In line with the emergence of the post-urban world, a general development trend is that rural areas are being divided into two opposite parts: the city-close countryside, which is being integrated into the growing city-regions, and a peripheral countryside outside the growth influences of the city-regions. (Between these areas, there might be intermediate zones interacting with the city-regions, but not enough to transition fully into integration). This means that “rural areas” cannot be treated as one unit, but as two units with very different development tendencies. This chapter discusses the situation and tendencies for these two types of rural areas in Sweden and Slovakia, respectively. Both are members of the European Union, and their rural policies are determined by the Union’s Common Agricultural Policy. However, the countries’ histories and institutional legacies are very different. Postwar Sweden has been a welfare market economy, while Slovakia, after World War II, became a part of the socialist Czechoslovakia and did not become an independent state until 1993. Against this background, this chapter presents and analyzes current challenges for rural development in the two countries, presents and discusses two successful cases of development in the rural peripheries, and, based on these, draws some conclusions on building rural resilience.