Governing space, constructing place: An ethnographic study of two towns governed by the Lega and Rassemblement national
通过比较意大利联盟党和法国国民联盟治理的两个城镇，研究民粹主义激进右翼政党如何利用地方身份和空间特征来强化民族主义主张，并揭示两种不同的地方排斥模式。
While the rise of the populist radical right (PRR) has been mainly analysed through the lens of ‘methodological nationalism’, this article contributes to the emergent ‘localist turn’ of the debate by examining how PRR parties symbolically and ideologically mobilise local identities. Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework that combines political sociology and geography, we investigate how PRR-led local governments transform spatial features into highly ideologised places, by rescaling and reinforcing nationalist claims. In a comparative ethnography of two medium-sized towns, governed by the Italian Lega and the French Rassemblement national, we adopt a space- and place-related approach. Two distinct modes of local exclusionism emerged: folkloric in the French case, and technical-bureaucratic in the Italian; this provides an effective approach for examining the parties’ patterns of power consolidation. Moreover, we underscore how these exclusionary dynamics, rooted in localism, are entangled with the role of space and place in re/producing bordering practices. While in the French case, ‘undesirable others’ are isolated mostly through ghettoisation, in the Italian case they are denied access to key sites of citizenship-building; yet, both strategies pursue exclusionary ends. This contribution argues that the spatialisation of discriminatory politics is a crucial, still underexplored, dimension of PRR, and one that also shapes the conditions for civic mobilisation and contention.