Introduction

Drawing on scholarly discussions on bureaucracy and the anthropology of the state as a relational setting, alongside scholarship that positions affect as central to understanding the political realm, this special issue examines the state as a simultaneous focal point of affective and imaginative investment. 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. Expanding their ethnographic scope beyond state bureaucracies, the articles in this special issue offer ethnographically nuanced accounts of how the non-linear workings of private and public bureaucracies – and their ambiguous relations to the state and their fragmented temporalities – create political, affective, temporal and imaginative reorientations in both bureaucrats and (non)citizens vis-à-vis states. We show how affects and imaginings of the state typically emerge from ‘bureaucratic impasses’: temporary stalemates in which both users and bureaucrats strive to understand and interpret, adjust and attune to bureaucratic rules and demands.