Mapping Resilience at Times of Crisis: Practices and Forms of Solidarity in Switzerland

Since 2008 European individuals and civil society have faced an endurance test due to the harshness of the economic and social policies. These policies have challenged people's capacity to absorb and to rebound from the heavy losses suffered in income, jobs and social services. In this context, the paper aims to explore how within Switzerland people have responded to the crisis in terms of solidarity. For this purpose, solidarity is conceived as a form of resilience at the intersection of the private and public spheres, where citizens unfold initiatives and cooperation networks amongst civil society actors (e.g., NGOs, churches, welfare associations, or public authorities) to give response to basic needs and to cope with the state services absence. Through a comparative perspective between three vulnerable groups (people with disability, immigrants, and unemployed people), the paper will first map solidarity practices and forms as action cases. Then it will apply descriptive statistics to portray the major socio-economic characteristics of the groups involved in solidarity action cases, their networks, resources, practices, and forms of solidarity promoted. Finally, it will confront the solidarity action cases mapping against standard Euclidean cartography (density maps, urban-rural maps, and political-territorial maps) to explore how place-based differentials might shape solidarity action cases, solidarity networks within trans-frontier zones, and impact the scale of the solidarity practices and forms.