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Rural Citizenship
Richard Yarwood
Plymouth University, UK
ryarwood@plymouth.ac.uk
Word Count 3,882
Abstract [Abstract should be 50- to 150-words.]
Citizenship, like rurality, is a highly contested term. Yet emerging research has suggested that
distinctive forms of citizenship are becoming associated with the global countryside. This
chapter examines the significance of citizenship to rural geography and how understandings of
rurality contribute to our knowledge of citizenship. It explores how rural citizenship is imagined,
performed and contested in different spatial settings, from local villages to transnational rural
communities. It explores how the language of rights and duties has been applied to rural areas.
The chapter concludes by examining the significance of rural activism in developing new forms
of transnational citizenship.
Main Text
Rural Citizenship
“It's up to you. Which will it be
Good citizen or poor campesino?”
Fishing, Richard Shindell
Citizenship, like rurality, is a highly contested term. It has widely been used to describe a
person’s relationship with a nation-state and, in particular, the rights and duties that are
associated with it (Smith 2000). Of late, this idea has been challenged by geographers who have
pointed to the importance of spaces above and below the nation-state in the formation and
practice of citizenship (Desforges, Jones and Woods 2005, Yarwood 2014). The concept of
transnationalism, for example, recognizes that the practice of citizenship may cross national
boundaries and engage citizens with political and cultural processes at a global level. At the same
time, local spaces provide an important context for engagements such as voting in local
elections, writing to councilors, volunteering to provide local services, staging protests or simply
living out daily life as a citizen. Citizenship is therefore fluid and multi-scalar and much more
than just a person’s relationship with his or her nation-state. Anderson et al (2008) contend that:
“Citizenship is increasingly organized and contested through a variety of non-state as
well as state institutions. This extends citizenship in the cultural sphere, to describe
people’s senses of belonging in relation to places and people, near and far; senses of
responsibility for the ways in which these relations are shaped; and a sense of how
individual and collective action helps to shape the world in which we live.”
Investigations of citizenship have tended to focus on urban areas, perhaps reflecting that its
etymology refers to the inhabitants of cities. Yet, emerging research has suggested that
distinctive forms of citizenship are becoming associated with the countryside and deserve closer
scrutiny.
It is widely acknowledged that rurality does not shape social relations per se. Distinct forms of
economic development and political conflict, together with different ways of imagining rural
space, influence how citizenship is imagined, contested and performed in rural places. Although
significant differences exist within and between rural spaces in the majority and minority world,
it is possible to discern a “global countryside” that has common characteristics (Woods 2011).
These include the presence of:
globalised commodity chains and agri-food systems;
the growth of transnational corporate investment and networks;
the supply and employment of migrant labour;
flows of global tourists;
non-national property investment;
the commodification of nature;
large-scale exploitation of primary resources;
social polarization;
new sites of political authority;
political contest.
Halfacree (2007) argues that rural space has three facets. It is simultaneously a locality that
reflects the outcome of productive and consumptive economic activities; it is represented, for
example through the much contested the rural idyll; and something that is played out and given
meaning through the performance of everyday lives. Significantly, political contest means that
these three elements do not always sit easily with one another meaning that rural space may be
disjointed or chaotic in nature. These three aspects of rurality have the potential to shape, and be
shaped by, different practices of citizenship.
The Imagined Countryside and Citizenship
As Halfacree’s (2007) model recognizes, social constructions of rurality have significant
bearings on rural society. Hegemonic views of the countryside have been enrolled into
discourses of citizenship and national identity. Heritage and folk traditions have been
appropriated to evoke the idea that a nation is somehow more authentic if it has “rural roots”.
This is evident in museums that link imagined folk cultures with nationhood and in folk songs
that associate rural landscapes and people with national identity. In the UK, nature studies and
rural folk lore were used to instill a sense of national identity in the early 20th Century. By
contrast, those unable or unwilling to appreciate these hegemonic views of the countryside were
positioned as “anti-citizens”. The active exploration and understanding of the countryside was
seen as important in developing these forms of citizenship. In the 1930s, the Scottish Youth
Hostel Association sought to develop a sense of national identity by encouraging working class
youths to engage physically and bodily with the Highlands.
Indeed, the countryside has often been viewed as a training ground for citizenship. One
contemporary example is provided by The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, a voluntary scheme
undertaken by young people in Commonwealth countries. Participants are required to undertake
an “unaccompanied, self-reliant expedition with an agreed aim” in rural or “wild” setting. The
countryside is seen as a testing ground in which young people perform skills that are deemed to
make them good citizens, including team-working, leadership, self-sufficiency, fitness, enquiry,
resolve and confidence. Organisations such as the Scouts and the UK’s National Citizenship
Service also draw on rurality to test and shape future citizens through camps and residential
projects. The annual Ten Tors Challenge uses Dartmoor National Park (UK) to test skills
specifically by soldier-citizens (Yarwood 2014). Rural settings are seen to provide opportunities
for citizenship to be embodied and performed, although there is an expectation that the skills
learnt will then be applied in everyday (perhaps urban) settings.
These kinds of practices reproduce dominant views of the rurality and certain expectations of
citizenship. At the same time, hegemonic and conservative visions of the countryside combine to
exclude some groups of people from full participation in society. Thus, the discourses of heritage
and citizenship discussed above often imply a white history, contributing to a sense that rural
space is white space. Equally, indigenous people, such as Native Americans or Indigenous
Australians, are curiously absent from both the imagination and reality of rural space. Indeed,
Aboriginal Australians were not granted full citizenship until 1968 and, until then, were only
allowed limited access to rural towns.
Women are also expected to conform to particular gender roles, especially in farming; gay
people may hide their sexuality due to conservative values; racial and ethnic minorities may feel
isolated; nomadic lifestyles may be illegal; young people may be barred from public space; and
disabled groups may find it harder to access rural places. At the same time rural areas can also be
seen as a place to which ‘others’ can be banished: rural places have been used to house prisoners,
asylum seekers, the mentally ill or indigenous people, who are kept out of sight and mind in
remote reservations and institutions.
Although in many countries legislation has been enacted to ensure equality, there is often a gap
between de jure (legal) rights and whether these are manifest in daily life (de facto). Painter and
Philo (1995) state that if people cannot be present in public spaces without feeling “out of place”,
then it is hard for them to consider themselves full citizens at all. While these issues are not
confined to rural areas, they are nevertheless exacerbated in rural settings due to greater
visibility, the hegemonic imagination of rural space and a lack of support services. The following
section examines how the language of rights and duties has been deployed to understand and
resolve some of these issues.
Rural Localities, Rights and Duties
There are significant differences in the standard of living between urban and rural places.
According to the United Nations, 71.6% of rural people at a global scale live in extreme poverty,
including 1,801 billion who live lived below $2 a day and 1,010 million on below $1.25 a day. In
the USA, the most persistently poor counties are non-metropolitan; in Australia infant mortality
rates in remote communities (12 per 1,000) are significantly higher than in major metropolitan
areas (6 per 1,000) (Tonts and Larson 2002). Tonts and Larsen (2002, 135) frame the differences
between urban and rural areas in the language of human rights: “as governments withdraw, or
fail to provide, certain services and infrastructure the human rights of rural people are
diminished.” By implication, rural people are unable to achieve full citizenship as they are
unable to access the welfare rights afforded to their urban counterparts.
In some countries, this reflects a form of local rather than national citizenship (Smart and Smart
2001). In post-war China, for example, there was a formal divide between urban and rural hukou.
In the countryside welfare was place specific, whereas urban welfare was based on particular
enterprises. This has meant that citizens have only been access welfare in specific parts of the
country, limiting their ability to travel and seek work. Outside their home areas they have been
treated as ‘second class citizens’ and tolerated only if the state did not need to provide for them.
This has not only limited their ability to travel to urban areas but more prosperous rural ones too.
The situation is similar to the experiences of international migrants seeking work outside their
own country.
The example illustrates Cresswell’s (2009) assertion one has to be mobile to be a citizen. In the
West the development of national systems of welfare untied people from their home localities by
offering welfare based on universal rights rather than a reliance on local charity. Yet poor or
non-existent transport networks render many people living in rural areas, especially the old,
young, poor, disabled and women, into immobile, semi-citizens trapped by rural localities.
Cresswell (2009) argues that citizenship relies on “prosthetic” materials, such as shops, services,
employment and transport, to achieve full social and welfare rights. The daily trek for clean
water or the closure of a local post office suggests that many rural citizens lack the supports
needed to enable them to participate fully as citizens of their wider society.
There have been various efforts to develop rural places that have had important implications for
rural citizenship. Forms of endogenous development have been associated with the
‘modernisation’ of rural places. These include state-led (or quasi-autonomous) development
agencies that may not be directly accountable to local people as well as forms of private capital,
such food processing plants of global corporations, that are powerful by virtue of their position
as monopolistic employers. In terms of citizenship, exogenous development is frequently
associated with the imposition of new forms of political authority that cut across and restricts
existing networks of governance. These centre on economic productivity rather than social and
political equality, re-enforcing existing structures of inequality. Thus, efforts to modernize rural
China have improved per capita incomes and led to a boom in consumer spending but, at the
same time, have contributed to a growing gap between country and city.
In an effort to counter these effects, more endogenous forms of development have been
encouraged that rely on forms of ‘active citizenship’ that emphasize the duty of citizens to
contribute to their localities. Citizens are increasingly required to fill gaps left behind from the
neo-liberal roll-back of the state by, for example, running their own services and working as a
community to supplement state provision. There are three reasons why this form of development
has been favored in rural areas. First, rural areas have been more likely to suffer from the
withdrawal of the state services (witnessed by the decline and closure of public services) and are
therefore more likely to rely on citizen action to fill gaps in state provision. Second, there has
been a long-standing obligation, evidenced in many countryside policies, that rural areas should
provide their own needs. Examples include community-run shops, voluntary policing, locally
built housing and health care. Finally, rural areas are perhaps better placed to engage in this form
of local participation. The lowest tier of formal government, such as parish councils in England
or Maries in France, are found in rural places, perhaps offering greater opportunities for citizens
in rural areas to engage with government than their urban counterparts. Many rural policies have
encouraged partnership working between the state, private and voluntary sectors, offering further
opportunity for citizenship engagement in local decision making and action. The European
Union’s LEADER programme is one such example that has not only encouraged local action but
a form of transnational citizenship that links rural localities to other places in the wider EU
supra-state.
Yet, rural communities are far from autonomous and local action in them is usually scrutinized
and managed by government agencies, especially where it draws on state funding. Local
organisations act as a proxy for government and, rather than empowering communities, these
schemes simply aid the roll-back of the state.
Furthermore, the idea of community is frequently used to impose unity and obscure diversity
beneath a banner of communal identity. Notions of community can exclude as well as include
and often imply a rather bounded, insular view of rural space that seems oblivious to the
significance of outside connections. Often “community views” are those of the elite or wealthy:
powerful farming interests still dominate local politics in some places and in others the interests
of new rural elites are to the fore. In South Africa, McEwan (2005) has argued that established
gender roles made it difficult for women to participate in consultation exercises, rendering the
practice of citizenship “a meaningless concept”.
Marginal/Third Space
Although policies of active citizenship fail to transform the countryside profoundly, rural places
can offer space for new, more radical forms of citizenship to emerge. The imagined and literal
edges of rurality (Halfacree 2007) have provided spaces for new utopian communities to emerge
that are based on faith, gender, green politics, political extremism, nomadism or a desire to live
sustainably. These have their own forms of membership, structures of decision-making and, by
implication, forms of communitarian citizenship that seek to disengage their members from the
state. Although these groups strive towards new forms of citizenship, they are prone to
disintegration as a of result internal tensions or state legislation to counter them. As the following
section explores, people have been more successful when they have adopted transnational, rather
than isolationist, stances.
Transnational Ruralities
One of the characteristics of the global countryside has been a ‘depeasantisation’ of rural places
(Woods 2011) by neo-colonial, exogenous and exploitative forms transnational capitalism. This
has led to landlessness, loss of rights and the suppression of local cultures, contributing to
migration from rural places to urban ones or, more significantly, across borders to work (legally
or illegally) in spaces of primary production. At best, these denizen workers have few or little
rights and can be subject to exploitation or even slavery. Despite this, many countries have
focused on tightening their borders and placing ever more stringent requirements migrants who
have sought to gain citizenship
1
. Such actions remind us that de jure notions of citizenship are
still closely regulated by nation-states.
At the same time, transnational actions have been launched to support those marginalized by
global capitalism. The Fairtrade campaign emerged in the 1980s to connect Western, urban
consumers more closely with “distant”, “other” producers of food in the third world. The
movement seeks to develop non-exploitative trading relations by paying producers a guaranteed
price to ensure the sustainable production of crops as well as a social premium to be invested in
social, environmental and economic projects. By acting as “consumer-citizens”, those in the west
are encouraged to use their purchasing power not only to make personal ethical decisions but
also to support a politics of change. These types of transnational coalitions have the potential to
empower the most excluded rural citizens. Thus, co-operatives of female artisans have not only
used transnational opportunities to develop trade, but have provided an important and alternative
platform for local women’s voices.
“Depeasantisation” has also prompted local resistance and the emergence of transnational
networks aimed at empowering poor rural populations. In South America, peasant movements
have successfully mobilized indigenous identities to address common concerns. Building on
social networks left in place by prior rounds of political and religious organizing, indigenous
groups have used unions, churches, nongovernmental organizations and even state networks to
mobilize across communities in order to demand rights and resources (Yashar 1998). As well as
linking local sites of resistance, crucially networks have been used to foster transnational
support.
One of the most prolific have been the Zapatistas, a Mayan resistance movement from Chiapas,
Mexico that emerged in response to unfair trade, exogenous exploitation of resources and the
loss of power and land. The movement gained international support through the effective use of
the internet and collaboration with activists at a global scale. Another example is the Via
Campesina (International Peasant’s Movement), which was formed in Belgium in 1993 to defend
small-scale agriculture against corporate and transnational companies. It aims to bring together
‘peasants, small and medium-size farmers, landless people, women farmers, indigenous people,
migrants and agricultural workers from around the world’ and claims to have 164 organisations
1
The quote at the start of this chapter is from Richard Shindall’s song ‘fishing’ in which an illegal worker in the USA
is given a choice between informing on other migrants in exchange for citizenship or deportation and a return to
life as a poor campesino.
in 73 countries representing 200 million farmers. These forms of “New Social Movements” are
autonomous, pluralistic and transnational; occasionally crystallizing in particular (and often
urban) protest sites. Their actions represent a form of transnationalism that is concerned with
global rather than national citizenship.
Conclusions
This chapter has used the lens of citizenship to examine a range of actions in rural areas. Based
on this evidence it is possible to draw two broad conclusions. First, citizenship is beneficial to
rural studies and, second, better understandings of citizenship can be gained by a focus on rural
places.
Within rural geography, Paul Cloke (2006, 26) has argued that there is a need for “theoretical
hybridization which can combine, for example, the concerns of the cultural turn with those of
political and economic materialism”. Thinking more closely about rural citizenship is one way of
fulfilling this call. Citizenship is concerned with understanding how broader political structures
that shape, and are shaped, by wider changes in society. At the same time it is concerned with
individual identity and performance. It offers a chance to bridge the personal and performative
aspects of the cultural turn with the structural and institutional foci of political and social
geography within variously and fluid spaces and places. As Susan Smith (2000, 83) argues, the
concept of citizenship “marks a point of contact between social, cultural and political
geography.”
Whether there is a distinct form of rural citizenship is open to debate and reflects the way in
which rurality is conceptualized. Using Halfacree’s (2007) model, it can be seen that rural
localities have been subject to distinctive but differentiated forms of social, economic and
political restructuring that, on the one hand, are leading to a “global countryside” with common
characteristics but, on the other, are producing very different experiences of rurality.
Nevertheless, these wider structural change provide the context for citizenship action (or
inaction) in rural places. Social constructions of rurality have also been deployed to fix the
identity of and mobilize citizens, be it “country people” in the UK or landless campesinos in
South America. Thus people who consider themselves “rural people” may be coerced to engage
with a variety of issues and rights that are broadly associated with the countryside. Recognising
the diversity of identities and actions under the banner of ‘rural’ contributes to understandings of
citizenship as multi-layered and fluid. Rural citizenship is also performed in a variety of different
ways. These range from overtly political actions, perhaps campaigning for rural issues, to more
everyday performances required by rural citizens simply trying to live out their lives in rural
societies. Closer investigations of citizenship therefore have the potential to improve
understanding of rural areas.
A closer focus on rural places can benefit understandings of citizenship. Rural citizenship in the
west has often been associated with rather parochial concerns and small-scale disputes
concerning the impact of development on the rural setting (Woods 2011). Very often these
debates revolve around different ways in which rurality is represented (idyll or productivist work
place, for example) that in turn reflect changes in the social structure of a locality. Too often
rurality has been associated with “community” and, as a result, has been rather inward looking
and concerned only with local places.
Yet, as this chapter has shown, rurality in the developing world has the potential to frame more
radical transformative forms of citizenship. As the example of the Zapatistas shows, rural space,
often considered peripheral, offers a site for radical, transformative actions that have the
potential to ‘jump scales’ to impact on wider society. Transnational rural actions represent an
attempt to develop a global civic society and, with it, citizenry that challenge the conventional
association of citizenship with the nation-state. It is perhaps significant that campaigns such as
Fairtrade are rural campaigns, aimed at supporting and transforming the lives of people in rural
places. Although urban areas often provide the setting for rural protests (the Zapatistas for
example first occupied cities in Chiapas) it is from and within rural places that some of the
potentially most transformative citizen actions are occurring. Far from being peripheral to
citizenship, rural places have the potential to develop truly radical forms of citizenship.
SEE ALSO:
[Include cross-references here. See the cross-references list of other entries on the homepage of
ScholarOne.]
Citizenship; Environmental citizenship; Rural policy, politics and citizenship; Globalization and
Rural Areas; Rural Geography; Rural Society (in global north)
References
Anderson, Jon, Kye Askins, Ian Cook, Luke Desforges, James Evans, Maria Fannin, Duncan Fuller,
Helen Griffiths, David Lambert, Roger Lee, Julie MacLeavy, Lucy Mayblin, John Morgan,
Becky Payne, Jessica Pykett, David Roberts, and Tracey Skelton. 2008. “What is geography’s
contribution to making citizens?”. Geography, 93: 34-39.
Cloke, Paul. 2006. “Conceptualising Rurality”. In Handbook of Rural Studies edited by Paul Cloke, Mark
Goodwin and Patrick Mooney, 447-456 London: Sage.
Cresswell, Tim. 2009. “The prosthetic citizen: new geographies of citizenship.” Political Power and
Social Theory, 20: 259-273.
Desforges Luke, Rhys Jones and Michael Woods. 2005. “New geographies of citizenship.”Citizenship
Studies, 9: 439 - 451.
Halfacree, Keith. 2007. “Trial by space for a ‘radical rural’ introducing alternative localities,
representations and lives.” Journal of Rural Studies 23, 125-141
McEwan, Cheryl. 2005. “New spaces of citizenship? Rethinking gendered participation and
empowerment in South Africa.” Political Geography, 24, 969-991.
Painter, Joe and Chris Philo. 1995. “Spaces of citizenship: an introduction.” Political Geography, 14:
107-120.
Smart, Alan and Josephine Smart, 2001 Local citizenship: welfare reform urban/rural status, and
exclusion in China. Environment and Planning A 2001, 33, 1853-1869
Smith, Susan. 2000. “Citizenship”. In The Dictionary of Human Geography, 4th Edition. Edited by Ron
Johnston, Ken Gregory, Geraldine Pratt and Michael Watts, 83-83 Oxford: Blackwell.
Tonts, Matthew and Anne-Claire Larsen. 2002 “Rural disadvantage in Australia: a human rights
perspective.” Geography, 87: 132-141.
Woods, Michael. 2011. Rural London: Routledge
Yarwood, Richard. 2014. Citizenship London: Routledge
Yashar, Deborah. 1998. “Contesting Citizenship: Indigenous Movements and Democracy in
Latin America.” Comparative Politics, 31, 23-42
Further Readings
Cloke, Paul, Mark Goodwin and Patrick Mooney, eds. 2006. Handbook of Rural Studies London:
Sage.
Mills, Sarah. 2013. “An instruction in good citizenship’: scouting and the historical geographies
of citizenship education.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38, 120-
134
Cheshire, Linda and Michael Woods. 2009. “Citizenship and governmentality, rural”. In
International Encyclopedia of Human Geography edited by Rob Kitchen and Nigel
Thrift. London: Elsevier, 113-118
Key Words
Rural, citizenship, activism, national identity, nations and nation states, transnationalism, folk
practices, political geography, social geography, globalisation