“It’s Your Business and My Business. It’s Our Business”—Making Solidarities with Palestine Work Among European Muslims

This essay explores how solidarity with Palestine is made to work among Muslims in Europe today. It investigates not just the ethical intentions behind solidarity, but the ways in which it is structured, enabled, and constrained. Drawing on Mitchell Dean’s analytics of governmentality and the different dimensions he proposes for analysis, I argue that solidarity is not merely a gesture of empathy or opposition, but a form of conduct—one that operates through particular regimes of visibility, knowledge and rationality, action repertoires, and subject-formation, shaping the terms through which ordinary people can speak, act, and protest. By mapping a variety of manifestations of solidarity and contestations that result from it, I show how solidarity emerges through negotiation with local political cultures, legal regimes, geopolitics, and within racialised logics of suspicion. This framework allows us to move beyond questions of who stands with whom, and instead ask: under what conditions is solidarity possible? What makes it credible, dangerous, or illegible? And how does it reshape those who engage in it?