Rural spaces are often portrayed as nostalgic idylls or strongholds of right-wing populism, obscuring their political creativity. Drawing on ethnographic research in Czechia’s Krkonoš mountains and rural Italy, this paper develops ‘quiet everyday resistance’ as an apolitical politics neither seeking recognition nor depending on explicit intent. Such resistance unfolds through ordinary practices of cultivation, cooking, repair, self-provisioning, and solidarity which quietly distance and deflect neoliberal demands. Bringing everyday resistance literature into conversation with post-socialist dissident and Daoist theories, we develop two entwined proactive logics – insulation and deflection – through which rural actors build autonomy and parallel structures within everyday life.
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Weldon et al. (2026) studied this question.