Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This book explores a crucial but overlooked aspect of political participation—the agency of citizens in their everyday encounters with the state as subjects of laws, targets of policy interventions, and users of public services. The book sheds light on the mundane, subtle, at times illicit forms of evasion, defiance, and negotiation that citizens enact in their frontline encounters with the contemporary democratic state. To do so, the novel ‘meta-ethnographic’ analysis synthesizes rich qualitative evidence from over 150 studies of everyday interaction in police stations and prisons, border control facilities and immigration detention, welfare offices and doctors’ surgeries, court houses and community centres, helplines, and online portals. Yet this analysis also reveals how these everyday acts—though understandable, savvy, and resourceful in isolation—do not seamlessly underpin meaningful opposition or open political engagement. In fact, these acts are more often atomizing, with ambivalent implications for bonds of kinship and community, and they more often enable only temporary respite, further entangling individuals and their communities in long-term relationships of vulnerability and marginalization. These insights matter for democratic reform. They draw vital attention to overlooked repertoires of citizen participation, but also to the need for more productive ways of linking bottom-up agency to a wider infrastructure of political engagement. I conclude by sketching out what this infrastructure might look like, and who needs to champion, make, and maintain it.</jats:p>