Governing by gifts: charity-dependency nexus in Lithuanian food aid and Polish-Lithuanian transborder ‘Kresy’ support

The article examines contemporary practices of charity through an anthropological lens on gift-giving. Drawing on ethnographic data from two contexts – a Lithuanian urban food charity NGO and Polish charitable initiatives for the Polish minority in Lithuania – it argues that charitable giving operates not only as a redistribution of goods and an expression of solidarity, but also as a mechanism producing relations of dependency, moral hierarchies, and collective identities. We propose the concept of the 'charity-dependency nexus' to capture durable arrangements in which material transfers, institutional practices, moral expectations, and symbolic categories combine to sustain obligation and dependency. Crucially, these relations can persist even after the material need that justified assistance has receded: giving may continue as a symbolic, institutionalized practice, while recipients remain bound by expectations of gratitude, loyalty, and deservingness. Together, the two cases show how the charity-dependency nexus functions as an infrastructure of conditional cohesion, producing social bonds through moral obligation and ritualized exchange rather than equal rights, stable services, or participatory governance. The findings call for a critical rethinking of charity as a dominant mode of solidarity, pointing towards frameworks grounded in rights, co-decision, and recognition to foster more equal, emancipatory forms of support.