Informal Practices and Repertoires of Resistance: The Politics of Informality Between Everyday Life and Collective Action

This panel examines informality as a political terrain through which collective actors negotiate power relations and build solidarities that sometimes challenge, sometimes reproduce dominant norms. It approaches it as a set of practical repertoires embedded in both formal governance and everyday life. Drawing on conceptual work and ethnographic cases, the panel explores how informal practices sustain collective agency, often under conditions of repression, exclusion, and neoliberal fragmentation. This panel brings together four scholars-activists working at the intersection of political anthropology, urban studies, critical social theory, and resistance studies to examine informality as a key terrain of multiple forms of resistance. Informality has long been treated as a residual, marginal domain, or merely a response to institutional failure. In contrast, the panel approaches it as a set of practical repertoires through which collective actors negotiate power relations and build solidarities that sometimes challenge, sometimes reproduce dominant norms, often under conditions of repression and exclusion. Building on recent scholarship that understands informality as relational and deeply entangled with formal governance, the panel shifts the analytical focus toward its collective and political dimensions, which often remain implicit. From a practice-oriented perspective, informality is understood here as a constitutive element of social and political action, instead of being reduced to rule-breaking or illegality. Collective agency operates through hybrid repertoires that combine institutional engagement with everyday negotiation and spatial, subtle forms of contestation. The political meaning of such practices is never given in advance: they may reproduce domination, enable survival, or open possibilities for transformation. Marco Allegra will produce a conceptual map of the relations between the ideas of “informality” and “resistance” by examining key references emerging from the literature. Matteo Savoldelli analyzes the political potential of gatherings beyond their organized forms (assemblies and protests), exploring informal modes of aggregation (spontaneous meetings in squares and streets, night-time youth socializing, use of public or abandoned spaces for cultural or mutualistic activities, raves,...). Based on ethnography with illegalized migrants in Switzerland, Louis Vuilleumier analyzes squats as “refuge-zones”, challenging the implicit divide between allegedly meaningful collective actions and supposedly opportunistic individual practices by showing how these squats operate as hybrid sites of (self)care and resistance. Miria Gambardella draws on the zapatista experience to disrupt the eternal divide between silent and loud resistance, showing that the possibility to overcome dual rationalizations lies in the politization of concrete repertoires of action. The panel explicitly engages with debates in Resistance Studies concerning the “immense political terrain” between quiescence and revolt (Scott 1990), foregrounding forms of resistance that operate alongside overt mobilization. It explores how actors navigate this terrain by reclaiming spaces of autonomy and forging collective identities through informal modes of organization. It emphasizes spatial and relational practices, offering a lens for understanding how collective agency is sustained over time under conditions of increasing repression and neoliberal fragmentation.