The final revisions of this special issue came together amid holiday travels and the UK's latest bureaucratic experiment: a wholesale switch from physical immigration documents to a digital-only system. As of October 2024, the government began phasing out physical residence permits (biometric residence permits, BRPs) in favour of eVisas, trumpeting the new system as loss-proof and damage-resistant. Yet many residents found themselves in a Kafkaesque maze: their physical permits expired, their eVisa profiles inaccessible due to technical glitches, and their right to work, rent, or even remain in the UK suddenly hanging by a digital thread. The government's contradictory guidance – instructing people to print their eVisa profiles while simultaneously declaring that printed documents would not count as valid proof of status – only deepened the confusion. One of us, caught in this web, found herself longing for the very physical documents we once anxiously guarded against losing, while navigating the very real possibility of being stranded by confused airline staff unable to verify digital immigration status.
That bureaucracy creates deadlocks is not news to anthropologists. But this special issue titled ‘Documents, State Affects, and Imaginings at Times of Bureaucratic Impasse’ digs deeper into how paperwork speaks and feels. While standing on the shoulders of giants, it charts fresh territory: people do not just submit to or resist red tape – they reimagine state power through their paper chase. When trapped in administrative quicksand, their frustrations, hopes, and fears actively reshape their understanding of government authority.
The collection's elegant insight is that bureaucratic bottlenecks are not mere obstacles but charged moments where political imagination takes flight. From Tunisians anticipating eviction to Kurdish citizens dreaming of efficient governance, these impasses spark rich political thinking. The political emerges precisely in these gaps between bureaucratic promises and realities, where imagining becomes an active process of foreseeing possibilities.
In our era of deadly apathy towards war and annexation, where tech-bros play at being presidents, this collection returns us to an indispensable ethnographic truth: the devil is in the details. No matter how unpredictable or maddening state power becomes, people never cease to anticipate it, transforming it into an intimate presence in daily life. These encounters must be studied at ground level: in shared stories, direct bureaucratic confrontations, and people's persistent efforts to anticipate state power's next move.
Edited by Rosa Sansone and Letizia Bonanno and featuring articles from Lana Askari, Rosa Sansone, Diego Valdivieso, Letizia Bonanno, and Ahmad Moradi, this issue promises to affect readers as deeply as the stories of bureaucratic deadlock affected both their authors and the people who lived through them.
This issue also hosts the first review article in our recently launched section, Widening the Frame, in which Adolfo Estalella examines how three collaborative ethnographic projects leverage digital infrastructures to drive multimodal experimentation. And in no less ambitious terms, book reviews from Saniya Ahmad and Andrea De Antoni examine the finitude of human knowledge and cultural apocalypse.
We hope that you enjoy this issue. Share your thoughts at cja@socanth.cam.ac.uk.