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.

Following the history of western constitutional history, studies of Chinese constitutionalism have tended to focus on its intellectual origins, or, more commonly these days, its failure to restrain official behavior. Drawing upon new archival materials, this article takes a different tack. I zero in on a critical period of constitutional gestation, when officials read the 1954 constitution in draft form, posed questions about its text and suggested revisions. How did officials react when told that citizens, many of whom were recently persecuted, now enjoy “freedom of assembly”? These materials allow us to see “the state” in real time: How did officials understand core legal concepts such as “right,” “constitution” and “citizen” as well as their role in the new polity? In many respects, the discussion surrounding the draft constitution turned out to be a venue for officials to talk about the meaning of the revolution they had just experienced.