects that are really central for the purposes of my my talk today. First foreign policy is always outward facing it is directed at another. Second foreign policy is about instrumental decision making and it's in a means to an end to realize a state's objectives. And third foreign policy is an expression of a pre-given and settled national identity. So in other words foreign policy is rooted really in this understanding of clearly delineated inside or nation acting towards clearly delineated outside or foreign. And although this traditional understanding of foreign policy has long been questioned by international relations scholars including Campbell himself it is still very much dominant in practitioner circles. And let me just illustrate this with an example from my own research in German foreign policy. And I went to to suggest that we look at a quote from an article published by the German foreign office where it speaks about the guiding principles of German foreign policy. And a quote as a trading nation Germany has a particular interest in an effective external economic policy that helps companies to tap into international markets and to improve the conditions for doing business. And quite obviously German national identity is here described as that of a trading nation. So it Germany the trading nation has particular interests that follow from that and that must be realized through foreign policy means vis-a-vis other states which is in this case gain and improve access to international markets. And decision making processes in the foreign office are then oriented towards that aim. And this is but one illustration of how foreign policy is still very much understood as outward facing as instrumental decision making expressing a national identity. So what then does all of that really mean for the possibility of solidarity in and through foreign policy. And to answer that question I would like to first define solidarity. And for the purposes of this talk I understand it as relating to others with empathy while recognizing difference in equality. And this means that solidarity is about a connection between the self and another. The self and the other are related but they're distinct and they're equal in difference. And this is a fundamental assumption taken from black feminist thought. So solidarity means really relating to others as equals but in recognition that differences among people matter. And solidarity is also about relating with empathy. And by empathy I mean a process in which the person or persons in a quite lispondized work here imaginatively enters into the experiential world of others. So it's really about the proverbial standing in someone's shoes. So if solidarity is relating to others with empathy while recognizing difference in equality can this be realized within this traditional doxylophone policy as an outward facing instrumental decision making process that expresses a settled national identity. I think in light of the current global pandemic this question is really more relevant than ever. And indeed claims to solidarity have a bound in the past year and a half. However I would argue that acting in solidarity is very much limited by how we traditionally understand and make foreign policy. And why is that so? I think the traditional understanding of foreign policy relies on an exclusionary idea about what national identity is. It limits expressions of solidarity to distant others and it understands solidarity as a means to an end. But let me elaborate on these three points. So the traditional understanding of foreign policy limits our ability to relate to others with empathy because after all it's about expressing one's national identity and this makes it rather difficult to stand in someone else's shoes right. In theory however solidarity could be expressed if it was part of the national identity. But who is this nation? And is national identity ever settled? I would argue not. Let's turn again to Germany. Here ideas of the nation are deeply intertwined with whiteness. However people are currently struggling against this and just one example of that occurs in the foreign office where employees of colour have recently founded a staff network and they argue for greater representation of people of colour and German foreign policy. This I think goes beyond questions of inclusion of career progress of visibility because it is really about the question of who belongs? Who belongs to the German nation and can therefore legitimately represent it towards the outside? So national identity is very much not settled. It is in constant flux and there are struggles over who gets to define what it means and relatedly defining solidarity in and through foreign policy is also a constant struggle. What's more the traditional understanding of foreign policy only allows us to express solidarity toward distant others. That is people separated from the nation both in terms of their identity but also in terms of space. But what about those within the state? During the pandemic we have seen exceptionally high levels of deaths of older people of working-class citizens of people of colour and other traditionally marginalised groups globally. We've also seen a significant decline in equity because socially crucial work including medical care, care for elders and children and homeschooling have mostly fallen on the shoulders of workers, of women, of people of colour and all of this is not visible in the doctor of foreign policy because it is not part of the foreign of the outside and hence solidarity cannot be directed here. And finally the understanding of foreign policy as an instrumental decision making process risks that solidarity is only extended when it serves larger foreign policy objectives and discarded again when it doesn't. A prominent example of this is the current debate about the trip's waiver. The trip is in agreement about intellectual property rights between member states of the World Trade Organization. In the current pandemic situation, temporarily suspending specific aspects of the trip that are related to vaccines and other COVID technologies, what really helps speed up the global pandemic response quite significantly. However, the majority of global north states is currently blocking the waiver, including Germany and here we see that economic foreign policy interests take precedence over acting in solidarity and this is very much in line with the traditional foreign policy doctor and comes out of it. So what I'm suggesting here is that the traditional doctor of doing foreign policy very much does not enable us to act in solidarity with others and this is why I think we need to reimagine foreign policy and its relation to solidarity and I do think that feminist care ethics provides one way of doing that. So feminist ethics have very recently interstate discourses when a number of states including Sweden, Canada, Mexico and Spain adopted feminist foreign policies and this presentation, however, I'm not really interested in those state policies. I'm happy to talk about those further after the discussion but for now I'm rather interested in the longer trajectory of feminist thinking on foreign policy that came out of this feminist care ethics perspective and I'm building on Fiona Robinson's work here and I want to read out a slightly long quote from her article on feminist care ethics and foreign policy which was she defines feminist care ethics and her quote as a form of moral responsiveness that is curious about context and sees moral dilemmas and difference through the presumive relationship. It challenges all forms of hierarchy which divide people and work against the possibility of relationship. It is finally a democratic ethic that presumes relational subjects engaged in ongoing participation in civic life as both givers and receivers of care. End quote. So to summarize this admittedly rather long quote what feminist care ethics is really about is that it centres relationality it challenges hierarchies and it works towards a world in which we equally given receive care. Now what would this mean for our understanding of foreign policy? I would like to suggest that certain feminist care ethics perspective radically challenges the traditional understanding of foreign policy for three reasons. First it collapses the artificial distinction between the inside or the nation and the outside or the foreign through its emphasis on relationality. It makes visible how those two spatial domains and the people in them are intimately connected and this allows to relate to others independently of their spatial location. Second and relatedly feminist care ethics dissolves this notion of a settled national identity because the self and the other are constituted through relationships that cannot exist independently of or prior to these constituting acts and this then also allows to recognize difference in equality. For feminist care ethics enables us to understand that one perspective is not the only one and that it comes from the way we're situated in the broader global context. So quite simply feminist care ethics allows us to be humble to be humble and to listen. And third feminist care ethics I think opens up the possibility for centering empathy and care towards others because people receive and give care as they relate to each other and this in my view challenges the inbuilt hierarchies and traditional foreign policy making most fundamentally. Now to summarize feminist care ethics allows us to reimagine foreign policy in a way that expressing solidarity is possible. It enables us to relate to others with empathy while recognizing difference and maintaining equality. And I think this is very much needed not just in the context of a global pandemic but beyond. Thank you very much and I look forward to discussion and I'm going to hand over to Aitan now. Thank you Kauline and thank you Becca and Maria and the communication team, Lizzie and Aisha for your support in putting this panel together. I'd like to share my screen now and talk a little bit about solidarity by taking the mind's perspective. I wonder if you can all see my slides. All right since I haven't heard. Otherwise I'll assume that you do see this slide. So often solidarity is being associated with group behavior and I believe that despite that solidarity has its origins at the level of the individual mind and as we will see today the mind poses some serious challenges for it. And so drawing on my own research in threat perception and others research in risk perception and in neuroscience and psychology I'll first share my understanding of the notion of solidarity before discussing how the mind does it. And then I'll try and sketch rather roughly three principles of what we might term effective solidarity hoping that this would help us reimagine communities as we move to the post pandemic world. And so solidarity for the purpose of today's talk I think entails three key elements. The first element that it's about a connection to entities outside ourselves. Right it's not about ourselves it's something else out there. And this connection could be either to either people groups it could be to animals it could be to a certain place. So say a religious site planet earth a piece of national territory and indeed other entities as well. The second element in solidarity is that it involves a certain course whether political social moral environmental and it involves our own readiness to either defend or advocate a certain cause. And finally and relatedly I think that solidarity requires a sense of agency a sense that by acting on the world I can bring certain positive effect onto it without this sense we often resort to apathy. And so today I'd like to focus mostly on the first element that is the connection to other entities. And so how does the mine form connections to entities out there. And here I draw mostly on the work on of Tania Singer and neuroscientist literary scholar Elaine Scarry and Paul Slovic and Paul Bloom both psychologists. And so I'd like to claim today that the ways in which our minds are doing solidarity are in ways that are very biased insensitive to numbers and over the long term facing large scale suffering they're also quite unsustainable. And to explain what I mean let me focus on specifically on three challenges that the mine has for connecting with other entities in the world. So the first challenge is really the challenge of distance. Either in space in time or in identity distance is central to the loss of feeling and connectedness. And let's take an example with space. Think about the difference that in how much you care about a deadly terrorist attack, a few minutes walk from where you now live and a similar terrorist attack happening thousands of miles away. All else being equal the farther we are from an incident the less likely we would be to care about that incident. And distance in time can similarly hinder our sense of connection. Generally the farther we are from an event in time the less we care about it. The impact of distance on our ability to connect can also be seen in terms of identity. The more different an entity appears to you the less likely you are to be in acting solidarity with it. And the suffering of animals I think is a case in point. We think they're very different from us and and hence we allow ourselves to do horrible things to them. And crucially in that context of identity we care less about members of other groups. We know from experiments that white, black and Asian participants show empathic resonance when watching an in group's members hand being pricked by a pin. But this response is a dump and or sometimes even completely absent when the hand belongs to an out group member. And the impact of group identity on solidarity is even more salient when groups are in direct competition so conflict. In those situations we not only experience less empathy towards distressed out group members who sometimes might even take pleasure in their pain. And this has have been documented again and again in neuroscientific experiments. So distance in time, space and identity plays a role in impeding our sense of connection to outside entities. In other words our sense of connection to entities is highly biased. The second challenge for solidarity is what scholars have called psychic numbing. When faced with the need to empathize with an increasing number of beings, worthy of our care, we tend to feel less empathy or our capacity to feel empathy diminishes. And to think about one example the official desktop from the global pandemic now stands at 3.5 more than 3.5 million lives. Yet most of us find it very difficult to feel any real difference between 3.5 and say 3.4 million lives lost. That is with increasing number of casualties psychic numbing takes hold. And this is really the second challenge that we face. The very first life at risk is crucially important. We do care a lot about the individual's person life. But when confronted with large numbers of casualties we tend to lose this feeling. In simple terms the more who died the less we care. The third challenge for solidarity is related and that is in some circumstances again we're faced with the need to empathize with many beings worthy of care. We experience the collapse of compassion actually becoming less concerned less prone to take effective action as the numbers of life at stake increases. And the famous study demonstrated this point rather effectively. The study had gave people who had just participated in a paid psychological experiment the opportunity to donate up to five dollars over their earning to the charity-saving children. In one condition participants were asked to donate to feed an identified victim a seven year old girl from Malinay parochia and participants in a second group were asked to donate to the same girl but were also shown statistics of starvation in several african countries millions of other children in need. Now this simple act of sharing this troubling statistics alongside the individual story reduced contributions to Rokia by about 40 percent. What's going on here faced with the need to care for many people we tend to respond by withdrawing from the situation and if you want to know how many people exactly then follow-up study found that the collapse of compassion actually begins with groups as small as two people. And so this decentization just described occurs when we contemplate different kinds of numerical information whether it's related to starvation global pandemics or casualties of war faced with our sense of seeming inability to make meaningful contribution we tend to look away and so we've just described three challenges distance psychic numbing and compassion fade and I've claimed that these pose serious challenges to our ability to form connections to other entities connections that are impartial reasoned and sustainable especially in the face of large-scale harm or suffering now the problem is that left to their own devices these psychological challenges can hinder effective response to harm and assuming that we do want to live in a society in which people care about salient issues and feel like they can make a positive difference in the world the question then arises how can we overcome these challenges how can we form better more meaningful reasoned and sustainable connections and to overcome these challenges I think we need to become better or at least consider these three major principles that together could be termed effective solidarity and these principles I think ought to be applied by everybody individuals and policy makers alike and so let me try to briefly explain what I mean by each let's take the first principle so we've just seen that we are very much biased towards the here and now and we need to educate ourselves on how to critically evaluate dangers and suffering in ways that are less biased and what we're doing so is is really to try and zoom out from the present and look into the future and to give a sense of why the future should matter take a look at the figure on the screen so looking 50 000 years back and forward in time all humans ever lived are represented by the small grey circle all human alive today are represented by the even smaller green circle and projections with same population rates as today you can see that the unborn generations are represented by the much much bigger orange circle so when thinking about how to prioritize security threats and existential risk we might want to take these future generations lives into account and start holding both ourselves and our policy makers accountable to them and in this context I'd like to share what two researchers have been have termed the intergenerational solidarity index which really tries to gauge how much different nations provide for the well-being of future generations and made up of 10 indicators of social environmental and economic solidarity the index gives each country a score ranging from one that's very low on intergenerational solidarity to 100 that's very high and so this is the kind of things we can start doing in order to critically think about both future dangers and suffering relatedly I think because we are highly biased in the ways in which we connect to the entities in the world we ought to try and balance by actively caring more for strangers what we perceive to be strangers and to deal with extreme inequalities that exist in our societies today and one way to do so again both individually and on a political level is to donate more and better either with our money our time skills and so on and we need to choose our charities in a better way we need to choose charities that make sustainable meaningful impact in areas of most importance and in this context I couldn't recommend more these two platforms effective altruism and give well which really do exactly that try and research evidence based what charities do the most effective work in those areas that really demand our outpost attention now at the level of the nation state we ought to give better more as well again in a sustainable and efficient way and in this context there's a lively debate now in the UK and other countries as well and the 0.7 target set by the United Nations about the official development aid as a percentage of the national growth income that's 0.7 is is quite this small I think all too low and we can do much better than this I think at the end of the day we all need to ask ourselves where do we want to see ourselves in this equation how much we want to give to ourselves to allocate to ourselves to our group or tribe and how much do we want to do the same for for others and it's an individual choice that we all have to make the second principle that I like to suggest is that we have to understand the psychological challenges that I've just described and we need to engage in reason alongside feeling whenever facing large-scale suffering or existential risks or dangers so an example in the context of human suffering you've just seen that we have a natural tendency to care less about the death of many and that in some cases when faced with large-scale suffering we tend to look away right these are second and third challenges that we mentioned that's the figure on the top of the screen now normatively if we think and agree that all human lives have the same equal value then the value of protecting lives should increase in a straight line as the number of lives at risk increases and that's the figure on the bottom and so understanding these psychological challenges coupled with engaging reason alongside feeling are crucial I think in moving forward finally we might want to learn how to better regulate our response our sense of connection again in things of large-scale suffering and threats one key in doing so is the distinction or how to distinguish between emotional empathy and compassion and this is crucial both for the ways again that individuals and policy makers operate and so what's the difference between these two emotional empathy is the ability to feel what the other feels to share in their pain the problem with it that over time and facing again large-scale suffering and when the other is experiencing overwhelmingly negative emotions it is often very difficult to sustain over a long period of time and I'm sure we all have our experiences in that context and so in order to avoid the excessive sharing of suffering that might lead us to distress and lack of effective action one way to respond to the suffering of others would be with compassion in contrast to empathy or emotional empathy compassion does not mean sharing the pain of others instead it's about caring about another without feeling their pain associated with a sense of active presence and warmth and concern and determination to find a way and help the other's well-being compassion is isn't as exhausting as emotional empathy and it does not make you withdraw but actually to approach and the good news is that building on this research cited here on the slide there are fairly straightforward ways we can start doing that regulate our responses to this large scale suffering thank you very much and I'd like to invite all of the speakers back in the chairs so we can engage in conversations and Q&A thank you very much Eitan and thank you to Lola and Caroline as well for three really excellent and thought provoking presentations I'm sure we'll have a lot to discuss so as Maria and I have mentioned already we have some pre we have some questions for you and these are a mix of general questions for all of you and questions for the speakers individually before we'll then turn it to our audience today so my our first question is for the entire panel and that question is a very broad one what is solidarity do we need to rethink this notion and if so in what way so anyone who'd like to start we don't need to go in the order of the presentations well I'll start seeing I was the most provocative saying that I distinguished this ethics of being in common without identity from solidarity and that implied in that is a big question given that you know solidarity as my two co-authors two co-panelists have so eloquently argued is such an incredibly valued ethics so and and I was puzzling about it I I don't really know I mean I think solidarity is it's a fantastic topic and we really do need to expand it and think about it I was very taken by Eaton's well Carolina's as well of course but more recently with Eaton's discussion of solidarity and how we should think about we should take it seriously and we should remember it all the time and but I was thinking all the time in in relation to the ethics of being in common without identity that both Eaton's and Carolina's talks were about a kind of purpose of reason I mean about thinking through the the ethics of solidarity and I think the argument that I was making is that we can be in common even without that reason we can be in common through sense-based practices through practices of compassion through practices of art through practices of love all of which are in a sense a kind of problematic so I guess the question that we might want to think about is to what extent is solidarity a problematic is it something that's fixed or is it a problematic Caroline would you like to add some comments on the question and thanks Lola for going first and for sharing your thoughts on that I've been thinking about this question quite a lot also in response to both of your your brilliant talks and in relation to my own research where really solidarity is something that is in the foreign policy world often spoken about either as a claim so I mean a you know discursive position taking if you will that is sometimes followed up with action but not always and particularly that is something that has particularly been discussed in relation to feminist foreign policy so has the adoption of a feminist foreign policy made a difference here or not but but also what I was also thinking is that solidarity is something in foreign policy that of course offers when we link it to national identity in this traditional foreign policy doxel that offers sort of guidelines right so it tells us who should we extend our solidarity to and and who maybe not and and it allows us to make well yes quite rational decisions about all of that and and still I think it's it's limited and I was quite intrigued by by Lola's idea about this this being in common without identity and what Lola what you talked about and but also Aitan your sort of your suggestions and how we might rethink solidarity because it has all those limitations and those might be aggravated particularly on the nation-state level so something that has also been suggested in light of this feminist foreign policy discourse is to turn to the notion of social justice instead and and work with that because that has a very different say intellectual history social justice is more associated with with the black feminist tradition for instance and it focuses more on on actual change and structural change and in foreign policy I think this might allow us to leave behind this this sort of mere discursive claiming of solidarity and to focus on well what can we do and how might we have to rethink foreign policy in a way that we can make change so these are just my sort of very initial two cents to start us off Aitan if you want to add anything yeah thank you thank you for this food for thought um yeah I think I want to make two points in this context the first is uh is that solidarity is a beautiful thing right uh when I look back in on my life and I try to kind of find out what would the most inspiring moment then most of them were experienced in in group settings where we worked to towards certain cause that I believed in so it's a very powerful I think notion um and it really speaks to our ability to uh step outside ourselves and and connect with something that is larger than ourselves and is there anything more beautiful than that um and it feels really good but I think that we've seen throughout history time and again that it can work both ways right it can lead to either very moral actions and consequences and quite immoral so my point is I think that we ought to be very careful and selective about it especially because we are prone to these biases enumeracy and unsustainability with our ability to defend or advocate certain causes and the second point that I'd like to make is that we currently are very much fixed on causes related to other humans which is perhaps understandable so to give some data to support this point in the United States 97% of philanthropy goes to causes associated with other humans and 3% goes to both environment and animals and considering the biases that we just surveyed I think we need to try and find a better balance to think not only about those people that are alive today but in future generations as well and so there's a few things that we could do and maybe just a final comment to pick on on what Lola mentioned this maybe they caught me between reason and feeling or experience and I very much agree with you Lola I think that there's a large role for art and experiences to play in the ways that we do solidarity but maybe I will try and kind of press further that in addition to these experiences and which are transformative in many cases very helpful you might want to still maintain our reason and try to think about things in analytical maybe even utilitarian points of view so that would be my own two cents thank you so my first question is for Lola in your research you propose a very beautiful and radical idea and it would be really interesting to hear you reflect a bit more on the tension between different identities does the tension that exists between different individual identities within ourselves prevent us from being in common without identity Lola you're immuted thank you very very interesting question I've approached the problem of identity very much from the perspective of what Ned Lebeau talks about identity being plural and that when we try and you know that all of us are in ineluctably plural within ourselves so that identity is multiple identities are part and parcel of what it is to be human and that's so to be and he goes on to say that identity has become a big feature of modernity precisely because we are always caught up between our own individual reflexivity and the social pressure put upon on us as individuals so that's the the sort of ground of attention that we have to negotiate he's got a quite an interesting model of for very for for categories of identity I won't go into those but it seems to me that if we are multiple all the time we are always in a sense poised first war between the politics of identity all of us are to some extent interested in the politics of identity but I'm also trying to make the case that we should be much more interested in an ethics of being without identity and that that tension between the politics of identity and the ethics of being without identity are themselves constitutive in a sense of our being in modernity and that I'm trying to bring forward this capacity of ours to tolerate multiplicity within ourselves and to positively embrace the business of being without identity it's a difficult risky project radical project as you say I think it's a project that is very much taken up in art I think it's one of the prime values of art and I would hope that social science audience might be quite intrigued by it especially in the relation to well this topic of order and disorder which is itself this dynamic dialectical topic what you know what is the relation between order and disorder what is the relationship between identity and without identity being in common without identity I think that those are all dynamic tensions that enable us to think and feel through our mutual co-constitution is actually what I mean I took that as a kind of starting point for this dynamic this dialectical process as I understand it and that to come back to your question is you know we I don't think that having this multiplicity within us inhibits us in any way from having practices of identity and practices of being in common without identity that each one of us has to negotiate that in terms of who we are and what challenges confront us so it's a I'm making a contribution to identity to the considerations of identity to bring in the ethics of it I think it's a very important valuable ethics that appears in art but it as I also think it appears in many other practices traditional and I was very interested I went to I was on a zoom conference last week where they're talking about pretty much the same kind of thing the ethics of waiting in hospitals in in this covered time and that the ethics of being in care with one another was itself a kind of ethics of being in common without identity so it's in our it's it's a it's an ethics that is lodged in many of our practices and in the interests of time we'll just ask one more question sorry we don't have enough time for to ask our individual question with Etan and Caroline but I'll just ask the question then for Caroline I'm since she was next on the list what does a feminist foreign policy that has gone through a pluralizing transformation look like how does it differ from a feminist foreign policy that is grounded in western cosmopolitan values thanks back and I'll try to keep that short in the interest of time I think what's important to say first is that we do have existing state feminist foreign policies right so that of Sweden of Canada France has claimed to have one Spain, Mexico, Luxembourg so there's quite a few around but when you look at those state feminist foreign policies closely it's quite obvious that none of those has gone through such a pluralizing transformation so when they do make claims to specific ethics these claims and the understanding of ethics is very much based in a western cosmopolitan understanding of what ethics means and I think you could sort of one way of rephrasing the question that you just asked Becker is why do we need this feminist care ethics perspective couldn't we just do an ethical foreign policy and then everything would be solved and I would argue not because I think and I'm drawing on Fiona Robinson's work here again that ethical foreign policy still stays within those binaries of inside and outside of universal in particular and doesn't really dissolve those because we see that for instance with Canada even where you have claims that you're making an ethical foreign policy and you're for instance elevating human rights over material gains then you still have this discursive construction of a sort of paternal protective masculinity so what happens in Canada for instance with the fee of the feminist international assistance policy is that it's very much directed at empowering women to access the international market and Canada is discursively destructed as sort of the enabler of them doing so and this very much then I think reproduces that inside-outside binary on the one hand and the second point I just want to make very quickly is that the the ethical remains attached to the cosmopolitan outside in those understandings of feminist foreign policy and this very much reproduces again existing power relations and opens up the risk of feminist foreign policy being co-opted by by capitalists by patriarchal and racist logics because it's so easy to construct the inside the state who has adopted the feminist foreign policy as the modern one as the protector and the outside as in need of saving or protecting in one way or another and I think if we reimagine foreign policy through this feminist care ethics what that allows us to do really is to centre relationality and to and look at context but also revise and adapt to our foreign policy decisions as needed so just being basically as a call for more uncertainty I'm guess I'm guessing and it's it's a process that very much centres relating to others and listening to others and I think that's what's what's very much needed wonderful thank you Caroline so I see that we have audience members waiting with questions and so we'll turn to them now and if we have time at the end we'll we'll get to our other questions on our list but let's open it up to the audience now I see that we have a first question from Francisco Francisco would you like to come join us and ask your question directly otherwise we're happy also to read it for you so please put your hand up if you'd like to ask your question someone letting Francisco in okay I'll go ahead and read the question so we're not we're still getting used to this virtual format so a question from Francisco Lobo thanks very much Francisco Francisco's question is thank you to all the presenters and organizers I have a question for the entire panel do you believe we can use the notion of common but differentiated responsibilities taken from environmental law to apply it to solidarity more broadly for instance quote common but differentiated solidarity duties quote depending on different capabilities and needs between countries so just in case I will put that in the chat box for the panelists so they can absorb it more individually but who would like to answer that first perhaps is it okay to call on A-ton since we didn't get to him with our third question thank you for calling me out I could I could try I mean it's it's quite far from from what I do but I think I think this is an interesting attempt as much as I understand it from the question it's an interesting attempt to think how we can do solidarity in more subtle ways right and how we can take into account the various capabilities and needs of different countries and so to me from just now thinking about it it does make sense right because it operates on these various principles of justice both equality and fairness and so I think there is a potential here but I I'm afraid that in order to come up with something more meaningful I have to think about about this elevating more details right thank you A-ton so do we have any more questions I can't see any hands up no so when we're the focus is on A-ton I actually had a question for you so you propose this notion of effective solidarity in your research what does an ethics that comes out from effective solidarity as opposed to solidarity understood as empathy look like and would effective solidarity change anything in terms of what it means to act in solidarity with others yeah thank you Maria so to reiterate if our intuitive sense of connecting to others in the world is indeed biased and if it's insensitive to numbers and if it's unsustainable over the long run then we need to come with ways that are less on those things right in ways that are impartial that are sensitive to numbers and reason and sustainable and so following the framework that I've alluded to effective altruism I think that effective solidarity might direct us to choose causes that are likely to be highly impactful to the extent that the cause is first great in scale that is that it affects many lives by a great amount that is highly neglected meaning that other people other groups other organisations and states aren't working to address this problem and third that it's actually solvable and tractable and if I put my own resources into this cause then it would actually have meaning to it so on the basis of these effective altruism reasoning I think that the idea of effective solidarity can suggest three main avenues for effective action and the first one is global poverty right reducing global poverty is probably high on everyone should be high everyone's on the agenda and we know that COVID-19 has only pushed more than 100 million people again below the poverty line so there is definitely that kind of area of high importance and then the second one is improving animal welfare and the third one is trying to influence long-term future and here is where climate change so if I have to think about certain ethics coming out of this idea of effective solidarity that it's very similar to effective altruism and for the second part of the question I would like to suggest an analogy that might help us think about this notion more clearly so if we think about solidarity as emotional empathy then it's similar to holding a spotlight that really shines more brightly on those people we love and are similar to us and gets much dimmer as we move away or farther towards people that are different from us and as we've seen this spotlight tends to get fixated as well on the individual rather than the many and it's also very difficult to hold it it has a very short life shelf life and so if we have to rethink how we do it and how would ethics or effective solidarity look like I think that to use this analogy we would use a spotlight that is much more disused that is directed at those causes that are most crucial and where we can make the most impact and we will not be I think want to sway it by the individual suffering but again to highlight the many over the one and it would also if we can manage this emotional regulation of our response then we could probably also hold it for longer periods of time so that's my thinking about how would ethics or effective solidarity might look like thank you could I quickly add something to that or do we have do we need to move forward by all means yes go ahead thank you thanks Aysa and I was just thinking through how this is similar but different in the foreign policy world because with foreign policy what you have and a lot of studies actually highlight to have highlighted this is that the international realm is usually seen to be more progressive in terms of ethics as opposed to the domestic and particularly with notions such as solidarity that in the context of foreign policy often revolve around questions of gender it's it tries it sometimes tries to sort of link the more progressive international back to the maybe less progressive domestic so the spotlight here seems to be on something that's taken place elsewhere so rather than don't so there's a different understanding of distance there in space I think what's at play but it's very much something that is being struggled about at the moment so with with you know just taking the the analogy because I like it so much like who do we direct the spotlight to who do we extend solidarity to in in feminist foreign policy is often quite limited so even though we like I said we direct to what the outside but then we also only direct to that specific groups of the population and that's that's often cis women and I think this is also something where and I think is related to what Lola said earlier where specific notions of identity and identity constructions come in that that somewhat hinder our ability to relate to you to the and I think here what a really radical notion of feminist foreign policy would do is like like Lola suggested try to center experiences more and I think one way of doing that would be through empathetic listening and empathetic cooperation and Christine Sylvester among others has has written extensively on that you know I think Christine Sylvester developed that idea with with regard to who actually gets the built theory but I think it's it's something that can be applied here as well where you sort of slip in and out of different positionalities because you you listen to others take them seriously in what they say their concerns their fears their genders and you listen to those in particular who you usually don't listen to so you direct your gaze at the margins and I think this is something that might be a way of moving forward Lola were you Lola I think you're muted yeah There we go just just to take up on that because I think we coming to some notion of what the value of solidarity is I think Eton has given a such a fantastic definition of it and I think that we're we're in a spectrum between the individual inner development of an of an ethics sense an ethical sensibility and the public and I would say that they're on a spectrum and that we need to attend to both we need to attend to our everyday ethics and to encourage people to do them in sense based practices and and hopefully that that will make the solidarity with others in extreme suffering more people would be more practiced in this kind of ethical endeavor excellent well we have one final question for the three of you but first let's see if anyone in the audience has another question or even general comments or thoughts that were inspired by this panel so if you have a question please just raise your hand or if you'd like us and you can come in and and and save yourself or you can type it into the text box and we'll read it for you so let me just pause for one moment just so I'm making sure I'm not silencing anyone so hard to know virtually what's happening behind the scenes in that case I just raised my own hand in that case I will ask my final question and if you think of any questions in the meantime we'll make sure that we give you a chance to do it at the very end we'll cover comments short if need be so our final question is actually two questions that we combined into one for the interest of time and also because our panelists have already partially answered our first question just naturally by the way the conversation went so the combined question and this is for all three of you is what potential does the notion of solidarity have in helping us to reimagine communities in times of disorder can it help us to guide political action or alternatively is there a risk that conversations about solidarity may actually close off other avenues such as political justice and responsibility is solidarity a prerequisite for these types of actions or can solidarity actually have a more negative side which is something we haven't discussed yet that's a long final question you can answer any part of it that you'd like of course so should we start then with Caroline I think I'm happy to start yeah it's okay so I think I'd like to address sort of the second part with the risky bits about solidarity are and I think I want to again take it back to this idea of national identity so I think if solidarity remains tied to identity and in the case of foreign policy particularly national identity I think there is a real risk that thinking about other avenues such as political justice might be closed off and I want to use Sweden as an example if I may so Sweden was the the first state to adopt a feminist foreign policy in 2014 and has a long history of state feminism but this sort of feminist foreign policy has added a new layer to their national identity and that it is discursively constructed as exceptional as a moral superpower and one aspect that came with this feminist foreign policy part of the national identity is its emphasis that Sweden has never been a coloniser so it discursively constructs itself as moral superpower because it takes in this feminist ethics and part of this feminist ethics is that it doesn't oppress others this is wrong like quite wrong because Sweden has colonized its own indigenous people but because there are within the state again this is not part of that narrative and I think solidarity very much is so much tight so tight well tight so so closely to this idea of national identity that you can't extend solidarity within that framework to everyone it's very much limited and I think political justice is something that will be needed here but that is not possible so I think we here we see sort of one really quite a big limitation of this feminist foreign policy idea as it is tied to identity yes I sure I wanted to say that it seems that what I'm proposing is not in the realm of justice but I'm more so simultaneously thinking that that's a that's a a weakness in my position but what I do want to say is that it seems to me that in this sense-based field of ethics that there is a it is it is always in a sense practical it is always based in senses it's always based in practices of friendship practices of love practices of art practices of being in common without identity across several forms of encounter so that it's at the kind of micro level that I'm talking about rather than the macro level of justice so yes so I'll leave it there I just I wouldn't have anything to say about justice yeah so I'll take the first part and that is really the potential and what potential if any does the notion of solidarity have in helping us to reimagine communities in times of disorder I think we it's quite important to keep in mind the the context in which we are speaking right now and maybe the next few months and years and perhaps even more are going to be very difficult times for many around the world and so I think there ought to be an emphasis on the outside the stranger the far away those that are unlike us those that are yet to be born especially in this kind of circumstance that we're going to find ourselves in and so I do think that there is a great potential to this notion if again done well and effectively to help us and to guide political political action and I think we're already seeing it again this kind of debate that is going on in the UK about rebellion by members of the conservative party against the prime minister for lowering the proportion of the OGA as is quite telling I think there is a move to to do more for others even those that are far away and different from us and so I do hope that it would keep on guiding us and about the other conversations I hope that you could actually help inspire these conversations about justice cleanness, equality and the different iterations so perhaps we can have these various conversations in tandem not necessarily closing off any particular direction yeah thank you I think we've had a unless there are any last comments from our presenters or from the audience I don't see any and I think we've had a very rich and thought provoking discussion and it's given us a lot to think about and you know really enjoyed hearing our three speakers and and getting to know more about their work and I think thank you to Maria and to Lizzie and the School of Security Studies for organizing such an excellent conference and on such an important and timely subject so I really look forward to being able to see all of you in person in the next academic year and I think in the meantime there's a message here in meantime yeah we just have a couple minutes left and Maria wanted to quickly walk you through the final steps and what to expect in terms of the blog posts coming out in relation to this conference as well so thanks again for fantastic conversation today and giving us such a rich and thought provoking such rich and thought provoking comments right thank you Becca thank you Aetan Carolina and Lola and thank you all for tuning in so as a final word I'd encourage you all to check out the Research Center for International Relations blog this week we will publish two blog posts on the topic of solidarity written by PhD students Carolese Pryor and Laura Suber we will also try to post these links of these blogs on our social media accounts so you will be able to access that piece from those platforms right thank you