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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.