In recent years, anthropological scholarship has extensively addressed bureaucracies from a variety of perspectives, looking at paperwork as the infrastructure of bureaucracy (Vismann 2008) and through its content and form (Göpfert 2013); as artefacts with formal, material and aesthetic properties as well as distinct social life (Hull 2012a,b; Reed 2006; Riles 2006); and as a mode of governmentality or as generative of knowledge, relations, effects and affective responses (Andreetta et al. 2022; Andreetta and Borelli 2024; Gupta 2012; Navaro-Yashin 2007; Stoler 2002, 2009). However, less attention has been paid to the interplay between the imaginative and affective dimensions that emerge as individuals engage with bureaucratic documents, and how this dynamic can inform the study of contemporary state formation. By examining how bureaucratic documents and paperwork induce citizens, non-citizens, and prospective citizens to develop affective and imaginative dispositions towards the state, we aim to revitalise the enduring anthropological debate about state images and practices. We suggest that these dispositions provide novel insights into contemporary state configurations, revealing both their excess of stateness and their concealed processes of statecraft.
Drawing on scholarship that establishes affects as key to understanding the political realm (Malmström 2019; Navaro-Yashin 2012; Stewart 2007), we examine the state as a focal point of affective investment – whether through fear and suspicion (Aretxaga 2005), hope (Jansen 2014; Laszczkowski 2016; Reeves 2011), or the desire for political recognition (Hasty 2005). We do so by looking at how a variety of documents – whether produced, concealed, kept on hold, discarded, recycled, demanded, missed, lost, found, or circulated within and beyond public and private bureaucracies – both crystallise and evoke (non)citizens’ imaginings of the state and affective investments in it. While anthropological explorations of documents’ affective and imaginative lives have gathered momentum in recent years (Bear and Mathur 2015; Billaud and Cowan 2020; Koch 2018; notably, Navaro-Yashin 2007; Reeves 2013; Smith 2021; Street 2012), this special issue's contributions advance this emerging debate by unearthing the excessive and messy potentialities of bureaucratic documents. We address them not only as providers of citizens’ needs but also as catalysts that generate political affectivities and imaginings. Through five fine-grained ethnographies of the encounters between (non)citizens/users and bureaucrats/state officials, unfolding in both public and private bureaucracies, we unpack the entanglement of imaginations and affects that both users and bureaucrats experience, encounter, and feel while handing, managing, searching, rejecting, exchanging, signing and stamping paperwork and documents. From post-revolutionary Tunisia and austerity-era Greece to Iraqi Kurdistan, Iran, and neoliberal Chile, our articles examine how people not only experience the state through daily interactions with its representatives (Thelen et al. 2018) but also imagine and affectively engage with it through its documents, procedures, and bureaucratic systems.
We understand the state as a relational setting where everyday encounters and practices provide key ethnographic insights into how the state is made, encountered, reproduced (Thelen et al. 2018: 9), and felt (Laszczkowski and Reeves 2015). Within this framework, we focus specifically on document-mediated bureaucratic encounters to demonstrate how bureaucracies foster varying degrees of intimacy and relationality between (non)citizens and the state. Answering Thomas Bierschenk's methodological call to acknowledge ‘the double face of bureaucracy’ – both as an instrument of domination and a means of protection and liberation (2024: 160) – and the ambivalences this dialectic entails, we turn to how users, clients and citizens, alongside officials, clerks and bureaucrats, make use and make sense of documents and of their relationships to and with the state. As the authors show, neither people seeking services nor those administering bureaucratic procedures are just victims or passive enforcers; rather, they ambivalently act upon and deal with the tangled potentialities of bureaucratic documents that can uphold or withhold access to rights, services and resources. This dynamic manifests in diverse settings. In an Athenian social clinic of solidarity, prospective patients appeal to volunteers-turned-bureaucrats by sharing stories of loss and state abandonment in an attempt to compensate for incomplete documentation needed to access services (Letizia Bonanno, this issue). In Tunis, citizens fearing new evictions encounter the state's cunning presence through illegible signatures and dubious documents (Rosa Sansone, this issue). In Tehran, Afghan veterans attempt to forge intimate relations with the distant state through an almost Kafkaesque production of paperwork required for state care and citizenship rights (Ahmad Moradi, this issue). Chilean state bureaucrats, hired on short-term contracts, find their renewal dependent on producing valid paperwork trails: they anxiously navigate their precarious employment as civil servants while embodying the state itself (Diego Valdivieso, this issue). In Iraqi Kurdistan, citizens’ distressing encounters with their autonomous government's bureaucracy reveal political tensions underlying Kurdish self-rule, and often leave them nostalgic for the Iraqi state administration (Lana Askari, this issue).
As a whole, the contributors of this special issue approach documents and bureaucratic practices by looking at the imaginative and affective dimensions that they retain, entice and trigger. We thus contribute to recent anthropological scholarship that explores the state from a relational perspective, deploying ‘affect’ as an analytical lens to capture bureaucracy's non-linear aspects, its contingencies and indeterminacies (Mathur 2016), as well as the forms of creativity, contestation and resistance it engenders (Billaud and Cowan 2020; Obeid 2019; Reeves 2013). Specifically, we explore ethnographically the mismatch between expectations of what bureaucracies should be and should do and the actual experiences of what bureaucracies are and do to and for users. With an ethnographic eye towards how the temporalities of bureaucracies diverge from the temporality of everyday life, we focus on what we call moments of ‘bureaucratic impasse’: those circumstances where people seek documents and struggle to obtain them or navigate dysfunctional, dystopian and often dehumanising bureaucracies. As our contributors show, these moments of bureaucratic impasse configure an experiential arena where people's imaginative and affective dispositions towards the state surface and become apparent. Drawing on these ethnographic insights, we demonstrate how the political crystallises in moments of bureaucratic impasse – precisely where people confront the discrepancy between bureaucracies’ promised capabilities and their actual performance. Through this, we locate the political beyond the state's supposedly rational bureaucratic discourses and practices. Instead, it materialises through people's affects and imaginings, as they both shape and are shaped by their pursuit and handling of bureaucratic documents.
In what follows, we introduce the theoretical tenets underlying this special issue. Firstly, we examine the relations between state images and affects in bureaucratic encounters and contend that ‘state imaginings’ as an analytic enables us to move beyond static representations of the state to focus on the processes through which people imagine and affectively relate to it. Secondly, we describe how state imaginings emerge particularly during moments of bureaucratic impasse: circumstances where users and bureaucrats engage in interpretative labour to make sense of and adapt to bureaucratic rules and demands. Thirdly, we look at how bureaucratic documents mediate, through affects and imaginings, individuals’ relations with the state.
State Imaginings through Documents and Bureaucracy
With this special issue, we aim to advance the debate on the imaginative and affective dimensions that bureaucracies, and especially their documents, manifest in various sociocultural and politico-economic contexts. Standing in a twilight zone between state and society, stories and narratives of dysfunctional bureaucracies, dispassionate bureaucrats and unfortunate encounters with bureaucracies populate collective imaginaries (Graeber 2012, 2015; Herzfeld 2022; Orland 2001) while triggering a myriad of affects and imaginations about the state (Navaro-Yashin 2007). To unearth the relation between affects and imagination, we follow Begoña Aretxaga's suggestion to explore ‘the link between an image and an affective state (of desire, fear, exultation or contempt) taking hold of people in the theatre of politics’ (2005: 202). In her overview of contemporary trends in the anthropology of the state, Aretxaga suggests that the state continues to ‘command an imaginary of power and a screen for political desire as well as fear’ (2003: 394) even as globalisation has rendered the modern state increasingly obsolete (Truillot 2001) and dispersed its traditional regulatory functions across myriad private companies and institutions. Though increasingly hollowed-out (Aretxaga 2003: 394), the state continues to manifest intimately in people's lives at the local level. People encounter it through organised violence (Aretxaga 2005), through everyday interactions with officials (Das 2004), through narratives of corruption (Gupta 1995), and through discourses of abandonment. If the imagined state fails to provide for its citizens, people's imaginary of it persists despite clashing with their actual experience of marginalisation, disempowerment and violence (Aretxaga 2003: 396). Ultimately questioning the desire for statehood that people continue to intensely experience in many parts of the world, Aretxaga argues that these desires can be better understood if we consider the subjective dynamics that link people to states. These dynamics are made of bodily sensualities and excitations, identifications and unconscious desires, while simultaneously manifesting in performances and public representations of statehood, discourses, narratives and fantasies generated around the idea of the state. In light of Aretxaga's considerations on the deeply subjective dimension looming over people's encounter with the state, we situate our special issue within current scholarly debates around state imaginations and state affects, and we do so by looking at how and what imaginative and affective investments are triggered by both public and private bureaucracies.
Bureaucracy has long represented a fertile ethnographic ground to explore what the state means to people and the ways it manifests through its bureaucratic artefacts, practices and narratives (Gupta 1995, 2005). For instance, Akhil Gupta (1995, 2005) argues that narratives about corruption reveal how people perceive and imagine the Indian state and he emphasises that we miss crucial insights when focusing solely on institutional forms, capabilities and organisational structures. Rather, ‘states are imagined through representations and signifying practices’ (2005: 28) and their materiality – their files, orders, memos, petitions, inspections and the like – is the very stuff through which citizens, subjects and officials not only negotiate their affective relations with the state but produce imaginations about it. From this perspective, the state is made present through the manipulation of existing images and representations and through its everyday languages and practices: people can bend kinship language to entice its benevolence (Yang 2005), produce narratives about it (Gupta 2005), engage with its bureaucratic forms (Das 2004). However, in much anthropological literature (Das 2004; Yang 2005), imaginations of the state often correspond to reified representations of its sovereignty and authority (Hansen and Stepputat 2001). Scholarship has yet to fully examine how people actively imagine and construct the state.
Drawing on Vincent Crapanzano's observation that anthropologists have focused more on imagination's products than its processes (2004: 1), we distinguish between imaginations as the capacity to re-create something which is not materially present and imaginings as a process of foreseeing possible scenarios (Rohrer and Thompson 2023). In this light, imagining is an ‘anticipatory’ (Crapanzano 2004: 20) process, characterised by ‘uncertainties, an expectation not yet fulling, a not knowing’ (Elliott and Culhane 2017: 15). By examining how conceptions of the state emerge through social and material practices (Sneath et al. 2009: 6), our ethnographic research explores people's imaginings of bureaucracies across Iraqi Kurdistan (Askari), Greece (Bonanno), Iran (Moradi), Tunisia (Sansone) and Chile (Valdivieso), revealing more than mere attempts to make sense of an absent state. Instead, people develop their imaginings of the state through direct encounters with bureaucratic systems and documents, shaped both by their relationships with state institutions and their efforts to anticipate how state power might manifest in unpredictable ways.
We argue that these imaginings are rooted in a social repertoire of stories about and experiences with bureaucratic apparatuses – systems that are both produced by new state formations and, simultaneously, help to produce them. For example, the Kurdish autonomous government, since its establishment in 1990, has been constrained by a hypertrophic bureaucracy which paradoxically reinforces its dependence on the Iraqi state. In Greece, austerity-driven policies and politics have fragmented the welfare state to the point of disappearance; in this context, civil society and solidarity initiatives strive to reimagine and re-engineer it in the grassroots voluntary sector and do so by importing state-like bureaucratic practices. In post-revolutionary Tunis, people struggle to make sense of the democratic transition as contemporary state politics and policies are perceived to be in continuity with, rather than disruptive of, those under the deposed president, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. In Chile, the state's neoliberal language of meritocracy converges with its rhetoric of transparency and efficiency and pushes bureaucrats to chase users and entice them to participate in state programmes. A similar conflation of state images, practices and languages occurs in Iran, where the state's rhetoric of Shi'a brotherhood ultimately perpetuates the exclusion of Afghan war veterans from state care by engineering vicious bureaucratic loops.
Imaginative and Affective States
In distinguishing between imagination (a capacity) and imagining (an active process), we aim to capture how imagining the state is an affective bodily and embodied process. In this special issue, we expand on the role of affects and imaginings for a relational anthropology of the state. We thus bring together an analysis of state practices by looking at specific encounters occurring in both private and public bureaucracies and scholarly approaches emphasising the imaginative and affective dispositions that people develop towards the state. Specifically, we look at how these dispositions are mediated by bureaucratic documents and contend that imagination and affects are nurtured through the process of producing, handling and handing paperwork and documents. The indeterminacy, incoherence and inherent inequalities that bureaucracies often produce and reproduce amplify the affective and imaginative loads that users and bureaucrats alike experience (see also Geoffrion and Cretton 2021).
Accordingly, we draw on Tatjana Thelen and colleagues’ (2018) invitation to study the state through its images and practices as they are mobilised in various historically contingent relational contexts, and suggest that imagining is itself a relational practice through which people – (non)citizens and officials – meet, image and produce the state (also see Moradi 2025). In their relational anthropology of the state approach, Thelen and colleagues (2018) turn to an ethnographically driven exploration of state practices and organisational forms, such as bureaucracies, to better understand how these combine with contextually situated state images. In this way, it becomes possible to apprehend ethnographically how state images are shaped contextually, in and through a concrete web of relations, and how ‘states can be understood as ever-changing political formations with institutional settings that are structured by social relations in interactions characterised by different state images’ (Thelen et al. 2018: 7). Along similar lines of inquiry, Sophie Andreetta and colleagues (2022) shift the focus to bureaucrats’ affects and emotions, suggesting that examining the state from the perspective of bureaucrats can open new analytical possibilities to understand the state through everyday practices and the emotions and affects these provoke in its officials.
Each article of this special issue demonstrates how imaginings of the state and affective responses and anticipations emerge through interactions between bureaucrats, (non)citizens, and bureaucratic documents – including situations where such documentation is absent. These articles thus show how bureaucratic encounters, saturated with expectations and images of what the state and its affiliated social organisations and NGOs should provide, often lead to discomfort, unmet expectations, or even fear among those seeking services. Together, they reveal how state affects and state images mutually reinforce each other. As a whole, therefore, this collection suggests that these should not be treated as separate fields of political experience.
In this respect, Aretxaga's States of Terror represents the theoretical departure undergirding this special issue: she clarifies how ‘encounters with the state are often experienced in an intimate way where power is experienced close to the skin, embodied in well-known officials, and true practices of everyday life’ (Aretxaga 2003: 396; see also Das and Poole 2004). These encounters, Aretxaga contends, can be as enabling as they can prove maddening. Either way, the anticipation and experience of an encounter with the state is fraught with visceral affects and uncertain imaginings of ‘what has not-yet become’ (Miyazaki 2006: 14). It is in the ‘not-yet’ of the encounter with the state and bureaucracies that the authors of this special issue situate people's imaginative and affective investment towards the state. By recounting how Afghan veterans in Iran grapple with unforgiving medical bureaucracies and legal procedures, Moradi shows how their wounded bodies become the living documentation through which they attempt to anticipate states’ and bureaucracies’ demands and negotiate access to welfare services. Moradi reveals how bureaucratic loopholes and rigid biomedical criteria for assessing war-inflicted disability work together to severely limit Afghan veterans’ chances of securing a dignified future. Sansone's ethnography in post-revolutionary Tunis shows how residents of La Petite Sicile anticipate future evictions through their relationship with documents – both present and absent – which they see as manipulated by a cunning state. Their fears and anxieties manifest physically as they handle, unfold, disclose, search for, and display legal documents, attempting to protect themselves against the state's – past, present and future – ghostly and unpredictable machinations. Affective and anticipatory investments in a quasi-state are central to Askari's exploration of ambivalent attitudes and expectations towards the autonomous Kurdish government and the Iraqi state. Her interlocutors’ shifting affects towards the state fluctuate between resignation and hope – a tension that Askari demonstrates is deeply influenced by memories of Saddam Hussein's genocidal campaign against the Kurdish population. Anticipation is also relevant to Valdivieso's and Bonanno's ethnographies. In Chile, Valdivieso explores how a group of officials actively pursue disinterested users of public services and experience growing anxiety about meeting the demanding standards of bureaucratic efficiency – standards that the neoliberal, newly decentralised state has elevated to the status of public good (see also Bear and Mathur 2015). Bonanno shows how patients in a self-organised medical centre in Athens mobilise individual and collective narratives of suffering to compensate for their lack of paperwork and entice the benevolence of the volunteers-turned-bureaucrats to register them: an enraged middle-aged Greek woman anticipates yet another rejection of her request for medication and bitterly asks if only her death certificate would be a good enough paperwork.
On Bureaucratic Impasses, Temporalities and Interpretative Labour
Bureaucracies – and the paperwork that accompanies them – are often characterised by confusion and fuzziness (Cabot 2012, 2013; Kelly 2006; Tuckett 2015). Anthropological scholarship has highlighted how they often operate as governing and disciplining regimes not despite but because of their opaque, illegible or even magical nature (Chakkour et al. 2024; Eule et al. 2019; Hoag 2010), and shown how such opaqueness can create uncanny spaces for affect-based interactions (Geoffrion and Cretton 2021). This opacity stems from the shifting and often indeterminate meanings of laws, documents and bureaucratic systems, which require civil servants’ interpretation and discretionary decisions (Cabot 2012; Carswell and de Neve 2020; Eule et al. 2019; Hull 2012b): indeed, laws and bureaucratic procedures often lack clarity about what paperwork constitute legitimate evidence and how such evidence should be interpreted (Sansone 2025; Ticktin 2011: 36).
Bureaucratic opacity often traps individuals in multiple temporal and bureaucratic loopholes and forces them to engage in demanding and often frustrating efforts to understand its obscure logics and mechanisms (Bonanno's and Valdivieso's contributions, this issue). These efforts resonate with David Graeber's (2015) formulation of interpretive labour as the attempt to understand bureaucracies, bureaucrats and their demands. Graeber describes this interpretive labour as imaginative and ultimately rooted in sedimented structures of inequalities (see also Heyman 1995). Those already experiencing socio-economic and political vulnerability and marginality are more likely to struggle to ‘decipher others’ motives and perceptions’ (Graeber 2015: 67) and to navigate, comprehend and engage with standard bureaucratic procedures. Ultimately, interpretive labour has to do with how people attempt to reconcile the complexities of their everyday reality with the standardised models, protocols and formulas of bureaucracy. We build on Graeber's work to show how affects and imaginings not only stem from ‘lopsided structures of imaginative identification’ (Graeber 2015: 70) born of structural inequalities or the threat of violence but also from bureaucratic impasses that are both temporal and interpretive – moments when users and bureaucrats alike strive to understand, interpret, and adapt to bureaucratic rules and demands, seeking ways to accommodate their requirements and navigate their temporalities.
Anthropologists have extensively explored how bureaucratic time frames intersect with and shape everyday life (Geoffrion and Cretton 2021) and reveal the distinct temporalities they produce – particularly through the lens of waiting (Chakkour et al. 2024; Elliot 2016). The politics of waiting is deployed as a tool of the governance of migration (Griffiths 2014; Jacobsen et al. 2021; Janeja and Bandak 2018), of the urban poor (Auyero 2011) and dispossessed Indigenous people (Correia 2023). As a mode of bureaucratic temporality, waiting is also integral to state bureaucracies’ ration services and to their ability to ‘cool out’ clients who have been denied resources (Sellberg 2008). As the state exerts its power by imposing bureaucratic time – legal and administrative deadlines, uncertain waiting periods for decision and appointments – these periods of waiting are actually anything but ridden with existential immobility: people often demonstrate agency and resourcefulness while waiting (Tuckett 2015), either adapting it into a way of life (Fassin et al. 2017) or adopting bureaucratic roles themselves (James 2012). This waiting time becomes an opportunity to reclaim temporal control (Griffiths 2014) or develop tactics to buy time.
While the temporalities of bureaucracies are not an analytic of this special issue per se, all the articles engage with how interlocutors experience bureaucratic time: Bonanno shows how, in Athens, prospective patients are repeatedly invited to wait their turn for their documents to be checked or to be registered. The clinic's staff, who straddle roles as volunteers and administrators, frequently use the direct command ‘perimenete’ (‘wait’). While this imperative is culturally acceptable in most contexts (Cowan 1990), its use reinforces the power dynamic between staff and patients that characterises bureaucratic interactions in the social clinic. Waiting is also central to Sansone's Tunisian interlocutors: they wait for the state to finally manifest its plans and for the final eviction notice that will turn their long-held fears of losing their home into reality. Stuck in a temporal and bureaucratic limbo, the Afghan veterans Moradi encounters in Tehran act with haste to produce paperwork and collect their neighbours’ testimonies attesting to their deservedness to state care. Valdivieso vividly describes how bureaucrats in Chile are afraid of running out of time to bring more users to join governmental programmes, while Askari shows how Kurdish people in Silêmanî feel trapped in a slow, stiff and swollen bureaucratic time which does not seem to keep up with their imaginings of good governance.
Each article shows how, along the diverging temporalities of bureaucracy and everyday life, (non)citizens and bureaucrats try to imagine, envision and negotiate solutions to circumvent and contravene bureaucratic rules and procedures that would likely reproduce, if not deepen, existing inequalities. With this in mind, we align with Graeber's understanding that bureaucracies are inherently ‘stupid’ (2012) but contend that it is in fact their stupidity that stimulates and drives (non)citizens and bureaucrats’ imaginative efforts and affective engagements with paperwork and documents. Ultimately, we show how bringing ethnographic nuance into focus is key to understanding the subtle negotiations of power that mark people's encounters with bureaucratic documents (Bear and Mathur 2015; Geoffrion and Creton 2021; James and Killick 2012; Lea 2021; Reeves 2011; Silver 2010). Whereas anticipations, expectations and speculations pertain to the realm of imaginings as a prefigurative and anticipatory effort (Crapanzano 2004), misunderstandings, elation and frustrations belong to the spectrum of affects: the interpretive labour that bureaucracy requires configures a paradoxically fertile ground on which people reformulate their experience and imagining of the political. In other words, the interpretative labour required to navigate and engage with bureaucracies re-frames people's relations with both state and politics, shaping their political imagination in unexpected ways. For example, Askari's article shows how Iraqi Kurds navigating everyday dysfunctions of an ever-expanding bureaucracy in Iraqi Kurdistan has reframed their desires and aspirations for an autonomous Kurdish government.
Bureaucratic Documents and the State
In this special issue, we focus on bureaucratic documents and paperwork produced or requested by state and non-state agencies. In both contexts, we understand bureaucracies as processual and relational encounters between (non)citizens and the state or its agencies and a productive site of ethnographic inquiry to appraise people's state affects and imaginings. Anthropological scholarship has framed documents as mediators between people and the state from a wealth of analytical angles and perspectives. Inspired by sociolinguistic approaches, documents have been described as neutral purveyors of discourses (Hull 2012a: 253) and as forms of bureaucratic practices (Riles 2006), whereby their textual nature clearly reflects the state as a specific kind of discursive entity (Göpfert 2013; Riles 2006). Foucauldian approaches have instead looked at documents as enclosing modes of governance: through documents, the state makes individuals and populations legible, visible and governable (Cabot 2012; Das 2004; Gupta 2012; Street 2012). As such, bureaucracies become ‘techniques of power [which] inhere in the routines of bureaucratic workers and their relationships with the person they attempt to control’ (Heyman 1995: 261). In James Scott's words, the creation of a ‘legible’ people is the main feature of modern statehood (1998: 2). Crucially, individual identification forms and documents keep shaping modern concepts of individual identity and subjectivity (Caplan and Torpley 2002) as well as ethnonationalist notions of belonging (Kelly 2006). Ultimately, the expanding reliance on audit technologies, biometrics (Ecks 2018; Inglis 2018) and biomedical documents (Butt 2018) shows how bureaucracies themselves become a mode for the governing of life (Foucault 2013). Bureaucratic papers also enforce and control performance-based and/or disciplinary mechanisms and increasingly shape subjectivities and lifeworlds (Dean 2002; Miller and Rose 2008; Mills et al. 2000; Ong 2006; Power 1997). Common to this body of work is the idea that, through bureaucratic documents, the state makes itself present in the form of the regulations and laws manifested in everyday life (Das 2004). However, more recent anthropological accounts have nuanced – or even reversed – the assumption that bureaucracies exert top-down forms of control through a system of gridding that makes (non)citizens visible and legible and therefore controllable (Scott 1998). While some people attempt to evade the state's gridding system (Scott 1998), anthropological scholarship has also shown how, across diverse socio-economic and political contexts, becoming visible and legible to the state often means being able to access welfare, medical resources and other services provided by the state (Jansen 2014, 2015; Street 2012; Ticktin 2006). Ultimately, documents in both physical and digital forms can enable people to place claims on or even contest the state. Through documents, forms of citizenship can be enacted, rights claimed, and services and resources accessed (Andreetta and Borrelli 2024; Das and Randeria 2015). Along these lines, recent contributions to the anthropology of bureaucracy have more clearly shown the double-face of bureaucracy and paperwork: while exerting forms of governmental control, they can also foster agency (Andreetta and Borrelli 2024) in both users and bureaucrats (Kalman 2018). For example, reversing Scott's paradigm, Alice Street (2012) shows how documents are more than technologies of visibility and governmentality: in Papua New Guinea, people mobilise paperwork to become visible to the state and to be included in its purview. Citizens and non-citizens alike learn to manipulate, swap, trade and forge paperwork and documents (Andrikopoulos 2023; Dhuphelia-Meshtrie 2014a) and to navigate bureaucratic procedures, thus regaining a sense of agency and establishing new modes of relationality with the state. While bureaucratic documents and procedures generate knowledge about individuals and populations and ‘make citizens’ (Lowenkron and Ferreira 2014: 83), in turn, both citizens and non-citizens develop practical, everyday knowledge about these bureaucracies and their workings (Andreetta and Borrelli 2024; Das and Randeria 2015; Kalman 2018; Steinmüller 2023). Documentation can also lend itself to processes of re-signification and can be mobilised to resist bureaucratic categories and forms (Cabot 2012; James 2012). At the same time, documents (or the lack thereof) can withhold and deny both rights and citizenship. Documents can thus be framed as forms of bureaucratic practice (Riles 2006) or lenses to explore how their transactions produce social relations (Das and Poole 2004; Gupta 2012).
Moving away from both ‘looking at’ and ‘looking through’ paperwork, this special issue pushes the anthropological debate away from strictly functional analyses that reduce bureaucratic documents to mere tools of modern governmentality or citizenship. Instead, our articles explore how documents trigger state imaginings through the political and affective charge of their excessive dimensions. We echo Julie Billaud and Jane Cowan's call to ethnographically dwell on moments of uncertainties and ambiguities that surface ‘in the midst of repetitive bureaucratic process’ (2020: 10) and can unexpectedly open space for surprise, anticipation and creativity. Consequently, we emphasise the significance of those moments when bureaucracies and paperwork defy logic, failing to align with the anticipated roles and expectations of state services, whether in public or private settings. As the labour of paperwork collides with people's projections and expectations, these instances reveal a shift away from the straightforward negotiation of rights, steering instead towards affective reinterpretations of the state's image and role. Problematic paperwork – whether missing, expired, or unconvincing – triggers intense emotional responses including panic, despair, fear, and frustration (Navaro-Yashin 2007). In this sense, bureaucratic documents are never ‘mere material administrative entities that could be replaced, diverted, returned or forgotten’ (Geoffrion and Cretton 2021: 3). Rather, they both shape and are shaped by affects, personal interests, moralities, and social networks (de Sardan 1999; Gupta 1995; Heyman 1995; Nuijten 2003). In this regard, anthropological scholarship on immigration bureaucracy demonstrates how multiple bureaucratic processes – from finding and completing required paperwork (Dhupelia-Mesthrie 2014b) and signing forms (Cody 2009) to providing proof of admissibility (Geoffrion 2018; Tomchin 2013) and enduring processing delays (Bélanger and Candiz 2019; Cabot 2012; Tuckett 2015; Turnbull 2016) – heighten the affective and imaginative dimensions of people's encounters with bureaucracies. Ultimately, Karine Geoffrion and Vivane Cretton (2021) argue, emotions are the driving force behind much administrative work, fuelling actions and shaping both their bureaucratic encounters and their migration trajectories.
If bureaucratic documents are affectively charged (Navaro-Yashin 2007), bureaucrats and officials acting and enacting bureaucracies can similarly display a range of affects, political dispositions and moral postures (Bonanno, this issue and Valdivieso, this issue). They can prove empathetic, efficient and caring (Giudici 2021; James and Killick 2012; Neumark 2020), but also indifferent (Herzfeld 1992), reluctant (George 2016) or ignorant (Obeid 2019). These officials grapple with their own anxieties (Allard 2012; Hull 2003) about performance-based employment (Valdivieso, this issue), potential complicity with state violence (Das 2004), and increasingly xenophobic regulations (Giudici 2021). As well as being sites of violent simplification (Graeber 2012), bureaucracies – inhabited by multiple subjectivities and positionalities – constantly verge on becoming spaces of disturbance (Stewart 2007), shock and risk (Wilson 2017), and negotiation (Fassin and d'Halluin 2005; Obeid 2019; Sansone, this issue; Wilson 2017).
An Overview of the Articles
All the articles in this special issue investigate ethnographically how people search, manage and manipulate documents to secure access to services administered by private and public agencies and institutions. Each article offers an ethnographic close-up of the excessive, uncanny and messy aspects of bureaucratic documents in different settings and shows how affective engagements with documents contribute to generating state imaginings. This special issue highlights how state imaginings emerge from moments of bureaucratic impasse as the pursuit of health, housing and work rights entail an arduous navigation of bureaucratic documents across public and private settings. These moments are often marked by ambivalence as bureaucratic paperwork is a source of both ‘desires and laments’ (Lea 2021: 60), of hope and disappointment, subjugation and frustration vis-à-vis the state. These ‘inchoate desires’ (Lea 2021: 69) shape political subjectivity and influence how individuals narrate their relationship with the state. Often, this narration takes speculative, imaginative and unpredictable forms that transcend the rational and normative framework of bureaucracy.
Through fine-grained and nuanced ethnographic vignettes, Askari attends to how documents and bureaucracy mediate Kurds’ everyday affective dispositions towards two states: the Iraqi state and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). Askari traces how Kurdish hopes for autonomous regional government have gradually eroded under the weight of daily bureaucratic dysfunction. Through her analysis of the overlapping timelines of Iraqi and Kurdish administrative systems, she reveals how expanding bureaucracies have increasingly undermined Kurdish political aspirations. Some of Askari's interlocutors even ponder if going back under Iraqi government administration could spare them the pain of their encounters with the Kurdish bureaucracy. She thus shows how her interlocutors’ dreams and hopes for Kurdish independence, self-governance and modern state morph into disenchantment and vernacular imaginings of the KRG as a ‘mock state’. Yet, she emphasises, the political possibilities of becoming part of the Iraqi state again are fraught with contrasting imaginations and fears: the former rooted in past genocide, the latter in the risk of losing independence and being oppressed and discriminated once more by the state they paradoxically long for.
The paradoxical presence and absence of the state is central to Sansone's article. Through her ethnography in La Petite Sicile in Tunis, she shows how property documents – or their absence – evoke complex affective and imaginative responses among neighbourhood residents living under the constant threat of eviction. This threat is linked to the shadowy figure of Leonidas, a company that residents associate with the previous dictatorial state and its alleged role in redeveloping the neighbourhood and evicting inhabitants. Through detailed ethnographic vignettes, Sansone examines how residents strategically and affectively reveal or conceal documents, a dynamic that fosters the production of narratives about state officials and associates of the former dictator Ben Ali. These state imaginings ultimately ignite residents’ collective fears and anxieties towards the post-revolutionary state which, instead of achieving radical change, is felt as existing in continuity with Ben Ali's dictatorship. By focusing on property documents as repositories of political affectivities in the post-revolutionary period, Sansone offers a poignant analysis of the interplay of state imaginings and state affects in times of rapid sociopolitical changes.
By foregrounding the affective dispositions of state functionaries implementing Chile's Indigenous Territorial Development Programmes, Valdivieso demonstrates how documents and signatures become pivotal in shaping their anxieties and their strategies to navigate accountability under conditions of neoliberal governance. On flexible, fixed-term contracts, the bureaucrats Valdivieso meets in Chile navigate an intricate system of auditing and work performance verification aligned with neoliberal principles of self-discipline and individual accountability. He shows how the inability to secure a valid ‘paper trail’ creates strong anxieties for functionaries and uncertainty about their future livelihood. Valdivieso thus goes beyond the trope of the ‘indifferent bureaucrat’ à la Herzfeld (1992), and argues that documents engender anxieties not only for the users (Allard 2012) but for the state officials themselves. Valdivieso shows that contemporary auditing mechanisms do more than simply reflect the neoliberal state reforms of the 1970s – they actively shape current narratives about transparency and efficiency (see also Graeber 2015). The bureaucrats in his study focus on creating valid paper trails not to advance development goals (Mathur 2016: 169), but to temporarily protect themselves against precarious employment conditions in the public sector. Their frantic efforts to document transparency and efficiency reveal more about job insecurity than administrative effectiveness.
Bonanno explores the conflicting postures of a group of volunteers-turned-bureaucrats running a self-organised grassroots healthcare facility (KIA) in south Athens. While the KIA grants access to resources and services to those able to provide the necessary documents, both volunteers and prospective patients appeal to a shared sense of humanity (anthropia) to negotiate and compensate for missing paperwork. Bonanno unravels emic interpretations of humanity and examines the affective and imaginative dispositions that paperwork and documents – and their absence – sparkle in both the volunteers-turned-bureaucrats and the patients. In so doing, she exposes the dual nature of bureaucracy: on the one hand, it functions as a ‘hope-generating machine’, embodying utopian values for the volunteers, and on the other hand, it amplifies socio-medical inequalities, re-creating the state's presence within a volunteer organisation. Bonanno's contributions expand on the affective and imaginative loads that documents and paperwork discharge when users and bureaucrats are caught in moments of bureaucratic impasse.
Emphasising state affects and imaginings through documents, Moradi discusses negotiations of care through documentary practices and procedures in healthcare institutions in Teheran. Moradi details how Afghan veterans returning to Iran after fighting in Iraq and Syria go through several bureaucratic ordeals to secure some degree of access to welfare services. He reveals the process by which Afghans ‘use’ documents to foster intimate relations with a sovereign state that compels them to produce legal and medical paperwork proving their disability: their disabled bodies not only conjure up their participation in the war but also signify their loyalty to the Shi'a community. Crucially, their disability is what secures access to social and healthcare services.
Acknowledgements
We wish to thank Ahmad Moradi, Lana Askari and Diego Valdivieso for having shared their work with us and for their generosity in commenting on the multiple drafts of this introduction. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive and encouraging feedback and Natalia Buitron for her support throughout the writing process.
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