This article examines coalition-building within Madrid's pro-Palestine movement since October 2023, shifting attention from cross-movement alliances to the endogenous dynamics that shape cooperation among solidarity actors. Drawing on 10 semi-structured interviews with key activists and organizers, we identify four intertwined obstacles to alliance formation: (1) path-dependent histories and social ties that reproduce long-standing factional boundaries; (2) ideological cleavages, especially around support for armed resistance; (3) strategic ambivalence towards engagement with parties and institutions; and (4) asymmetric repression and stigmatization that differentially target organizations and reconfigure incentives to collaborate. We also show how diaspora activists have acted as symbolic and relational brokers, creating 'spaces of pragmatic convergence' that enabled limited-purpose coordination (mass protests, cultural/pedagogical events) without forcing programmatic homogenization. We discuss implications for the durability and scope of coalitions in peace-movement settings and outline avenues for comparative research.
Political polarization about Muslim presence in Europe is fostering a discursive atmosphere that, when combined with social inequality and urban segmentation, places hybrid identities among the descendants of migrants under strain. This article engages with scholarship on Muslims in European cities to argue that identity hybridization constitutes the norm rather than an exception. It further identifies key strategies of religious reinterpretation through which such hybrid identities are articulated. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in two Spanish cities, the analysis examines how local configurations of symbolic and material polarization shape the expression of Muslim subjectivities. The comparison reveals that, while polarization in Ceuta gives rise to more constrained and distressed forms of identification, the comparatively less polarized context of Madrid allows for more confident and stable expressions of hybridity.
