When private citizens mobilise to protect their local community against threats, the rationale is that the local government is unable or unwilling to do so, due to legal restrictions, a lack of organisational resources and capacity – or indifference and discrimination. While these practises are commonly theorised as vigilantism, this conceptual approach draws in large part on studies of urban parts of the United States, Latin/South America, and the Commonwealth countries. This corresponds to a parallel knowledge gap in rural criminology, where there is little knowledge of so-called peripheral areas in the global north as well as a dearth of theoretical conceptualisation about rural vigilantism, and few studies cover areas outside the Anglo-American context. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork in 2020, this paper contributes to knowledge of vigilantism in the Nordics by providing a study on how Norwegian citizens mobilised to protect local communities from an urban pandemic threat, constituting a new form of rural vigilantism
