A key transformation in the aims of governmentality that neoliberalism introduces is a shift from normalisation and discipline, replaced by a government seeking to control and inform conduct through ‘environmental technologies’ and the establishment of the ‘rules of the game’ (Foucault, 2008). Checkpoints, as well as various encounters with the security apparatus, can be viewed along other strategies of the state to develop such a framework, characterised by everyday practices, representational discourses, and multiple modalities of power (cf. Sharma and Gupta, 2006). For example, other such technologies demonstrate how mundane governmental practices related to spatial and national frontiers such as border patrols, passport checks, and immigration laws help make abstract entities such as the state a very real presence in people's lives (Mitchell 2006). Along those lines, Khalili and Schwedler (2010) point out that in regards to more contemporary investigations of policing, ‘with very few exceptions, most scholarly works are technical discussions of police organisation, rather than a contextualisation of the police and policing within broader political or sociological discussions.’ These forms of scholarly focus give disproportionate weight to the bureaucratic and extreme ends of disciplinary measures undertaken by state authorities. By contrast this paper investigates the varied and gendered performances, utterances and everyday activity that arise out of encounters with the police and security officials to shed light on particular modes of subject formation. With extensive ethnographic fieldwork with over 80 respondents across three popular quarters in Greater Cairo, I explore the constitutive role of security checkpoints which encircle these areas in a shaping the lived experiences amongst male youth (18-35 years), in particular how they find and develop amongst themselves alternate forms of networking and strategies to avoid a repressive state. I demonstrate how such strategies are not merely shirking authority and emphasise the importance of situating these encounters with an approach that underscores their embeddedness ‘in differently configured regimes of power’ (Ong, 1999). As such checkpoints are placed within the global context of security states and the fluid reconstitution of power relationships that they exhibit. Within this perspective, the state is an object of analysis that appears to exist simultaneously as material force and as ideological construct; it seems both real and illusory (Ibid).