Over recent years, public servants from across the world, from French nurses and Belgian social workers to Beninese judges, have been protesting their governments. These protests, some even overt, have erupted in response to specific policies imposed on them or needing to be enforced by them. This Special Issue, however, delves into diverse processes, strategies, actions and practices adopted by civil servants in delivering or administering a public service, be that health care, education, welfare and the like, by extension, seeking to redefine the state or the experience of the state (as a body of institutions, services, public policies, etc.) at the micro-level. Often daily practices of public servants when administering public services directly or indirectly challenge and undermine such legal and policy directives of the government that defy their own idea(l)s of stateness. These findings are drawn from recent works on the making of stateness, which explore the day-to-day work of public servants, especially their interaction with users and their exercise of discretion in implementing public policies. The studies focus on how public servants critically engage with the state and interrogate its policies, mainly to instil (or prevent) political change. A critical engagement with the conflicting loyalties of individual bureaucrats will expand our current understanding of street-level bureaucracies. That also entails observing and analysing their ambivalent responses to new governmental injunctions on a day-to-day basis and their attempts to reinterpret and redefine professionalism as they navigate their conflicting loyalties.

Drawing on ethnographic research across two street-level bureaucratic institutions in Istanbul, Turkey in the late 2010s, this paper traces the causes and implications of the politicisation of bureaucrats in the context of authoritarianisation. It argues that politicisation of bureaucrats cannot solely be taken as a reflection of the erosion of bureaucratic autonomy and capacity but must be explored further to reveal how bureaucrats cope with authoritarian pressure as well socio-legal destabilisations to preserve their institutional ethos. To this aim, I demonstrate how bureaucrats get politicised in response to authoritarian policies and, in turn, labour to uphold the rule of law despite politico-legal risks. The paper particularly focuses on how bureaucrats weave political solidarity and circulate anti-government discourses and how they use their knowledge of the legal-regulatory repertoire and archives to deter and ‘correct’ unlawful practices through their everyday work. The paper generates insights into the fashionings of political subjectivities and agency by bureaucrats through their labouring in the face of authoritarian interventions, legal disruptions and the increasing interactions with the citizenry. In doing this, my objective is to shed light on the everyday workings of authoritarian state and to get a better picture of the way the law is ‘made real’ (Latour, 2002) across mundane encounters between bureaucrats and the citizenry.

How is policy implementation affected by increased polarisation and extreme shifts in politics? In order to address this question, the paper focuses on frontline workers’ (street-level bureaucrats’) interpretations of political shifts and how these are then translated into practice. Building on ethnographic fieldwork conducted among social workers in Northeast Brazil, the paper proposes a theoretical framework for analysing the influence of political landscapes on policy implementation by foregrounding the political processes in which these agents play a critical role. Drawing on empirical data, the paper proposes ideal types of possible outcomes of translation practices – counterbalance, collaboration, resistance – that function as a guiding framework for future research.

This paper builds on ethnographic fieldwork in Belgian welfare administrations to identify daily practices of resistance among Belgian ‘welfare bureaucrats’ who interrogate the new welfare and immigration law reforms that further restrict migrants’ access to social assistance. The contestation strategies are used to circumvent and sometimes break the formal and informal policy guidelines while still allowing them to perform and remain loyal to the state and to higher principles such as a commitment to the fundamental right to human dignity. Three main contestation strategies are identified: failing to provide certain services to demonstrate the absurdity of certain guidelines, writing reports against the administration and in favour of the user, and encouraging litigation against the federal agencies that employ them. These strategies show Belgian welfare workers’ commitment to providing a form of public service that aligns with their professional ethos rather than enforcing specific government policies.

Research has rarely investigated the actions bureaucrats take to challenge the status quo of their organisation from within. Proposing a power-analytical approach to voice, exit and everyday resistance as political strategies of challenging the bureaucratic status quo, I study the difficulties of achieving organisational change in a context of structural constraints on junior bureaucrats’ reformative power. During field research in Niger's Refugee Directorate, I found that despite the associated risks, junior bureaucrats criticised their working conditions and, in confidential conversations, the administration. As precarious staff, they often combined criticism with compliance. In frequent acts of semi-private criticism amongst peers and with external actors, they problematised their working conditions and the state, but performed symbolic conformity in the everyday to avoid sanctions. This strategy nevertheless created autonomy for themselves and mobilised external actors for change-making. In rarer acts of direct criticism voiced to their superiors, the junior staff often complied with the same informal solidarities they vocally criticised.

Since 2012, judges and prosecutors in Benin have repeatedly protested against political interference and demanded compliance with their statutorily guaranteed independence. In 2014 and 2017, magistrates demonstrated in their judicial robes in the streets, protesting against the government's bill to deprive them of their right to strike and other freedoms. Benin has been described as a ‘success story of democracy’ (Stroh and Never, 2006, p. 1) and even as a ‘model democracy’ (cf. Kohnert, 1996, p. 78; Magnusson, 2001, p. 211; Bierschenk, 2009) since its peaceful transition to democratic conditions and its participation in a national conference in 1990/91. So why were magistrates in Benin demonstrating in the streets for the first time in the history of their profession? Based on fieldwork in Benin in 2009 and 2015 and archival research in 2017 in France, my paper analyses the change in the style of interactions between parts of the executive and parts of the judiciary in the history of the profession – a change from political negotiation to confrontation. Through their strikes and industrial action, magistrates fought for judicial independence; yet, at the same time they constructed legality and strengthened democracy because their actions emphasised the rule of law. My paper also considers the specifics of their strikes in the context of other striking civil servants. When magistrates, as bureaucrats, become politically active, it marks a transformation in their self-conception, as they are usually reserved and withdraw themselves from political and public spheres.