How do contemporary subjects navigate, withstand and even contest the particular governmental assemblages that define regimes of power today? The article addresses this question by considering ‘refusal’, which has emerged as an increasingly potent empirico-theoretical anthropological concept by, in part, marking an explicit contrast with the longer-standing concept of ‘resistance’. Through analysis of resistance and refusal literatures, and with reference to fieldwork with Burmese grassroots activists and Rohingya civil society actors, the article delineates resistance and refusal as divergent but intertwined tools for engaging different aspects of any given apparatus of power. Where resistance describes opposition to direct domination (sovereign modes of power, following Foucault’s schema), refusal describes the disavowals, rejections and manoeuvrings with and away from diffuse and mediated forms of power (governmentality). To the extent that contemporary apparatuses of power typically constitute a hybrid assemblage of sovereign and governmental forces, subjects of population groups draw upon both resistance and refusal tactics in their navigations of these apparatuses, navigations that refigure the collective resisting/refusing subject. Resistance and refusal hence operate in a quasi-dialectical relation, meaning that through a play of recursivity between apparent converse strategies (direct confrontation versus evasion) groups come to fortify stronger positions from which they can persist. Resistance and refusal not only constitute the conditions of each other’s possibility, sharpening the particular interventions that each makes, but demonstrate the necessity of a politics of manoeuvre in which subjects—as individuals and part of collective groups—oscillate between direct confrontation and governmental navigation.

当代的主题如何导航，承受甚至挑战今天定义权力制度的特定政府组织？本文通过考虑“拒绝”解决了这个问题，“拒绝”已经成为一种越来越强大的经验理论人类学概念，在某种程度上与长期存在的“抵抗”概念形成了鲜明的对比。通过对抵制和拒绝的文献进行分析，并参考与缅甸基层活动家和罗兴亚公民社会参与者的田野调查，文章将抵制和拒绝描述为使任何给定权力机构的不同方面参与的分歧但交织在一起的工具。抵制描述了对直接统治的反对（遵循福柯的模式的主权权力模式），拒绝则描述了反对，排斥和操纵与分散和介导的权力形式（政府）相背离。在某种程度上，当代权力机构通常是主权和政府力量的混合体，人口群体的主体在他们对这些机构的导航中，既采用了抵抗策略，也采用了拒绝策略，这种导航表明了集体抵抗/拒绝主体。因此，抵抗和拒绝是在准辩证关系中进行的，这意味着，通过在明显的相反策略（直接对抗与逃避）之间发挥递归作用，各团体可以巩固自己可以坚持的立场。抵制和拒绝不仅构成了彼此可能性的条件，还加剧了彼此的特殊干预，