After the ‘Arab Revolutions,’ the notion of the ‘local’ has taken a prominent place in area studies. However, depending on their disciplinary background and theoretical perspective, scholars use the concept of the ‘local’ in ambiguous, sometimes even contradictory ways. Thus, the definition, content, and implications of the ‘local’ still remain largely unreflected and unexamined. To make this polysemous concept more precise, this paper suggests a conceptual and a methodological notion of the ‘local,’ in which both notions are not mutually exclusive but are considered to be complementary. First, we suggest conceptualizing the ‘local’ in spatial terms and understanding it as a territorialized small-scale locality demarcated from and interlinked to the regional, national, and global scale. Drawing on empirical examples from Jordan and Morocco, the paper illustrates that the ‘local’ is a sociopolitical spatial construction shaped by ‘multiplex relationships’ between agents with different interests, strategies, and dispositions. At the same time, these agents share a localized imagination of togetherness and belonging, even as the local scale is always related to other scales of power. Second, we argue that analyzing local politics not only requires conceptual innovations that help overcome structural perspectives, but also methodological tools that enable researchers to grasp political actions beyond the regime level. Elaborating on political actions through ‘local lenses’ entails in-depth ethnographic research and demands attentiveness to social and political location, as Gupta and Ferguson (1997: 5) have pointed out. Taking the local perspective makes political interactions tangible and abstract categories such as the ‘state’ observable. Furthermore, the local research perspective allows us to trace different formal and informal ways in which the ‘state’ is continuously constructed, de-constructed, and re-constructed. Indeed, the local space is where the ‘state’ and citizens interact visibly, where participation becomes concrete and the unequal access to resources materializes. Hence, it is on the local scale that relations of power and domination become visible and thus analyzable and ultimately understandable. This holds especially in an authoritarian context, where access to resources is less a right guaranteed by citizenship than the outcome of various struggles. Taking empirical findings from politically and economically marginalized spaces in Jordan and Morocco, this paper elaborates on the ways in which the authoritarian state is contested from below.