Project Outline

A new global moment of societal disruption today is fueled by an outburst of rural-based political expressions across the world (Mamonova & Franquesa, 2020). This diverse set of political upheaval – from the ‘Gilet Jaunes’ in France to farmers protest in India to new forms of armed mobilization in the US – is surprisingly persistent and characterized by a deep-seated discontent in relation to the economy, democracy, government and the state.

Over the past decades, economic growth has mainly been concentrated in urban regions characterized by competitive knowledge economies and service sectors with rural regions and small towns being and feeling left behind (Giulluy 2019). The ‘urban bias’ within modernist developmental approaches has reinforced this trend globally. Additionally, many rural places have witnessed cuts in state services and subsidies, rising under- and unemployment, deepening inequality and increasingly precarious livelihoods (Burdick et al., 2009; Horton, 2013; Weyland, 2004).

The failure of neoliberal regimes in alleviating poverty, in guaranteeing equal access to the benefits of modernization, and in providing citizens a sense of belonging, combined with the bleak prospects of climate change are profoundly affecting the functioning of our political systems. These dynamics today produce large-scale and widespread discontent that is most profoundly articulated within rural regions (Deppisch et al., 2021; Jodhka, 2021; Baviskar and Levien, 2021), feeding into a surge of new and ruralised forms of populism and contention.

This call for PhD proposals invites studies that critically investigate rural populist responses to global disruption. It mobilizes the concept of rural radicalism (Weiss 1967) as a way to capture the multiple expressions of rural discontent. Rural radicalism is both theoretically and conceptually an innovative way to capture the formation, narratives, strategies and effects of diverse forms of emerging rural (violent as well as non-violent) counter-publics. What is new to the contemporary global upheaval of rural radicalism is that these emerging rural counter-publics are often prompted by a fundamental refusal of and antagonism towards the state.

With this call, we invite research proposals that are centered, amongst others, around the following questions:

 

  • What forms of contentious and violent politics are deployed by rural populist counter publics?
  • What type of material conditions, social constellations and information flows inform the past as well as present relationships between rural discontent and rural radicalism?
  • How does rural discontent determine participation in agrarian movements and to what degree are rural subjects informed and driven by either material conditions and/or ideological subjectivation?
  • How do different rural radicalisms relate to the state and what is the role of (party) political dynamics in engaging rural communities in a favorable or hostile perception towards ‘the political’ in general?
  • What role do transnational populist narratives of counter-politics play in global forms of rural radical mobilisation?
  • What forms of individual as well as collective political agency are being produced through contemporary manifestations of rural radicalism?