Around the world, armed conflict is increasingly occurring in capital cities and governments are relying on pro-government, rurally recruited, militia to suppress anti-government political violence. Pendle and Maror draw lessons from South Sudan where recruits from rural areas were brought to Juba to help defend the government. Drawing on ethnographic observations and qualitative interviews with combatants, this article uses “rural radicalism” to argue that patterns of violence by these rurally recruited forces were shaped by histories of rural violence over previous decades and can be read to include a political objective that challenges the inequities in safety and security between rural areas and the capital city.

This article analyzes a 2018 protest instigated by rural activists in northern Uganda, who chose to contest violent state-driven evictions by peacefully occupying a UN compound in the urban center of Gulu. With their contribution to this ASR forum on rural radicalism, Laing and Weschler argue that in militarized contexts such as Uganda, remote geographies present rural political actors pursuing radical goals with certain advantages but also unique challenges. The case they examine demonstrates the capacity of rural activists to draw on rural-urban ties and a tactic they have dubbed “third-party leverage” to imaginatively circumvent such constraints.

Studies of protest in contemporary Africa often fail to address three related dynamics. First, rural radicalism has long been more central to African political struggles, even urban ones, than is commonly recognized. Second, the ongoing transformation of rural political economies links them to those of urban areas and has changed struggles over land and resources. Finally, these changes have reduced the power of traditional authorities and increased the appeal of nonviolent protest, as well as shifting protest toward a more national mode in which rural populations are increasingly central. Mampilly elaborates on these propositions, which are derived from brief examinations of both historical and contemporary examples of rural protest across Africa, before applying them to a deep analysis of LUCHA, a social movement in the Democratic Republic of Congo.