Digital diaries and rural democracy: Participatory engagement between depopulated Balkan villages and their diasporas

Depopulated rural settlements in the Western Balkans face shrinking populations, weak local institutions and limited channels for political voice. At the same time, residents and dispersed villagers increasingly use online diary projects to document everyday life, comment on local decisions and maintain attachments across distance. This article examines how such diary initiatives operate as place-tethered digital infrastructures of participatory engagement linking villages, urban centres and transnational diasporic communities. By digital infrastructure, the article refers not only to platforms or connectivity, but to the socio-technical arrangements of entries, archives, editorial labour, routines and audiences that sustain participation over time. Drawing on multi-sited qualitative research that combines digital ethnography, qualitative diaries, interviews and fieldwork in three rural cases, the analysis shows that diaries are carefully assembled and sustained by intermediaries who bridge local and external worlds. Diary narratives reframe decline as injustice, distribute responsibility across scales and occasionally move issues into municipal arenas, while also concentrating interpretive power and reproducing certain exclusions. The article conceptualises diaries as place-tethered digital infrastructures that reconfigure the spatial organisation of local politics under conditions of rural peripheralisation.