A refusenik is a person who refuses to do something they are told or expected to do — join in, follow a rule, obey an order. The word came from a very specific place. In the Soviet Union, Jewish people who asked for permission to leave the country and move to Israel were often told no. Those people were called refuseniks — they were the ones who had been REFUSED. So at the start, the word did not mean the person who refused; it meant the person who was refused. That is a strange twist, and it is worth knowing, because the meaning has since flipped in everyday English. Today, when a British or American speaker says refusenik, they almost always mean the opposite: someone who is doing the refusing, on purpose, and usually for a reason they believe in. A person who will not use a smartphone, will not get a certain vaccination, will not sign the new contract at work — a newspaper may call each of them a refusenik. The tone is important. It is a slightly light, slightly journalistic word. It is not a legal or formal term, and you will meet it more in newspapers, magazines and opinion pieces than in careful writing or in speech. It can sound half-admiring (this person stands firm) and half-teasing (this person is being difficult about nothing). Which one it is depends completely on what the writer thinks of the refusing. The word is much commoner in British English than American. Note also that the person is usually refusing something small or everyday now — the huge political weight of the Soviet original has mostly worn off, though a well-read person still hears it faintly.

拒絕配合的人；(原指) 蘇聯時期被拒絕出境的猶太人。今天英文報導裡多半是前者——刻意不配合、不照做的人，帶點調侃或帶點欽佩，看語氣而定。