Date: 15-16 June 2026
Venue: University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies
(in collaboration with the Institute of the Americas)
Keynote: Andrés Rodríguez-Pose (LSE)
We have a very limited budget to cover travel or accommodation costs for selected participants. Please specify on the form if you require this assistance.
Submission of abstracts
Call for Papers: Urban elites, rural margins? Apply by 19 April 2026.
Fill in this formA new, more unequal and polarised geography of prosperity and opportunity has become the defining feature of the first two decades of the 21st century. At the core of this new geography of inequality lie urban–rural divisions. Across countries, differences between dynamic metropolitan centres and peripheral rural areas increasingly structure access to employment, income growth, public services, and political voice. These divides intersect with class, education, and occupation, but remain fundamentally geographic in nature. Social and economic crises, including the 2007-2009 global financial crisis and the 2020-2022 COVID-19 pandemic have only compounded these existing spatial inequalities. Discontent with such uneven geography of opportunities has translated into the rise of populist politics across Europe and the Americas, challenging the stability of democratic societies.
In high-income economies in North America and Western Europe, deindustrialisation and the expansion of services, concentrated in large cities, have coincided with prolonged growth stagnation. While the aggregate wage gap between urban and rural areas has widened, this divergence is driven almost entirely by high-skill service workers in major metropolitan areas pulling further ahead. Low-skill workers in large cities, by contrast, often face high living costs and stagnant or declining real incomes. In this context, the main beneficiaries of globalisation and technological change appear to be a narrow, highly educated urban elite, while incomes in rural areas stagnate, fuelling economic frustration and political dissatisfaction.
These dynamics, however, need not generalise to regions that have undergone different transformations over the past few decades. Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America have not experienced the same scale of manufacturing decline and, until recently, have continued to record relatively robust economic growth. Both regions have attracted substantial inward foreign direct investment, retained a significant industrial base, and maintained an important, though distinct, role for agriculture. In post-socialist Europe, economic convergence has been further shaped by EU cohesion funds and institutional integration.
This raises a set of core questions:
- How have urban–rural divisions evolved in these converging regions, and how are they reflected in political preferences, particularly support for anti-establishment or anti-elite movements?
- What do these processes imply for local identities and social cohesion?
- How is internal migration influenced, and how is it influencing these divisions?
The conference Urban elites, rural margins? will explore these questions through a multidisciplinary approach. A comparative perspective is especially informative because post-socialist Europe and Latin America differ sharply in overall inequality levels and agrarian structures (relatively lower inequality and smaller-scale agriculture in the former, extremely high inequality and the persistence of large landholdings in the latter). However, they share important features, including rapid political transitions, the dominance of external capital, and the enduring role of religion.
We invite contributions from scholars working on topics in these two regions, specifically on:
- Rural-urban tensions;
- Geographical and spatial inequalities;
- The long-run effects of local economic deprivation;
- Marginalisation, social exclusion, and identity formation;
- Politics of anger and grievances fuelled by urban-rural cleavages;
- Place attachment and identity linked to issues of urban-rural cleavages;
- Victimhood narratives and political mobilization stemming from urban-rural divisions.