Introduction -- Non-productive care at the borderlands (Sepetla Molapo, University of Pretoria) -- Constitut(ionalis)ing sovereign responsibility (Juergen Schraten, Justus Liebig University) -- Between universal humanism and the particularity of experience: Solidarity, sovereignty and their possible futures (Vito Laterza, University of Agder) -- Languaging solidarity in an undergraduate classroom (Vangile Bingma, University of Pretoria) -- The League of Commoners and economic solidarity in colonial Lesotho, 1910s-1950s (Sean Maliehe, National University of Lesotho) -- Landscapes of intergenerational solidarities and conflict in South Africa: Disjuncture, intimacy and the return of the Sovereign Pater (Detlev Krige, University of Pretoria) -- African personhood and its landscapes of solidarity (MphoTshivhase, University of Pretoria) -- ‘Unusual’ solidarities: South Africa’s social movements and the thornyissue of Palestinian Liberation (Maya Bhardwaj, University of Pretoria) -- Solidarity in a post-migrant society: A case of Germany (Farah Hasan, Institute of Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University Berlin) -- In search of a kingdom (Kereng Khotleng, University of the Witwatersrand) -- Conclusion.

This book offers an exploration of collective action by bringing together the themes of sovereignty and solidarity in post-colonial societies in Africa and beyond. It does so against a common tradition of writing about collective action that assumes an opposition between the state as a legal framework of unity and social movements that express the aspirations of marginalized people. The book’s examination of collective action resists this binary division. It states that sovereignty can be imagined beyond the confines of the law and consequently beyond the centrality of the state. Power therefore appears as a construct of forces and factors that signal or gesture to a complex but fascinating way of imagining collective action. These forces and factors open our eyes to the dynamics of life in post-colonial societies in ways that the understanding of sovereignty centred on law conceals. Brought into an intimacy with solidarity, sovereignty opens collective action to nuanced, complex and multiple configurations that surpass binary thinking. This is an innovative approach and of interest to students and scholars from across the social sciences.