Glossary

Interscalarity, a concept from human and political geography, describes how deeply interconnected different geographical scales are: from the local, to the national, to the transnational. Standard units of analysis, for example, at the level of the state, or the region, or the city, are no longer sufficient to understand and explain political phenomena. Most political phenomena are no longer contained within the scale of choice and often have causes, manifestations, and consequences that are not geographically bounded to that specific unit.  

Rather than treating each scale as separate, or as ‘levels’ where one scale is stacked above another, interscalarity shows that these scales constantly shape each other and the political processes that occur across them. Politics is not contained within a fixed territorial unit (like the state) or a pre-determined level of analysis (be it local, national or transnational). Socio-spatial arrangements – where power and resources are accrued and deployed, who gets to do what where – are the object of political struggle. Thus, interscalarity shows how the lines between local, national, and transnational are blurred and contested, and points to a research agenda that looks at how this blurring and contesting takes place. 

For example, villagers protesting a gas pipeline or factory opening up in their locality might seem like a purely local dispute. But it is often a manifestation of a broader, interscalar struggle around environmental pollution and justice. International NGOs working for climate justice might draw on this local struggle to bolster their claims to international organisations like the United Nations, unsettling national governments and transnational corporations that stand to benefit from the gas pipeline or factory. In turn, the local movement might get bolstered by the support of the international NGO, forcing the national government to take note or triggering heightened repression.  

For more information on interscalarity, refer to Neil Brenner’s 2019 book, New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question. Saskia Sassen’s work on the global city and the global economy provides a powerful example of what an interscalar approach can do. 

Authoritarianism is not just something that each country experiences or addresses on its own. It is not neatly contained within state borders. The authoritarian ideas, antidemocratic institutions and practices, surveillance and information manipulation technologies, and anti-gender policies that shape contemporary authoritarianism are produced and spread through interactions and mutual influence among myriad state and non-state actors. These interactions blur the lines between the local, the national, and the transnational, shaping authoritarian ecosystems that are simultaneously embedded in specific contexts and thickly interconnected.  

For example, authoritarian governments increasingly use spyware to surveil journalists, activists, and political opponents within their territories. This technology is developed and sold through globalised commercial networks, shared between firms and governments across borders, and – in any given place – often built up piecemeal by public bodies and private actors. Once acquired, it creates a surveillance infrastructure that is used to monitor and repress local dissenters. The information gathered can then be used to justify further crackdowns and, pressure international critics into silence, be leveraged by private companies for profit, or be shared with allied governments facing similar movements elsewhere. 

Read our working paper to learn more about how our “interscalar authoritarianism” framework can help us understand the shifting new geographies of contemporary authoritarianism. 

Site-based research, an approach proposed by Thea Riofrancos (2021), studies a political phenomenon from the physical “sites” where it plays out. Traditionally, comparative research to understand a political phenomenon meant picking ‘cases’ at the same level, say two countries or two cities, treating them as separate and comparing them to find common patterns. Site-based research instead traces a single process as it moves across different levels, locations, and scales.   

For example, a site-based research project around the politics of the fast fashion industry wouldn’t just compare a factory in Vietnam to a factory in Bangladesh. Instead, it would follow the production of cheap and fast clothing as one connected process that might manifest in different forms across different sites: from a factory in Bangladesh, to the corporate headquarters of popular fashion brands, to the waste clothing dumps in places like Chile.  

Similarly, our site-based approach to authoritarianism and democratic resistance, starts from concrete locations to observe how authoritarian and democratic resistance ecosystems come together in specific places, observe them in action, and thus gain new insights on their complex geographies. 

For further reading on site-based research, look at Thea Riofrancos’ books, Resource Radicals: From Petro-nationalism to Post-extractivism in Ecuador (2020), Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism (2025), and her chapter in the anthology Rethinking Comparison (2021), ‘From Cases to Sites: Studying Global Processes in Comparative Politics.’ 

Democratic resistance has also had to emerge as a complex and dynamic process, in response to the myriad threats from authoritarian rise. RESISTANCE aims to show that democratic resistance should also be interscalar, mirroring the nature of contemporary authoritarianism.

Interscalar democratic resistance proposes that contemporary resistance must not only depend on unidirectional strategies, actors, or coalitions but rather develop tools to resist interwoven authoritarian influences. We map how non-state actors, such as activists, civil society organizations, journalists, or human rights practitioners, and state actors, such as the judiciary or policymakers, creatively navigate, challenge, and shape pushback against interscalar authoritarian advance.

In particular, we attend to the geographies of resistance: how forms of resistance might travel across contexts, how actors might build coalitions that link local struggles to national and transnational arenas, and how strategies developed in one setting are adapted, scaled up, or reworked in another. These multi-layered actors, coalitions, and networks of democratic resistance, cutting across scales, form the crux of interscalar resistance.