In much anthropological reflection on value creation through objects, value is conceptualized as created in circulation. Yet objects’ social lives are punctuated by periods of waiting as much as they are by movement. Waiting can thus be theorized and examined as a critical pause in the circulation of objects, one that enables their value transformation and creation via social actors, institutions,

In South Africa's urban hubs, young women are increasingly participating in the global fertility market by donating their eggs. Egg providers, who supply oocytes for others’ use in fertility treatment, are a key resource in the fertility market, and they are emblematic of new forms of biolabor. Egg markets have tapped into a precariously middle‐class population of young Black women in Johannesburg

Contemporary technoscience is rife with hype—inflated claims that rapidly propagate in favor of the next “new thing.” While scholars often strive to debunk and dispel hype, Tanzanian technologists working in health care face a different challenge: navigating hype. As these technologists embark on new projects in machine learning and other forms of AI, contending with hype becomes crucial. These actors

Political risk forecasting is an industry that provides specialized analysis to a range of clients, including insurance companies, extractive industries, governments, defense ministries, and NGOs. Risk forecasters aim to help their clients mitigate risks by anticipating political developments that could threaten their investments and assets, especially in the “emerging markets” of the Global South

On November 13, 2020, the Sahrawi movement for national liberation, known as the Polisario Front, resumed its armed struggle against Morocco's occupation of Western Sahara. With this decision, the movement put an end to a 29‐year‐long peace process throughout which the implementation of international law had been indefinitely deferred. During this cease‐fire, the Polisario used humanitarian aid to

British Muslim volunteers in Syria have been variously cast as humanitarians, activists, and—under the suspicious gaze of the war on terror—disguised militants. Yet many volunteers frame their efforts as attempts at iṣlāḥ (reform, repair, rectification). What is the ethicopolitical life of iṣlāḥ, a multivalent concept in the Islamic tradition, in a landscape marked by war and international relief efforts

The chilling infiltration by technologies of state power that make up modern governance is brought home by each of the articles in AE’s “Citizenship, Solidarity, and Nonbelonging” forum. In reflecting on them, I pose the question: Can we move beyond descriptions of human agency entirely within the cracks and fissures of state governance? Or can we develop a richer futural imagination that goes beyond

Contemporary white supremacy often takes hold through strategies of racial disavowal. One strategy that political parties and regular citizens in Bulgaria use is what I call determined indeterminacy. Determined indeterminacy is a collective, institutionalized method of denying the ubiquitous systemic racism that undergirds social life. It allows people to naturalize white supremacy and render it adaptably

The authors in this forum highlight collective action that gives way to new scripts of citizenship. This collective action also opens new spaces of common life, where people can perform the politics of being with others. I ask whether the concepts of commoning and sociability, rather than the language of solidarity and belonging, would be more suitable to capture the dynamics of contemporary citizenship

This commentary engages the articles in the “Citizenship, Solidarity, and Nonbelonging” forum by discussing three points: citizen participation in and challenges to bureaucratic practices; the spatialities of citizenship and belonging; and the potentials for co‐optation of civic mobilization vis‐à‐vis the privatization of state responsibilities. It concludes that citizen mobilizations can effectively

This commentary asks what would change about the analyses in AE’s “Citizenship, Solidarity, and Nonbelonging” forum if the state were not assumed as the background. Using research on unrecognized states and their citizens, the commentary urges a return to the problem of sovereignty that takes seriously the desires that sovereignty evokes. Doing so, it argues, can help us understand the shape that political

This short commentary argues for the utility of a suitably expansive idea of citizenship, one that opens complex terrains for analysis: where citizens work with, against, and alongside the state, and where state power is enabled and sidestepped through multiple embodied processes. I consider the nature of the citizen‐state encounter in each article in AE’s “Citizenship, Solidarity, and Nonbelonging”

In Thailand, the volatile period from 2019 to 2023 was marked by changing material and political atmospheres. Air pollution, the COVID‐19 pandemic, and government restrictions on speech transformed how Thai citizens breathed and how they related to the monarchy. Understanding this period as a history of breath reconceptualizes the citizen‐body as volumetric, recasting politics as an intermaterial practice