ABSTRACT
This book aims to establish a cause for recognition, or at least case-based acknowledgement, of rural communities and remote communities as non-state actors on the grounds that they can display the essential participatory characteristics generally required to be regarded as such in terms of their treaty recognition and/or their accumulative capacity to influence international decision-making and equitable rights in national and transnational decision-making impacting on them. The cause is facilitated by (a) the lack of established coherence and agreement on what may constitute a non-state actor and (b) changing circumstances in international discourse. These aspects are the focus of the present chapter. The first section summarises the prevailing and differing views among commentators on what might constitute the characteristics or identifiers of the nature of non-state actors. The second section then considers four current scenarios with significant international impact: two short-term scenarios, namely, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the Covid-19 pandemic, and two long-term scenarios, namely, the advent of ‘strongmen’ in state leadership positions, and the quick progress of the fourth Industrial Revolution. The examination of these four angles aims to show that perceiving rural communities with non-state actor lenses is not as unimaginable today as it would have been half a century ago.
