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"Extremism does not happen in a vacuum. Rather, extremism is a relative concept that often emerges in crisis situations, taking shape within the tense and contradictory relations that tie marginal spaces, state orders, and mainstream culture. This collected volume brings together leading anthropologists and cultural analysts to offer a concise look at the narratives, symbolic, and metaphoric fields related to extremism, systematizing an approach to extremism, and placing these ideologies into historical, political, and geo-systemic contexts"--

In a recent article in Anthropology News, Víctor Giménez Aliaga suggests that the contemporary wave of populism calls for closer anthropological analysis of the term and its usages. While it is less interesting to me to partake in the eternal strive to define "what populism means," I concur with Giménez Aliaga with the need for anthropology to asses "practices—that is, the ways and purposes with which the term is used in the political arena. In response to Gimenéz Aliaga's call, I will try to sketch out some of the insights an anthropological perspective could provide around current political transformations.

When I arrived for fieldwork in Rome, in early 2008, I was seeking to track and interview the ex- militants of the fascism-inspired 'Spontaneista groups'. Active in the late 70s, these had been very violent and had claimed to be 'neither left nor right'. Their name made reference to the supposed 'spontaneity' of their constitution and action, announcing an ideological predilection of instincts and drives over reason and thought. All of these movements had a short life of four to six years between the late 70s and the early 80s. I was then very surprised when – on my arrival in Rome – I ran into a crowd of students, dressed in black and with shaved heads, rallying against the reform of lower education and crying in the streets the slogan: 'Non rossi, né neri, ma liberi pensieri'

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, there is a general process of readjustment of socio-political relations, power geometries and hierarchies within fundamental segments of society. This article tackles precisely such transformations by analyzing emerging practices, legitimacies and struggles around citizenship in south European periphery. Ideologies, representations and deriving practices around models of financial support are deeply engrained within particular production structures, embedded themselves within particular historical social relations, moralities and claims. By looking at two very differently -almost opposed- produced regions, the Industrial District of SMEs in Veneto, and the large electricity production site of Kozani, we ethnographically explore the dialectics between the political meanings attached to 'private' and 'public', while inhabiting with our analysis the mutually constitutive relationships between the economic and the political.

The past decades have seen significant urban insurrections worldwide, and this volume analyzes some of them from an anthropological perspective; it argues that transformations of urban class relationships must be approached in a way that is both globally informed and deeply embedded in local and popular histories, and contends that every case of urban mobilization should be understood against its precise context in the global capitalist transformation. The book examines cases of mobilization across the globe, and employs a Marxian class framework, open to the diverse and multi-scalar dynamics of urban politics, especially struggles for spatial justice

In this Forum, we ask our contributors to reflect on the entanglements between economy and politics and how they contribute to the ongoing precaritisation in academia, how they shape individual researchers' biographies and how they influence academic research. But more importantly, beyond analysis, this Forum also invites its contributors to reflect on concrete interventions from their respective positions.