In this article, we study the emergence of the political spaces of activism of second‐generation Swiss Tamils resulting from a critical event – the suffering of Tamils during and after the final battle in early 2009 of a civil war in northern Sri Lanka that had lasted for decades. We contend that we can explain the geographies of newly emerging second‐generation activism committed to achieving Tamil Eelam through two factors. These are first, this generation's multiple senses of belonging both to Switzerland and to the Tamil ‘nation’ and, second, the way a specific politics of affect remoulded second‐generation identities because the pain of witnessing the brutality of war and suffering of Tamils occurred concurrently with a perceived lack of interest from their ‘new home’ (Switzerland). The combination of these factors made them want to acknowledge their Tamil ‘roots’ and encouraged them to become politically active. Consequently, these second‐generation activists primarily sought to engage with their host society – to awaken it from its indifference to the suffering of Tamils and from its passivity in taking action on an international level. We thereby witness the emerging of a new type of Tamil activism in Switzerland, which is firmly located in and bound to the host country.

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Has the increased political influence of indigenous/peasant organizations on the local state in the Bolivian Andes helped them better address persistent poverty among the grassroots? The insights we gained in Northern Potosí show that there are two major movements with divergent political visions (framed around class or "peasantness"), and thus two long-term strategies for vivir bien. But both represent the same grassroots realities, and their communal leaders seek to apply similar practices (e.g. improving agricultural production or accessing off-farm employment in the mines of Mallku Khota). They also face the same difficulties-leading to complaints from their constituencies about the lack of actual support in the productive sphere. We find that this contradiction between political influence and grassroots criticism emerges less from the movements' ideological struggles over agrarian change, and more from everyday problems, including the difficulties their local representatives face as part of the complex local administrative system, the persistence of cumbersome bureaucratic procedures, and movements' obstructive practices of competition. Such mundane issues, we argue, are as important as issues of ideology in debates about agrarian/rural struggles.