Discourses of solidarity fatigue as ambivalent recognition among German and Polish actors in relation to Ukrainian displacement

Abstract

Solidarity has long been of interest within Cultural Studies, Migration Studies and the social sciences more broadly, but solidarity fatigue has received significantly less academic attention. Solidarity fatigue is defined here as a sense of psychological or physical exhaustion experienced by those expressing solidarity – support around a shared horizon of values. Building on the prominent political articulations of solidarity fatigue in central and Eastern European media in the wake of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, this paper looks at how solidarity fatigue is communicated and expressed through 40 interviews conducted in the spring of 2024 with employees in a range of organisations that offered solidarity to displaced Ukrainians in Germany and Poland, including non-governmental and cultural organisations. A framework of solidarity through recognition is employed to contextualise such articulations among these interviewees, encompassing emotional, legal, and sociocultural dimensions.

Introduction

At the time of writing, it has been over three years since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. As of February 2024, nearly 6.4 million displaced Ukrainians had been recorded globally (UNHCR, 2024). The European Union's support for displaced Ukrainians has generated significant public debate, because of the war's heightened and prolonged demands on member states’ public infrastructure and associated economic cost (Karnitschnig et al., 2024; Rainsford, 2023). This concern comes after a widespread outpouring of support from individuals, companies and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). More recently, Europe has seen right-wing opposition linked to European and governmental elections exacerbated by misinformation and disinformation online (Bentzen, 2024).

Yet while the question of solidarity fatigue – articulations of spent physical or psychological resources, often associated with exhaustion and burnout in relation to humanitarian responses to conflict (Sarafian et al., 2025)– has generated press and academic interest, with the European Commission's Ukraine adviser Lodewijk Asscher identifying its major cause as economic slowdown relating to high inflation (Baniya, 2023), it is relatively under researched in relation to the latest so-called migration ‘crisis’ to hit Europe. Expressions of solidarity, following Honneth's definition in the Struggle for Recognition (1995) can be expressed as ‘felt concern for what is individual and particular about the other person’, in other words the mutual recognition of ‘one another in light of values that allow the abilities and traits of the other to appear significant for shared praxis’ (Honneth, 1995: 129). This disrupts the binary between recognition and its opposite, misrecognition, through a complex relational struggle (Thijssen, 2012). One might expect solidarity fatigue to particularly affect Germany and Poland most prominently, given that these two countries have hosted the largest number of Ukrainian refugees since the full-scale invasion, 1.13 million and around a million respectively (Golebiowksa et al., 2024; Kinkartz, 2024) (albeit these numbers are subject to ongoing change). We must consider expressions of solidarity both by and to Ukrainians, if we are to interrogate the struggle relationally as defined.

Solidarity has long been an important concept within the social sciences (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005; Chouliaraki, 2013; Eagleton, 2009; Rorty, 1989). Chouliaraki's claim is that solidarity is born of modernity itself, with Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith, 1759) saying benevolence towards vulnerable others is a fundamental moral part of the human psyche. What Chouliaraki (2013: 12) terms humanitarian solidarity must be viewed critically given the compromises aid agencies make with ruling political actors and their oft-absent external scrutiny. ‘There can be no pure humanitarianism, in that all choices to save lives are ultimately political choices about which suffering is worth alleviating and who is to blame for it’ (Chouliaraki, 2013: 13). This paper is written with that critical intention in mind. It seeks to understand how solidarity has unfolded in relation to this prominent humanitarian crisis, through analysing how solidarity actors articulate solidarity emotionally, legally and socioculturally over time. Most urgently, it seeks to begin to parse how different kinds of solidarity – offering material support, solidaristic speech acts, nation-states’ policies towards refugees – might interact temporally through expressions of fatigue.

While compassion fatigue is a more commonly considered concept in the wake of refugee movement (see Gusak et al., 2024, in the context of the full-scale invasion) given the extensive legal, political discourses articulated across the public sphere in relation to Ukraine, the concept of solidarity usefully speaks to the political, legal and sociocultural dimensions of fatigue in the face of war, as well as the emotional toll of long-term support. I take legal and political changes to include, for example, the introduction of the Temporary Protection Directive in March 2022 offering short-term rights for Ukrainian refugees, or the changing political landscape in Poland, where the right-wing Law and Justice government (PiL) were defeated in the October 2023 national election. These changes in laws and governments, alongside broader sociocultural shifts over the last two years, inevitably impact the context in which solidarity happens.

As such, I argue that these expressions of solidarity exist within a communicative space forming part of a broader politics of recognition, through which Ukrainians and their hosts negotiate interrelationships manifesting particular articulations of power. If Honneth's work around recognition shows him define solidarity as a relationship between two subjects determined by mutual sympathy with different ways of life due to mutual esteem (Honneth, 1995), then, I argue, the construction of subjects that engage in solidarity takes place within a particular order of knowledge production, the manifestation of which is dependent on the national, social and cultural discourses around it (Foucault, 1976).

Representation results in certain discursive formations by ‘inscribing power relations of who is normal’ and who ‘belongs’ (Hall, 2013: xxxv; Leurs, 2023: 86). Given the strong arguments around citizens' need for complete recognition to be fully realised as ethical subjects (Georgiou, 2019) I make the case for the need for a greater understanding of the interpersonal manifestation of solidarity fatigue over time as part of this recognition within this article. My argument is that solidarity fatigue may be conceived as the expression of discourses of recognition changing temporally, if solidarity is considered in Honnethian terms.

Solidarity as recognition within migration

Solidarity has been of longstanding interest to Media and Cultural Studies academics in the context of the relationship between the mediation of distant suffering and solidarity (Chouliaraki, 2013; Markham, 2019) with the resurgent prominence of solidarity within political discourse during the various migration crises to recently hit Europe (Schmitt and Rademacher, 2023). Less has been written about how solidarity changes over time and as a result of fatigue. Some important scholarly accounts exist of changing everyday politics in the wake of the arrival of refugee populations (McCluskey, 2019), of disillusionment among activists (Proctor, 2024) or of compassion fatigue in the context of mediation (Ong, 2012) but none focus on solidarity fatigue specifically.

Recognition – which I argue is pivotally bound to solidarity, via Honneth's definition – has also long been used within Migration Studies and Media and Communications in relation to theories of voice. Couldry (2010) centralizes recognition in his argument around voice, drawing on Honneth's belief that recognition of others’ agency is central to social justice’ (p. 19). Citing Honneth (1995) and studies of UK citizen engagement in politics, Couldry et al. (2007: 16) report that ‘the real issue about the…long-term decline in engagement in formal electoral politics in the UK and elsewhere… was not so much a “motivation crisis” on the part of citizens… the real issue was a “recognition crisis.”’

Honneth (1995) develops his definition of recognition along three interlocking axes, the three preconditions one needs to be an ethical agent, in his eyes: self-confidence, self-respect, and self- esteem (p. 94). These are realised through three kinds of social relationship: loving primary relationships, legal relations, or the social state of solidarity. If a subject is misrecognised then this is experienced as injustice or harm (Van der Brink and Owen, 2007). Thus, recognition and by extension solidarity is fundamental to the formation of a human subject, Honneth argues. In this article I focus on solidarity fatigue in relation to Honneth's (1995) third axis of recognition, ‘self-esteem,’ the acquisition of which arrives through a ‘cultural struggle for the recognition of previously denigrated contributors to the common good’ (p. xvii), ultimately by changing a society to create conditions where minority populations are not denigrated outside their own culture and thus may contribute civically (Honneth, 1995: 120). While there are some caveats to the normativity of this conception, these have been addressed extensively elsewhere (Kymlicka, 1989; van Leeuwen, 2007: 186). My argument is that as solidarity diminishes due to fatigue, recognition may also fade away; displaced individuals may no longer receive the same level of empathy, respect, or acknowledgment as they did initially. This changing dynamic can result in more expressions of what Honneth calls misrecognition, where the displaced may be seen as less deserving subjects.

Debates around civil rights, gender equality, and the rights of migrants have all drawn on recognition theory (Smets et al., 2019). The argument for recognition has received renewed attention in recent decades, with Honneth's influence continuing to be seen in more recent literatures around migration and digital divides (Georgiou, 2019; Klinkisch and Suphan, 2017; Solík, 2016). Honnethian recognition has often been applied to refugees (e.g. Sharp, 2024; Thomas et al., 2011), though less commonly with those experiencing ongoing displacement, and barely ever to questions of solidarity fatigue as described – e.g., discourses of recognition changing – or indeed recent events relating to Ukraine. Research surrounding the NGO sector, and NGOs themselves, have published extensively on the effects of compassion fatigue and burnout within the sector since the full-scale invasion (Gusak et al., 2024; Jarosz and Klaus, 2022). However, little attention has been paid to the manifestation of fatigue as it might relate to solidarity, conceived as it is here in terms of recognition and its broader sociocultural and communicative context.

Thus, solidarity is conceived here through Honneth's broader ethical project, grounded in emotion and individual as well as collective recognition. My argument is that recognition's multi-faceted conceptualisation encompasses the fundamental emotionally prejudicial, legal and sociocultural injustices of the contemporary displaced. Given that I seek to adapt Honneth's framework by arguing that solidaristic speech acts sit within a discursive framework of power relations, solidarity fatigue becomes not the absence of recognition, but an ongoing shift in articulation from a more aligned shared critical position to a more antagonistic articulation – that might have clear material implications. A private citizen may discuss how they no longer wish to help particular Ukrainian migrants with material help, for instance, and this might compound the effects of a fragile rights framework for displaced Ukrainians in Europe. How these different dimensions of recognition interrelate is of pivotal importance to those displaced – materially, affectively, and socioculturally – in relation to their experiences of the everyday. Over time, we might see solidarity move away from what Honneth defines in terms of social relations of ‘symmetrical appreciation of individualized subjects’ (Honneth, 1995: 209–210; see also: Hoelzl, 2004), a reciprocity in terms of values, to a disconnect.

While I tackle the relationship between these articulations and the media in more detail elsewhere (Sharp et al., in press) it is worth nothing how such cultural contexts may regulate individuals’ views, given the widespread regulative misrecognitive effects of platformised mediation (Davies, 2021). As Georgiou (2017: 264) writes, encounters are experienced physically and are ‘managed through proximity’, but are also ‘symbolically managed’ on mass and via social media through the circulation of dominant discourses and representations (Lane, 2018). Cultural spaces including the media do not only circulate symbols but also construct meanings of the Self, and/or define the parameters of individuals’ sense of belonging (Koulaxi, 2025). Recent theoretical work on recognition extends Honneth's theory of recognition, particularly in its emotional dimension, to one of ambivalence, and in this respect this paper also serves as empirical evidence around this claim (Allen, 2021, 2024; Benjamin, 2018; Butler et al. 2021; Fraser and Honneth, 2003; Petherbridge, 2013). Ukraine is a particularly pertinent case-study in this regard, given that the conflict ‘unfolds in many theatres, including information and communication…hybrid strategies and media old and new are used for information, persuasion and propaganda’ (Benabid, 2022: 1). Institutions serve as the most powerful of communicative spaces, despite the possibility that they may co-opt expressions of solidarity to their own ends (Couldry, 2024).

Methodology

Data collection stems from 40 interviews conducted in Berlin, Germany and Warsaw, Kraków, Opole and Lublin in Poland, with employees in a range of organisations that offered solidarity to displaced Ukrainians in the aftermath of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. These individuals worked in non-governmental institutions (NGOs), were employees of cultural organisations which had offered solidarity to displaced Ukrainians over the same period, or members of independent collectives of individuals or activists of fewer than 10 members who had organised solidarity activities – anything self-described as ‘solidarity’ publicly by the organisation in question in the aftermath of the full-scale invasion. I have focused on these groups as the most prominent sources of consistently supported solidarity in the countries in question. Despite the large amount of state support provided to displaced Ukrainians, European politicians have called on civil society organisations to help (Carlsen et al., 2024). Similarly, beyond direct support from the state, cultural institutions are one of the foremost sources of solidarity to refugees within civic society (Sharp, 2024).

Because of the length of time since the full-scale invasion, employment since February 2022 is one source of solidarity. As such, of the 40 people interviewed, 14 were Ukrainian nationals who were now embedded within the organisations described. Ukrainian participants were from a variety of locations within Ukraine including Kyiv, Odesa and Donetsk. Of these 14 Ukrainians, 13 were female, reflecting the gender breakdown of Ukrainians able to leave the country due to emergency laws relating to conscription. Overall, 17 interviews were conducted in Berlin, 19 in Warsaw, two in Lublin, one in Opole, and one in Kraków. Interviewees were selected using purposive and snowball sampling, where I approached interviewees and institutions with questions of solidarity, with participants subsequently suggesting other participants of relevance (Bryman, 2004: 408). I have stated interviewees’ nationality unless they have explicitly requested otherwise. Interviewees worked as project managers, communication officers, and curators, within the institutions as defined, or as freelancers in equivalent roles.

The interviews were conducted mainly in Warsaw and Berlin as these are the metropolitan centres of the two countries that had received the most displaced Ukrainians since the full-scale invasion – 800,000 and 267,000 respectively since February 2022. The focus on Berlin and Warsaw is due to the huge numbers of Ukrainian refugees being hosted by these two cities, relative to British cities, placing Germany and Poland's education and health infrastructures under significant strain and prompting reports of ‘solidarity fatigue’ in both countries (Eden, 2022; Pieper, 2022). During fieldwork I also conducted two interviews in Lublin, and one in both Kraków and Opole, at the recommendation of other interviewees, in order to gather information on institutions beyond the capital. Lublin is of particular interest given its relative proximity to the Ukrainian border, and as a transport waypoint between Kyiv and Warsaw.

Interviews were conducted in a semi-structured way (Olson, 2014), in person or via video conferencing between February and April 2024 in Berlin and Warsaw and lasted up to 60 minutes. Because of the nature of the institutions involved, which had an international reach, interviews were conducted in English, though this is acknowledged as a flaw of the study. The interviewer was a British researcher with a decade's experience of working with refugees, living in the UK, equally experiencing Polish and German society as an outsider. The interview guide required interviewees to discuss how they defined their values and those of their organization, how they experienced or expressed solidarity or otherwise, and how this had changed over time since the full-scale invasion.

A thematic analysis was undertaken of the resulting transcripts, paying particular attention to repetition and replication in light of the paper's concerns (Bazeley, 2013). I took a hybrid inductive/deductive approach to coding and analysis, mindful of themes that might emerge in relation to the overarching questions relating to questions of solidarity (Fereday and Muir-Cochrane, 2006). Within these major themes subthemes that emerged from the data were factored into my literature review and informed the use of material. While my interest is borne of discourse theory, in order to give an overview of the range by which articulatory strategies are conceived, I have not used discourse analysis in this paper, though associated papers may employ this methodology. Necessarily, because I have focused on institutional forms of self-proclaimed solidarity, this study might overemphasise solidarity in the context of elite or cosmopolitan migrants, at the expense of those who migrate using existing family networks. I acknowledge this as an additional limitation of this study, which I attempt to alleviate elsewhere with broader studies of Ukrainian migrants to Germany (e.g., Rock and Sharp, in press).

Any identifying characteristics have been removed from interviewees; participants were informed of their ability to withdraw from the research until two weeks after the interview date. No participant was asked about subjects likely to cause distress, including the causes of their displacement or the status of family members, focusing solely on the circumstances relating to solidarity. All other parts of the research adhered to the project's extensive ethics approval in line with the University of Sussex's ethics best practices.

Emotional fatigue as changes in recognition

My findings broadly fall into three overlapping and interrelated dimensions of solidaristic recognition changing over time: emotional and psychological fatigue, fatigue relating to a lack of rights, and sociocultural shifts as speech acts relating to personal values, that broadly align with Honneth's three dimensions. In this first section, we see how emotional fatigue relating to recognition is manifested among those offering and receiving solidarity, something that speaks to the two subsequent sections – in my second section, where I discuss how legal recognition is afforded to some Ukrainians and not others, and in my final section, where I discuss how actors’ solidaristic articulations align with different sociocultural values over time. As described above, the role of media in regulating emotional, legal and sociocultural recognition will also be woven into each section. While these sections have been structured in this discrete way, ambivalent articulations of fatigue overlap between dimensions.

Turning first to Poland, by way of opening context, NGOs operating in Warsaw and close to the Polish-Ukrainian border widely reported increasing emotional and psychological fatigue in the 12 months preceding the second anniversary of the full-scale invasion of February 2022, especially among Ukrainians embedded within their organisations. The Migration Consortium NGO and the University of Warsaw, in a report on the aftermath of the full-scale invasion, spoke of burnout being especially pronounced among Ukrainians now embedded within NGOs in Poland. ‘Refugees from Ukraine proved to be extremely committed workers,’ it reads. ‘They claimed that work was a way for them to participate in the war – a field where they could make themselves useful. This very personal, strong motivation was admirable, but at the same time it fostered overworking.’

Building on this idea of burnout among Ukrainians offering solidarity, Ukrainian activists based in Warsaw reported distress from accrued instances of alienation in their everyday social encounters, particularly microaggressions and prejudice. One activist describes a prejudiced encounter in the street, her own fatigue, and a clearly worsening political and media environment. This included the rearticulation of disinformation and misinformation around the costs of migration, alongside the oversubscription of Polish hospitals and schools, both of which have circulated heavily on social media and in tabloid media in Poland (Wenzel et al., 2024).

So there was a man who was obviously a little bit drunk. And yeah, he started just saying that because there were also Ukrainians in the same train. ‘Oh, no one's talking. No one's talking in Polish in Poland anymore’. Blah, blah, blah. And yeah, I wanted to say, like to say something. Ask him what his problem is. And he started saying that, that his friend who was suffering from something he didn’t get the recommendation [for] his medicine because of the Ukrainians, because there was no money left in hospital.

Here, the Ukrainian activist interviewee clearly articulated examples of anti-Ukrainian sentiment that has developed over time, and relates to the cost of the war, in contrast to previous studies from earlier in the post-invasion period which suggest that Ukrainians are preferentially treated compared to those fleeing persecution from elsewhere in the world (Zawadzka-Paluektau, 2023); this feeling was echoed in numerous other interviews I conducted in Poland.

Contextually, it was clear from my fieldwork that an oversaturation of coverage of the conflict in institutional and social media contributed widely to emotional burnout. Activists in Poland reported that participating in social media was necessary to their solidarity work, yet the intensity of their media consumption of war had a personal cost. A Ukrainian woman working as a tour guide in a national museum in Poland talked about the effects of retraumatisation through consuming social media, and the way she attempted to negotiate this not only through her consumption, but what she felt comfortable posting. She performatively regulated her expressions of joy – she felt she could not focus on the positive sides of her life in Warsaw – in order to avoid upsetting those who did not have this security in Ukraine. Her resistance resulted in silence, omission and voicelessness. The ambivalence of such emotional complexity – a need to emotionally connect in highly regulated ways – dramatically complexifies Honneth's framework in an age of platformised capitalism (Davies, 2021).

In Germany, Ukrainian interviewees in Berlin also articulated disillusionment in their experiences of solidarity over time. One Ukrainian woman who had been offered employment in a Berlin arts organisation contrasted her own perceptions of the European Union during her childhood in Ukraine, versus the lack of knowledge local Germans had about her life, resulting in distress. ‘So I know everything about their culture’, she said. ‘Unlike a local, they know nothing about me’. Such attitudes, interviewees claimed, put pressure on them to perform their hosts’ ideas of an ideal Ukrainian citizen, one exemplified gratefulness and respect, an example of the labour of performative refugeeness as refugees seek to negotiate the terms of their own acceptance (Sharp, 2024; Georgiou, 2019). Frequently interviewees discussed ignorance among German citizens relating to their home country, which developed over time – asking whether they had access to the internet in Ukraine, for example, as the same interviewee relayed to me – also contributing to their sense of fatigue. In other words, an accrued sense of prolonged emotional fatigue, that was negotiated performatively.

It was clear that an oversaturation of coverage of the conflict in institutional and social media also led to such misrecognitional fatigue among those offering solidarity. ‘So it's about this tiredness of the news, it's kept going and going, especially if it's not about you, maybe it's not about your country could get you can get distant and to say, “Oh, it's just, it happened again”,’ said one employee at an arts charity in Berlin running residencies for Ukrainian artists. Her colleague mentions feeling ‘hopeless’ in terms of their exposure to digital content on the conflict, and their ongoing desensitisation. ‘And what we do is we, we just build it ourselves, like the protection gear,’ she said. This sense of misrecognition solidified over time among both Ukrainians offering and receiving solidarity, as well as Poles and Germans offering it to Ukrainians, with mediated misrecognition one obvious component of this.

A Ukrainian artist working with a German national arts organisation in Berlin spoke of a form of ontological insecurity caused by the disconnect between their experiences in Germany as a refugee and the social media content of war back in Ukraine that they engaged with every day. Such an experience is fundamentally misrecognitive – within a digital mediated context, the complex processes of acceptance through normative integration in Germany become confused and elided with the different, and alienating processes of being online and observing destruction back home. This articulation sits within a particular network of power relations – not least the competing regulation of the German government and the digital platform company's algorithmic regulation of this refugee's digital experiences, with interviewees caught between the two.

There was a view among interviewees that Russian disinformation was widespread and was tilting public opinion away from supporting the war, with multiple interviewees raising this as a worsening issue. A Ukrainian activist at a Ukrainian-run NGO based in Berlin spoke of celebrating the appearance of Russian bots on a particular post. ‘Because it serves that we got to some point that we [have] achieved,’ she said, suggesting that if their posts touched a nerve, they would be attacked. ‘If is not important they will not be there’. Russia's ongoing disinformation campaign has been described by some as ‘the most amazing information warfare blitzkrieg we have ever seen in the history of information warfare’ (Vandiver, 2014: para. 3; see also: Mejias and Vokuev, 2017). These broader mediated political discourses had clearly shifted in the aftermath of the invasion from welcoming to ambivalence, which Ukrainians experienced as more ambivalent forms of solidarity in their everyday lives. This was often articulated as a sense of everyday emotional fatigue as they negotiated this struggle. Overall, then, this sense of emotional struggle is defined by them as one source of their fatigue: through competing and ambivalent forms of emotional recognition and misrecognition.

Articulated changes in rights

In terms of rights-based fatigue in relation to solidarity, I draw here on Honneth's (1995) second axis of recognition, ‘self-respect,’ resulting from legal recognition, or the ‘autonomous capacity to raise and defend claims discursively,’ thereby viewing oneself as worthy of the same status and treatment as everyone else, giving an individual ‘a symbolic means of expression [to] demonstrate that he or she is universally recognized as a morally responsible person’ (Sharp, 2024; Honneth, 1995: 120). Where this is lacking, or contested, or shifting through changes in solidarity, misrecognition may occur, I argue. In this section we will think about how such respect is offered in different ways, effectively comprising boundary work around national borders, regulating the terms of solidarity on offer. We will also see some of the ways in which Ukrainians negotiate such offers of support.

On the broadest level, legal recognition – and the legal possibilities of solidarity therein – was clearly administered by state actors. The European Union's (EU) Temporary Protection Directive, for instance, which was adopted by the European Council in March 2022, lists the rights of beneficiaries of temporary protection, including a residency permit, access to social and medical care along with access to employment for one to three years (European Commission, 2024). Yet clearly there were many Ukrainians who did not necessarily fall within this protection.

In Berlin, one interviewee with legal expertise from a self-organised community group felt keenly that at present her solidarity could be offered only to the limits of German legality. In the aftermath of the initial invasion she organised within her local neighborhood ‘the collecting of clothes and baby food and whatever people were willing to [give]. So all of a sudden, there was this momentum, and that creates a lot of energy, I think you feel you are being useful’. Two years later, she said she was often asked advice, ‘including questions, which I would say, are intended to bend the system completely,’ she said. ‘Like, I mean any post-Communist society struggles with people who bend the system, they get benefits, and then they’re working on the side and all these things. That's something I can’t help with…this kind of aiding and abetting something that's illegal’. So she did not define her experience of offering recognition as switching ‘on’ and ‘off’, so much as she chose to express it in ways that aligned with different values over time, normatively or otherwise.

One way of interpreting this is that the terms under which solidarity was offered changed over time through the imposition of a kind of associative solidarity with particular caveats – whereby solidarity is extended to members of a particular groups but not to others – that reproduce the boundaries around the German liberal nation-state (Straehle, 2020). The same interviewee discussed how they had changed from a benevolent position with few caveats – at the beginning of the crisis they were ‘very convinced of their unique value’. Now, alongside her unequivocal support for those in need, the interviewee spoke of her original benevolent position at points being taken advantage of – that she was being asked for ‘unnecessary luxuries’. But she also acknowledged that the overall volume of requests she was receiving has declined. It is perhaps indicative of selective solidarity (Ortiz, 2022), whereby preexisting values within a population may be used to justify providing support to some groups but refusing others (Lawlor and Tolley, 2017; Uhr et al., 2025).

As such, we might argue in this case that the legal boundaries of the German state are increasingly articulated to define the terms of solidarity being offered, and being received. Despite the offering of recognition around these boundaries, large numbers of Ukrainians do work in Berlin ‘illegally’. According to a one Yugoslavia-born cultural worker living in Berlin working for an organisation offering cultural residencies to Ukrainians in the city, there was a sense of principles of the German nation-state being tethered to employability within everyday communicative acts, a position which he opposed. ‘There's a lot of grey zones, you know,’ he said. ‘Where I go tomorrow and buy some vegetables from some Polish people…three Ukrainian girls are working there but I’m sure that they’re working on the black market. You know this is just helping them in some way’. There are currently around 12 million people living in Germany without German passports; 5.3 million have been doing so for over 10 years (Santos, 2024), though unsurprisingly no exact figures relating to so-called ‘illegal’ Ukrainian migrants exist in relation to the current conflict. As such, this recognition might form a regulating effect that provides the social and cultural context in which solidarity is able to occur, that intensifies over time (Sharp, 2024). In this sense, two dimensions of Honneth's framework are acting antagonistically – with legal respect regulating the sociocultural terms of solidarity on offer.

Lending credence to this argument, again, in Berlin, a German employee of an NGO supporting those going through the asylum system with frontline support, argued that Ukrainians were already privileged by the state in terms of their access to healthcare, accommodation and other social benefits (Senate Chancellory, 2024), compared to other forcibly displaced groups. However, he went on to say that despite their relative advantages, illegal Ukrainian migrants were still disadvantaged. ‘Most Ukrainian people in Germany do not have the kind of problems concerning residence permissions as most other people do,’ he said. ‘And therefore, we do not see them a lot’. Such Ukrainians benefit from legal rights not shared by those seeking asylum in Germany through other legal routes (Rock, 2025). So, building on the intensification of emotional fatigue associated with solidarity over time, we again see particular forms of legalistic misrecognition – whereby those with a clear human rights claim are legalistically excluded – reframing solidarity around deservedness. Again, this view sees these two dimensions of recognition as distinct but clearly overlapping and mutually informative. Here, solidarity is still articulated: yet it is manifested differently, over time, in ways that increasingly align with a normative conception of who is welcome.

This regulation happens within digitally mediated contexts. According to one Ukrainian communications officer at a Ukrainian-run activist organisation in Berlin, alongside their falling foul of Facebook's algorithm regarding the contents of their posts, which they said were disfavoured in terms of visibility, Meta's verification policies regulated Ukrainian activists in promoting their work. Currently in order to receive account verification, applicants must hold a relevant ID document from the country in which they wish to run ads (Meta, 2024); this causes complications for those in the course of applying for residency, say the Ukrainian members of activist groups interviewed.

While the use of media by activist groups has been well researched, particularly in their ability to coordinate protests (e.g., Cammaerts, 2015; Marino, 2024), and to encourage the construction of collective identity (Khazraee and Novak, 2018) there is very little research available about the regulating effects of verification among migrant activist groups. This lack of verification compounded the organisation's difficulty in corralling engagement over time, forcing them to assume more entrepreneurial approaches, as engagement declined. ‘It's not so huge as it was before,’ said the same activist, saying their Instagram account would attract 400,000 views per video at the beginning of the conflict. ‘Even without promotion or anything…now it's more like 30,000’. They now use named ‘ambassadors’ on the account – personalised mediated storytelling, by Ukrainians speaking to camera – as opposed to anonymous voices. Such approaches are redolent of the emergence of the Ukrainain influencers on TikTok, documenting their experience of becoming refugees (Marino, 2024). In these cases, solidarity is again regulated around the limits of the nation-state, with its terms negotiated in different ways over time. We might note here that solidarity manifested in such digital spaces over time privileges those best able to navigate the demands of algorithmically regulated platformisation, using entrepreneurial approaches. Honneth's conception must also account for the logics and values of the rapid, recent saturation of physical and social space with what Couldry (2024: 13) calls ‘new types of information flows’– content circulated by media institutions and audiences that regulate other solidarities in on- and offline spaces.

In Poland, where such entrepreneurial approaches were less obvious, NGOs widely criticised the kinds of governmental support they received at the beginning of the crisis, and these queries extended to questions around integration as the crisis progressed – this could be conceived in terms of impeding the opportunity to have rights recognised, in Honnethian structural terms. Multiple NGOs highlighted the need to learn lessons from the way the early crisis was handled by government. Polish NGO the Homo Faber Association in its 2022 report Lublin Social Committee to Aid Ukraine prepared a list of challenges facing NGOs working in Poland. These include the lack of accommodation, leading to potential homelessness, the risks of labour exploitation, and lack of support for integration of Ukrainian children into Polish schools (Dąbrowska, 2022).

As far as state management on various levels is considered, there is still a lack of systemic solutions and plans for the next months and years,’ reads the report. ‘We need to know how to properly respond to what happens in our country (Dąbrowska, 2022).

Through my interviews in Poland, there were also clear structural differences in rights to employment between Ukrainians and German and Polish nationals employed within institutions, which compounded rights-based misrecognition over time. One Polish employee of a museum in Warsaw spoke of Ukrainians who had received work within the organisation being ‘happy of how they are treated within the team,’ but also ‘there's one thing that is most problematic is that they didn’t get top contracts, they got [a] temporary contract, which means they are not totally included in all the procedures and they are not really employed full-time’. Such Ukrainian employees did not have the security or full support of human resources; such practices are ‘widespread’ within Polish institutions, said the interviewee. There is significant research on two-tier employment practices around refugees. Kamryn Warren writes of refugees resettled to the USA, who despite having strong language skills and employment experience, are fast-tracked by employment specialists into contingent, low-paid work (Warren, 2021). This has been less comprehensively considered within the cultural field, however, or indeed in relation to the current crisis.

As such, despite the legal frameworks in place, there are significant disparities in how rights are experienced and implemented and the effects this has on solidarity. In both Germany and Poland, there are issues such as illegal employment, lack of full-time contracts, inadequate support for integration, and the legal regulation of digital platform audiences, meaning that solidarity is articulated increasingly around normative borders in on- and offline spaces as the conflict has worn on. These structural issues highlight the gap between legal rights and their practical contestation, compounding the complexity of misrecognition – and the difficulty of solidarity – expressed over time.

Solidarity fatigue as articulated through ‘ways of life’

Thirdly and finally, I return now to Honneth's definition of solidarity through recognition as ‘an interactive relationship in which subjects mutually sympathise with their various different ways of life because, among themselves, they esteem each other symmetrically’ as defined in full above (Honneth, 1995: 128). The examples cited in the following section seek to highlight the tensions inherent in the offer of solidarity through the negotiation of different values, held in different kinds of esteem – as part of a negotiation around values between those offering solidarity and those receiving it, as part of an ongoing struggle. As such, my specific interest here is how sympathy in these ‘ways of life’ might be perceived to have changed over time – specifically in terms of a negotiation around values between solidarity actors, as socioculturally conceived. These expressions were revealed to Ukrainian interviewees in everyday moments – in their consumption of social and institutional media, for instance, and within the course of their employ.

One female Ukrainian graduate who works within an activist group in Berlin and at a German cultural institution spoke of ‘high emotional energy’ propelling support in the months after the full-scale invasion that drew on broader political discourses aligning German and Ukrainian liberal values, but ultimately she felt that liberal political rhetoric regulated the social context in which solidarity could take place. ‘You also need to kind of give space to the people who are under the threat so that they will say exactly what they need,’ she said. ‘Then it's not like praising yourself, because you’re helping’. Her view was that mainstream political media discourse had become self-serving, as opposed to asking Ukrainians what they needed to properly thrive in the longer-term, a view that was widely echoed across those interviewed. Perhaps unsurprisingly, German and Polish politicians’ discourses of welcoming were sometimes viewed with cynicism among those interviewed, by Ukrainians, Poles and Germans alike. For instance, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz's frequent reassurances and celebration of solidarity with Ukraine, and Germany's relatively liberal view towards refugees in the previous 10 years, should be viewed broadly in light of this (Grieshaber, 2023).

Another Ukrainian activist in Poland who had worked with a national institution on a long-term co-produced project, spoke of disillusionment regarding cultural institutions’ bureaucracy, which she felt worked mainly on the liberal solidaristic terms of the institution. ‘There was a lot of negotiating, and a lot of emotional work to explain why we needed the space,’ she said. ‘And you tell this to one person, that goes to all the other levels, and yet everything is being calculated [in terms of] what they can get from this’. The project in question was an award-winning example of a solidarity initiative within a national Polish museum; yet over time its key participants felt their decision-making became waylaid by institutional bureaucracy. So it is clear, as in Germany, that longer term recognition within organisations offering solidarity – whether media platforms, or cultural organisations – are often beholden to the terms of those institutions, leading to misrecognition of the actors involved.

Socially, the institutional terms of this recognition can often be rearticulated in everyday spaces. One Polish activist in Warsaw compared the performative social benefit of helping Ukrainians to the stigmatisation she experienced socially with acquaintances when she communicated helping refugees who had arrived via Belarus – hailing originally from countries including Syria or Iraq. In short, there was a performative social benefit in helping white migrants as opposed to migrants of colour. She attributed this to the approach of the previous government, in power while serious human abuses were meted out to migrants by Polish Border Guards (Gall, 2024). ‘I was just speaking with parents in my kindergarten,’ she said. ‘And it was like, you know, I was telling them [about her work with refugees from the Middle East arriving via Belarus], and they were telling me…why are you doing it? You know, what [does it give] you to support those people?’ In other words, she experienced what she saw as a social benefit to helping Ukrainians that did not extend to helping other migrants, including migrants of colour, for which she experienced an everyday social cost. In this way, the regulation of solidarity occurred in multiple contexts beyond institutions, regulated by mainstream political discourse. The fact that in such a context, normative forms of solidarity may contain racialised undertones and be so vulnerable to the bordering regimes of nationalistic governments – and the fact that such normative values can be so quickly in flux – further complicates Honneth's theory of reciprocal recognition through esteem.

Within the context of Poland's shared history with Ukraine, Polish interviewees also discussed changing media narratives over time in Poland resulting from the war's effects; most notably, the Polish farmers’ protests in 2024 against the European Green Deal and the import of grain from Ukraine; tabloid rumours alongside widespread disinformation circulating online – including the claim that the farmer's protests were financed by Russia – fermented dissent.

Beyond this, in Poland, one Ukrainian woman working at a museum in Opole, southern Poland in the aftermath of the full-scale invasion spoke of a hardening towards her due to ‘social media propaganda’ aiming to highlight the economic cost of recent Ukrainians migrants in Poland, alongside negative stories in the press around so-called ‘open borders’ between Poland and Ukraine. The interviewee discussed disinformation circulating online of images depicting Ukraine seemingly unaffected by the war, as well as increased political agitation relating to purported tax burdens caused by pressures placed on Poland's social infrastructure, alongside Ukrainian corruption. Some Polish media reports claim bribes are securing safe passage to Poland, as well as reports that some customs agencies are registering commercial goods vehicles as part of humanitarian convoys (Sieradzka, 2023), with these reports circulating widely on social media. Such an example highlights how emotional, legal and sociocultural dimensions of misrecognition might further intertwine and interrelate across multiple dimensions, changing over time.

Conclusion

In this paper, we have seen how solidarity as expressed through recognition and misrecognition is complex and multifaceted in the way it is discursively rearticulated over time, via the logics of platformised capitalism. We first considered recognition in relation to emotional fatigue, before looking at legalistic and values-oriented struggles and their different expressions. These related variously to burnout, everyday misrecognition and performative refugeeness; legalistic misrecognition relating to digital rights, employment and rights to asylum and their associated shifts, as well as the changing terms by which recognition was offered as solidarity expressed through different values.

Instead of being viewed discretely, Honneth's three-pronged conceptualisation should be understood as acting in overlapping and antagonistic ways: through, for example, the emotional tensions inherent in recognition in the context of displacement, the inveigling of rights-based forms of recognition into solidaristic acts, and the highly changeable nature of solidarity in fast-changing political contexts. Crucially, the saturation of physical and social space with what Couldry (2024: 13) calls ‘new types of information flows’ regulates widespread ambivalent recognition through digital mediation and platformised capitalism, despite the new sites for solidaristic regulation and struggle found within it.

The fluctuating nature of recognition, driven by internal and external pressures, reveals the delicate balance between empathy, legal obligations, and the broader societal willingness to share solidarity during prolonged crises. By examining these shifts through an interlocking framework, this study provides evidence for the conditions necessary for long-term solidarity: legalistic recognition as pivotally centralised, a broader politics of emotional care, sustained articulations of interrelating values, and a heightened awareness of the threat of misrecognition over time becoming more salient as impacts accrue, especially within the urgency of the ongoing war.