Abstract

Governance on the European periphery is frequently diagnosed through the lens of ‘incapacity’ or ‘failed modernization.’ Yet, such diagnostics overlook how dysfunction itself operates as a specific technology of power. This article advances a critical theory of the state by analysing what I term projectocracy. This regime governs not through the production of rational order, but through the strategic management of productive failure. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in post-socialist Romania, I analyse how the subjects of this regime − far from being passive victims − actively curate the state's fictions. My main argument is that these citizens perform the immaterial labour necessary to sustain the bureaucratic apparatus while pursuing their own survival in the shadows. Ultimately, I posit that the state survives not by eliminating its informal shadow, but by becoming structurally dependent upon the very parallel worlds it pretends not to see.