Neither apolitical nor governmental, to be involved in politics without aspiring to govern… such are the constraint that delineate the condition common to all practitioners of nongovernmental politics [...] Nongovernmental politics can be envisioned as encompassing the political involvements of the governed, or better still, as the politics in which the governed as such are involved [...] what all these activists all have in common is that they are driven by a shared determination not to be governed thusly. In other words, what specifically concerns ng activists is not who governs – who is in charge, for whose benefit, and to what alleged end – but how government is exercised.

Introduction chapter in: Michel Feher (ed.), Nongovernmental Politics, New York: Zone Books, 2007