Abstract In this essay, we respond to claims made about so-called leaderless social movements, which tend to overstate the organizing abilities of their membership. Like many Indigenous, feminist, and activist scholars, however, we contend that many so-called leaderless social movements are land-based and rely on cultivating human connection to land or, in some cases, severing human connection to land. This essay re-centers land and land-based leadership in a conceptualization of rhetorical leadership that accounts for social movements mediated through shared space. Then, the essay draws from a case where social movements described as leaderless draw direction from a relationship to place, what we call land-led politics: the enduring Syrian revolution. We show how a land-led politics is impelled not only by the severing of people from their subsistence base and the expropriation of their lands but by an ontological relation that draws leadership from the land. Hence, the land as theopanic influences social actor subjectivities and how they manage their conduct in relation to land. Emphasizing the amorphous, symbiotic, and rhizomatic relationships social actors have with land brings to light the land's political power and agentic qualities. As such, land-led politics demonstrates the limits of a leader-centric approach, which reproduces colonial understandings of power by failing to account for the political valence of land in realizing visions of a transformed landscape.

AbstractTransnational rhetorical scholarship has yet to enact meaningful solidarity with the subaltern. “Inclusionary” efforts have actively excluded what I term the “radical subject,” the subject revolting against repressive hegemonic forces to achieve liberatory change in society. Without privileging the radical subject and a critique of freedom over a critique of domination, hegemonic narratives continue uninterrupted. This paper turns toward the Syrian revolution to illustrate how critical rhetoric does not stretch far enough for the radical subject. I propose a radical rhetorical paradigm that centers the radical subject’s lived knowledge as determining meaning. This approach realizes the wisdom in relinquishing skepticism during the critical reasoning process by placing the radical subject as the starting point in inquiry in contested spaces where negotiation over meaning is ongoing. It acknowledges the radical subject’s testimony as born of the epistemic relevance of social location and the boundedness of knowledge. The radical rhetorical approach consecrates the epistemologies of the radical subject as inculcating the imperative for action on behalf of the oppressed.