Paper short abstract

Based on ethnography from the Austria-Slovenia-Hungary border region, this paper examines homogenizing tendencies in socially diverse rural contexts. It analyzes the interplay of actors with nativist and cosmopolitan positions, whose strategies punctually converge, shaping regional development.

Paper long abstract

The paper discusses the case of Jennersdorf, a locality in southeastern Austria bordering Hungary and Slovenia, focusing on tensions between local populist movements and the cosmopolitan, cross-border character of the region. The rural area lies away from main connectivity axes, suffering from population decline and outmigration. Populist parties dominate at local level, promoting an anti-EU discourse with nativist elements, reflecting the “left-behind” discontent described in literature on so called “left behind places” in Europe (Rodríguez-Pose 2018, MacKinnon et al. 2022). At the same time, strong cross-border ties exist, and political actors call for the region to be recognized as a cross-border, cosmopolitan Central European space.

Based on ethnographic material collected as part of the EU-Horizon project EXIT, the paper examines the tension between homogenizing tendencies and existing socially diverse contexts in rural places, a dynamic often overlooked in debates on rural areas described as “left behind”. It analyzes the surprising interplay between actors holding seemingly opposing positions, particularly regarding the tension between nativism and cosmopolitanism, whose local strategies may nonetheless converge. These actors include local populist politicians, civil society organizations, and neighborhood initiatives, often led and carried out by women. The paper further explores how nativist claims in this interplay are simultaneously contested and implicitly normalized, shaping the region’s development in contradictory ways.

Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic material and 65 semi-structured interviews with (return) migrants and their descendants in rural Austria and Poland, this paper examines the emergence as well as migrantisation of anti-cosmopolitan narratives, that are also used to justify the choice to live in rural regions.

Paper long abstract

While rural areas are often studied as sites of nativist friction, our paper examines how (return) migrants residing in these “places that don’t matter” envision diverse metropolitan areas they have left behind, or never lived in. Drawing on case studies from the Horizon project “Premium_EU”, our research addresses urban-rural polarisation by examining the migrantisation of anti-urban narratives. Most notably, our interlocutors - migrants from Turkey in rural Austria and Polish returnees from Western EU countries - often describe Western metropolises as dystopian, dangerous, and overly diverse, using this critique to justify their choice to live in rural regions. Hereby, the following question guides our argumentation: How do migrants in remote areas in Poland and Austria make sense of metropolitan centers and what role do anti-diversity narratives play in rural place-making and belonging?

Based on ethnographic fieldwork and 65 qualitative, semi-structured interviews with (return) migrants and their descendants, we first trace the emergence of anti-diversity narratives within a rightwing populist context in Austria and Poland. We then relate these narratives to the biographies and migratory experiences of our participants, examining how they adopt nativist-coded distinctions between a (homogenous) rural area and a (diverse) Western metropolis. By comparing our fieldwork in the Global West (Austria) and the Global East (Poland), we challenge the dichotomy between cosmopolitanism and nativism. Ultimately, our aim is to contribute to the exploration of multipolar politics in rural areas by showing how belonging and non-belonging are negotiated through the rejection of urban cosmopolitanism in European peripheral regions.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how young people in the Guatemalan diaspora in southern Mexico negotiate belonging through inherited refugee histories while aspiring to mobile futures beyond rural life. It explores tensions between collective memory, fragmented present-day community relations, and mobility.

Paper long abstract

This paper discusses how young people in the Guatemalan diaspora in Southern Mexico negotiate belonging against the backdrop of inherited stories from their families’ refugee pasts while aspiring to futures predicated on the promises of mobility. La Gloria is a town in the rural borderlands of Mexico’s South, founded by Akateko-speaking refugees from Guatemala in the 1980s. My interlocutors are part of successive generations that were born and raised in the 2000’s. Their relationship to the Guatemalan civil war and the re-building of Akateko communities in Chiapas takes place through inherited stories and collective memory. These young people mobilise the unity of their parents’ and grandparents’ narratives from the past when confronting a present characterised by economic, religious, political and generational divisions. They experience contemporary community relations as fragmented and appeal to a sense of ethno-linguistic (Akateko) and local unity of a time that predates their own birth. At the same time, young people aspire to futures that lay elsewhere and leave rural life behind in exchange for the cosmopolitan promises of modernity in El Norte. The paper will explore these productive tensions of (un)belonging and im/mobility in relation to how rural and indigenous identities are negotiated by young people in these volatile settings. The paper will further put these in conversation with wider changes and movements that have characterised the region in recent years; namely the Central American migrant caravans, the escalating cartel violence in the border region and the intensification of the US immigration regime.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines environmental anti-cosmopolitanism in Austrian Alpine communities, showing how nativist ideas of non-human belonging shape resistance to rewilding and conservation policies.

Paper long abstract

Rural responses to environmental governance are often framed through a moral opposition between progressive ecological concern and reactionary resistance. Drawing on ethnographic research in Austrian Alpine communities, this paper complicates such binaries by examining forms of environmental anti-cosmopolitanism that target not human Others but non-human ones. I explore how opposition to rewilding, habitat restoration, and species protection is articulated through nativist ideas of ecological belonging, in which particular landscapes, animals, and modes of land use are understood as autochthonous, while others are framed as foreign, invasive, or imposed from elsewhere.

Situated at the frontline of climate change, Alpine environments have become symbolic and material battlegrounds where broader anxieties about globalization, expertise, and political legitimacy are negotiated. The paper will show that local resistance to conservation policies is not only a reaction to specific measures, but also to the perceived cosmopolitanism of environmental science, transnational institutions, and abstract planetary futures. These dynamics have intensified in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, which deepened mistrust toward expert knowledge and sharpened rural-urban divides.

By focusing on everyday practices of environmental knowledge-making, this paper traces how alternative ecological interpretations circulate, gain authority, and produce polarized understandings of nature, belonging, and responsibility. It will suggest that attending to non-human nativism highlights how rural politics of (un)belonging extend beyond human communities to landscapes and species, revealing the multipolar character of rural politics and the ambivalent entanglements of nativism and cosmopolitanism in contemporary environmental governance.

Paper short abstract

Based on ethnography in rural Italy, this paper examines how living with the Marsican brown bear reshapes local conflicts over belonging. The relationship between humans and bears unsettles oppositions between nativism and cosmopolitanism giving rise to new forms of multispecies community.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in the Marsica area (Abruzzo, Italy), this paper explores how human/nonhuman relations complicate polarized politics of belonging in rural places. Focusing on the endangered “native” subspecies of Marsican brown bear (Ursus arctos marsicanus), it examines how residents, conservationists, and institutions negotiate competing claims of autochthony, care, and exclusion through a nonhuman figure that is at once deeply local and profoundly invested with translocal representations.

The bear is widely framed as an indigenous presence and mobilized as a marker of territorial authenticity and ecological continuity. Simultaneously, it is embedded in transnational conservation regimes, EU biodiversity policies, scientific monitoring networks, and global environmental imaginaries. Through everyday encounters, conflicts, and original practices of coexistence, rural actors articulate forms of belonging that exceed the neat opposition between nativism and cosmopolitanism. Rather than expressing either closed nativist territorialism or liberal openness, these practices reveal a relational politics grounded in a human-nonhuman communitas.

By approaching rural politics of (un)belonging through an ecoanthropological lens, the paper argues that nonhuman beings can function as mediators of polarized rural imaginaries, unsettling anthropocentric assumptions about who belongs and on what grounds. In doing so, it contributes to debates on rural marginality, autochthony, and cosmopolitanism by showing how global connections and local attachments are not opposing forces but are co-produced in everyday multispecies worlds. The case of the bear highlights how rural places are not merely sites of political polarization, but laboratories for alternative - though fragile - forms of belonging in a polarized world.

Paper short abstract

This paper analyzes everyday resistance to COVID-19 governance in rural Switzerland. Using ethnographic methods, it seeks to understand how non-compliance emerged without mobilization and, accordingly, how a locally sedimented common sense gave shape to a reactionary practice movement from below.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines everyday resistance to COVID-19 governance in rural Switzerland beyond protests and referenda. The pandemic governance met with staunch everyday resistance some local contexts. Drawing on a comparative ethnographic study of two rural alpine municipalities, the paper addresses the puzzle of how collective action can emerge in the absence of formal mobilization efforts or movement organizations.

Building on James C. Scott’s concept of everyday resistance, I conceptualize these practices as Contentious Non-Compliance: patterned yet informally coordinated acts of rule-breaking that are neither spontaneous deviance nor orchestrated protest. To explain their coordination, the paper turns to Antonio Gramsci’s notion of common sense as a pre-reflexive, historically sedimented ensemble of moral intuitions and epistemic heuristics. I argue that locally embedded forms of Common Sense provided the normative foundation that rendered non-compliance intuitive, legitimate, and collectively acknowledged in some local contexts.

Empirically, the analysis contrasts a municipality marked by intense non-compliance with one where pandemic measures were followed despite similar structural circumstances. The divergence is traced to differences in local moral economies shaped by long-term neoliberal transformation of the countryside, including the erosion of productivist livelihoods, growing dependency, and sovereigntist imaginaries of autonomy. The findings show that reactionary mobilisation is not only imposed from above but can be built from below through the reactivation of vernacular ideological elements in moments of crisis. By foregrounding the normative infrastructures of contention, the paper contributes to debates on everyday politics, rural transformation, and the social foundations of right-wing mobilisation.

Paper short abstract

This research seeks to complicate understandings of rurality as marginalization by analysing the ideology and practice of sovereign citizens through the lens of nativism, proposing to theorize sovereignism as privilege along four different axes shaped by nativism.

Paper long abstract

Since the pandemic, the phenomenon of ‘sovereign citizens’ has gained both popularity and attention worldwide. Depending on national contexts, the terms used to describe the phenomenon include Staatsverweigerer, Reichsbürger, Selbstverwalter, sovereign citizens, or freemen. For various reasons and with different justifications – for example, with reference to earlier forms of state government, conspiracy theories, international law, pseudo-law or natural law – sovereign citizens reject the existence and legitimacy of the state, democracy and the legal order. This research draws on qualitative fieldwork among sovereign citizens and state authorities in Switzerland and in the Netherlands to challenge often prevalent victim/villain narratives and tendencies of criminalization, victimization or pathologization of the phenomenon in the literature and in public discourse. The analysis of sovereignism through the lens of nativism complicates the understanding of rurality as marginalization or deprivation (only) by theorizing sovereignism as privilege instead. The contribution introduces sovereignism as practice and ideology since the pandemic, the reactions by politicians and state authorities, and the profile, arguments and social networks of the scene. The subsequent analysis illustrates the extent to which sovereign citizens often act from a social position of relative privilege. This sovereignism as privilege is analysed along four different axes, all shaped by nativism: privileged positionalities (e.g. race, class, gender), privileged state presence/absence, privileged state response, privileged utopias. In conclusion, I reflect on what an understanding of sovereignism as privilege entails for our thinking about rurality and nativism.

Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic research, this contribution examines migration and rural belonging, complicating the distinction between nativism and cosmopolitanism in everyday boundary-drawing in villages east and west of the former inner-German border.

Paper long abstract

Based on an ethnographic study in four villages along the former inner-German border, this article examines patterns of migration and social boundary-drawing processes through which rural belonging is negotiated. Following German reunification, these villages—often framed as marginalized places “that don’t matter”—experienced both outmigration and diverse forms of in-migration.

The article asks which social distinctions currently structure everyday life in these villages and analyses the moral orders underpinning practices of inclusion and exclusion. It approaches nativism and cosmopolitanism not as opposing positions, but as relational and situational logics of belonging. I argue that in villages west of the former border, historically rooted distinctions between long-established residents and newcomers remain central, while “East” and “West” have largely lost their relevance as categories. Since the 1990s, newcomers from urban backgrounds seeking to realise alternative lifestyles can be understood as engaging in forms of everyday cosmopolitanism that partly clash with established village norms, producing experiences of non-acceptance. Other newcomers, including those with an East German background, become recognised as local bridge figures through sustained engagement.

In villages east of the former border, in-migration remains more limited and access to housing is largely reserved for local families, including returnees. While East–West distinctions remain more pronounced, locally grounded forms of nativism coexist with integrative practices, enabling newcomers to become part of village life when they adhere to established communal rules. Across both contexts, the article shows how nativism and cosmopolitanism shape the multipolar politics of rural belonging in contemporary Germany.

Paper short abstract

Satellite bases contributing to planetary surveillance are commonly found in remote places. This paper explores the politics of the planetary rural through the solidarities that arise between those locally displaced and distantly surveilled, focusing on activism at Pine Gap in central Australia.

Paper long abstract

Remoteness is produced, not discovered (Ronström 2021). As such, remote places can be understood in terms of the presence of infrastructures around which remoteness is strategically maintained, not just as spaces of absence. Such sites. including signals intelligence bases, Earth stations, and launch sites, contribute to increasingly interlinked planetary surveillance and high-tech militarism. Their installation in locations optimized against various kinds of interference, moreover, requires the disruption of rural placeways, and in some cases, displacement of rural populations. This paper explores the insurgent rural socialities that arise against and in spite of such multiply-entangled facilities, drawing on digital ethnography and interviews with members of a settler-diasporic-indigenous coalition organizing against the Pine Gap intelligence facility in central Australia.

Pine Gap was constructed in 1966 without any consultation from local Arrernte communities, rupturing their access to important sites around a place known as Quiurnpa. It has become a critical node in the Five Eyes global intelligence infrastructure, using geosynchronous satellites to intercept vast amounts of data. Today, its surveillance of the occupied Palestinian territories is made available to the Israeli military, abetting their continuing genocide. In this paper, I first outline the contours of solidarity emerging against the base’s multiple complicities, illustrating a hybrid movement that resists binaristic constructions of cosmopolitanism / nativism. I next unpack the implications thereof on a politics of the “planetary rural” (Wang, Maye, & Woods 2023) which complicates the “frontier imaginings” (Prout & Howitt 2009) of remote places in settler states.