Over the last years, public servants from across the world, from French nurses and Belgian social workers to Beninese judges, have been protesting their governments. They have resorted to interrogating, acting contrary to, and protesting against the specific policies that they must enforce as being imposed upon them. In general, bureaucratic principles include loyalty, obedience and compliance – but what if public servants disobey their governments, using daily practices to undermine legal and policy directives? What happens if the making of public services gets politicised? In this special issue of International Journal of Law in Context, we ask what happens when bureaucrats become political.

Drawing from five examples in four continents – Benin, Belgium, Brazil, Turkey and Niger, we explore the strategies, actions and practices adopted by civil servants in these countries in delivering and administering a public service. We show that the researched public servants critically engage with the state and interrogate its policies, some of them protesting and acting ‘against’ the state, its institutional norms, policies, and guidelines. We focus on the norms they mobilise or refer to, and their effects. In Turkey, bureaucrats in two election offices defended the autonomy of their organisation against political overreach (Saglam). In Brazil, bureaucrats translated political scenarios before any actual legal or policy changes (Eíro). In Belgium, welfare workers circumvented restrictive administrative guidelines to ensure provision of social assistance (Andreetta). In Niger, young state employees criticised in everyday resistance their working conditions and the administration (Lambert). In Benin, judges and prosecutors organised a political protest movement and fought for judicial independence (Kolloch).

We argue that bureaucrats become politicised, meaning that they act in awareness of their actions diverging from the policies or the expectations of their superiors, counteract or resist official policies. The ambivalence between high bureaucratic ideals and their personal professional or ethical norms can eventually lead to political unrest, to which several strikes of bureaucrats in Europe and beyond testify. Using conventional methods of actions, such as strikes, bureaucrats draw attention to their own role and put forth their own political demands and, ultimately, change the political system through legal force. Our special issue highlights bureaucrats’ attempts to strengthen the rule of law and democracy as serving to improve public service, and their attempts to foster political and legal change from the bottom up.

Focusing on how and why bureaucrats all over the world engage with and question state policies and government guidelines allow us to delve into public servants’ understandings of stateness, the law, and their reflections on professionalism – and, ultimately, their seeking for a better rule of law.

Read the new International Journal of Law in Context special issue, Politicised Bureaucrats: Conflicting Loyalties, Professionalism and the Law in the Making of Public Services.

Sophie Andreetta is a research fellow with the Belgian National Fund for Research (FRS-FNRS). Her work focuses on how citizens, public servants, and legal professionals appropriate laws and public policies for use in their day-to-day work, often relying on litigation to achieve specific social or political effects. Her most recent publications include “The Symbolic Power of the State: Inheritance Disputes and Litigants’ Judicial Trajectories in Cotonou”, an article published in PoLaR (2020), and a special issue titled “Governing Migration through Paperwork” in the Journal of Legal Anthropology (2019).

Annalena Kolloch is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Anthropology and African Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. Currently, she is conducting research as part of the DFG-funded project “Police-translations – multilingualism and the everyday production of cultural difference”. Her PhD dissertation in social anthropology, which studies the roles of judges and prosecutors in the struggle for judicial independence in Benin, is published under the title: “Faire la magistrature au Bénin – Careers, Self-Images and Independence of the Beninese Judiciary (1894-2016)”, Mainzer Beiträge zur Afrikaforschung vol. 46, Rüdiger Köppe 2022. Her more recent research interests focus on the judiciary, policing, and police-citizen interactions as well as language mediation in such interactions.