Just sharing: The (potentially) radical politics of helping

Abstract

This article argues that compassionate helping has radical political potentials. Observing practices of assistance to and collaboration between newly arrived refugees and established citizens in what has been called the long summer of migration, I argue that hegemonic norms of in-group sharing gave way to cosmopolitan solidarity: When, in the face of the legal sources of inequity, inequality was re-politicised, claims to prerogative on the grounds of membership and merit were de-naturalised. This provided room for a novel understanding of rights to a share on the grounds of ‘presence’. While at first relying on actual physical presence, in the political theory I take from those practices, ‘presence’ means ‘connection’, constituted by the historical making of our respective life situations, and our contemporary implicated-ness in near and distant others’ lives. Such a political theory of sharing that arose from learning to help, while remaining a potentiality, pointed to the possibility of institutions of sharing adequate for the entangled nature of the contemporary world.