The current arrival of refugees has led to highly contentious debates about solidarity towards refugees and joint burden sharing across Europe. Despite the issue’s international dimension, many EU countries were hesitant to participate in joint problem solving and opted for national responses to the new challenges. In many cases, this also meant that domestic asylum policies were increasingly tightened in recent months. Yet, in contrast to these political reactions, the past year was also characterised by an unprecedented emergence of transnational civic engagement, protest movements and other acts of solidarity with asylum seekers in different European countries. This involved solidarity campaigns of established civil society organisations as well as alternative grassroots initiatives and novel forms of civic activism. For this trend, Germany is a particularly emblematic case. Against this backdrop, this paper aims to elucidate the various forms of transnational solidarity towards refugees and shed light on innovative and good practice examples in Germany. To this purpose, findings of the TransSOL project will be used. To start with, the paper will provide a detailed picture of civic transnational solidarity initiatives in support of refugees, which is gained from an action case analysis of selected websites. Moreover, it will present and discuss findings of an online survey and face-to-face interviews with activists and beneficiaries, thus contributing to an enhanced understanding of the objectives, claims, strategies, practices and conditions of civic transnational solidarity in the field.
