State Bureaucracy Research Articles

Affective control: the emotional life of (en)forcing mobility control in Europe

ABSTRACT Current outcomes of immigration enforcement policies and apparatuses call for rethinking the ethics behind our understanding of community belonging, human rights and just society. The ethics at work are often presented as emotions creating particular affective atmosphere that permit the ongoing implementation of enforcing migration. This Special Issue tackles emotions as processes of organizing that are mobilized in support of certain ethics. In the context of immigration enforcement, these emotions are not self-explanatory, but they can justify the potential for violence and even deem it necessary. The emotions or affects of enforcers (as opposed to migrants) have been less addressed, and this Special Issue aims to be a novel collection. The articles pay particular attention to racism and to the understanding of institutional racism within state structures. They reveal the ways in which emotions are instrumental to the operations of state bureaucracy within the repressive migration apparatus and point to the ethics that allows individuals to conform state structures of oppression.

Основные тенденции участия отечественных представительных институтов в государственном внешнеполитическом механизме

The article considers the features of the functioning of early models of the Russian foreign policy mechanism. With this in mind, in the process of research, institutional, historical-genetic and activity methods have been applied. On the basis of a retrospective analysis, the traditional features of domestic systems for making and implementing foreign policy decisions that functioned within the framework of the Ancient Russian State, the Moscow State and the Russian Empire have been characterized. Five main models of the mechanism for the formation and implementation of foreign policy,which were characterized by varying degrees of subjectivity of representative institutions, have been identified: the system of making foreign policy decisions in the Ancient Russian principalities in the X–XIV centuries (a high degree of subjectivity of the veche, taking into account the influence of the activation of external threats and internal instability); 2) the mechanism for the formation and implementation of the foreign policy of the Moscow State in the XVI–XVII centuries (increase in the subjectivity of the Boyar Duma and the Zemsky Sobor in the context of exacerbation of external threats and internal crisis manifestations); 3) foreign policy mechanism of the Russian Empire in the XVIII – early XX centuries (low subjectivity of the Senate, the Legislative Commissions, the State Council in the circumstances of constant external threats, the strengthening of central power and relative domestic political stabilization); 4) the mechanism of foreign policy activity of the Russian Empire in 1906–1917 (a higher level of subjectivity of the State Duma against the background of the crisis of the international system, the aggravation of external threats and internal economic and political problems); 5) a conventionally distinguished foreign policy mechanism that functioned in the period after the February Revolution of 1917 until the formation of the USSR (deviant model: contradictions between the Petrograd Soviet and the Provisional Government on foreign policy issues against the background of the transformation of the system of international relations, the activation of external threats and internal shocks). It has been established that these models (except for the last one, which seems to be a special case) have in common the presence within the state bureaucracy of the dominant role of the «first person», which, at different historical stages, could have the powers of a commander and sovereign, exerting the greatest influence on the process of foreign policy formation. At the same time, the supreme leader, as a rule, relied on a narrow circle of trusted persons in the implementation of their functions in the foreign policy sphere. Traditionally, «power departments» (military, naval, foreign affairs) were personally subordinated to the head of state. It is concluded that the subjectivity of representative institutions within the framework of the state foreign policy mechanism increased in the face of increased external threats and internal crises and, accordingly, decreased against the background of general stabilization and strengthening of the central government.

The appointment mechanism of the ulema to the Ilmiye posts

The new, developing bureaucratic procedures in the nineteenth century had wide-ranging influence over the Ottoman ulema in such areas as professionalization, performance evaluations, examinations for graduation, appointments, and promotions. The central government by increasing its direct control over the Ilmiye members incorporated them into the centralized state system and they became more and more intertwined with state service. During this period, they adapted to the new rules of the current bureaucratized system of the centralized state with their official identities in the education, judicial, and religious affairs of the state bureaucracy. In this respect, this article aims to show that the institutionalization of the Şeyhülislam Office through the Tanzimat process introduced the appointment mechanism of the ulema to the Ilmiye posts in the nineteenth century.

BODIES AGAINST MODERNITY: Politics of Slum Rehabilitations in India

AbstractIndia continues to modernize, and the legacy of political modernity rooted in the European Enlightenment continues to reify itself in India through the performative practices of the body politic. The body politic is a totalized conceptualization of a society imagined in the form of a body, with real exclusionary effects on those without citizenship rights. This body politic is made real through performances of popular sovereignty, bureaucratic state practices and liberal democratic electoral procedures performed during urban development processes. Ethnographic accounts of politics of slum rehabilitations in Pune show that the modern body politic is indeed performatively practised, and reshaped, by the very bodies that are expected to be alienated for the making of the body politic. Bodies meet one another in different spaces and times and generate the possibility of reshaping the liberal body politic into relational and affective bodily politics. Together, bodies become both the site and the means through which political modernity is reshaped in India.

The Spatial Dimension of Police Legitimacy: An Exploration of Two Pacific Island States

The police legitimacy literature is grounded predominantly in studies from the Global North. In these contexts, technology and economic resources allow policing institutions to exercise significant reach in ways that mitigate the challenges to service delivery posed by distance and geography while the bureaucratic state relationally distances these same institutions from the public. This scholarship tends to take these governmental ‘fixes’ as given. In Global South contexts, these fixes are less reliable. The complexities of policing in dispersed states—rural, remote, and island—are frequently mentioned within scholarship. However, the question of how spatial relations impact police legitimacy and services largely remains a passing concern. In this paper, we argue that in the Global South, spatial relations are important elements contributing to police legitimacy. This argument is made by reframing the rural and remote policing literature to explore how spatial archipelagic features influence how policing by the state occurs. This work is used as our analytical scaffold in two case studies of the Solomon Islands and Tonga that illustrate how space influences local views of police. We argue that space is a key contextual characteristic that needs to be considered within future police legitimacy research and theorisation.

Dialogues in Silence

This essay journeys through the silent dialogues and intimacies in Ibrahim Shaddad’s vivid cinematic oeuvre that render him a genre unto himself and a distinctive presence in Sudanese and African cinema. Much of Shaddad’s experimental work deals with the death of the psychic imagination brought about by legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and bourgeois statecraft in Sudan. Shaddad seems interested in the ways the moving picture articulates itself, how it stretches and composes meaning when liberated from the burden of the sonic — a re-evaluation of the terms of language and the auditory. Despite navigating a hostile cultural terrain of state bureaucracy and censorship, his talents for deconstructing the integuments of social reality permeate his filmic work, bending and playing with the boundaries of the art form to create a unique aesthetic encounter, one which is capable of activating the political imagination. Attending to Shaddad’s visual language teaches us something about honesty, makes one more capable of declaring the real and more open to experiments of living.

The effects of policy discourse on the governance of deforestation and forest degradation reduction in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)

AbstractThe international initiative to combat deforestation and forest degradation, known as REDD+, was put on the DRC agenda following actors' policy discourse aimed at convincing policy‐makers of its effectiveness. This paper uses discursive institutionalism (DI) as a theoretical and analytical framework to analyse a set of selected policy documents on REDD+ issue and to assess the effects of policy discourse on deforestation reduction governance in DRC. From an empirical standpoint, interviews with key actors involved in the DRC REDD+ processes and field observations show that four main types of discourse accompanied the adoption of REDD+ in the DRC: a discourse promoting REDD+ through its forest conservation component, as a policy instrument that would bring in significant financial resources to the DRC forest‐related state bureaucracies, a discourse that considers REDD+ as an efficient mean of reducing poverty while promoting sustainability through “green development”, a discourse presenting REDD+ as a way of reducing marginalisation of local communities and indigenous peoples by recognising their customary rights, and finally, a discourse promoting REDD+ as a tool for territorial planning and governance. In addition, the paper points out strong links between DRC REDD+ policy discourse and three types of governance approaches: organisational and fiduciary governance, territorial governance, local development and benefit sharing governance. Our analysis also shows that political discourse has played a significant role in the adoption of substantial policies aimed at reducing deforestation in DRC.

Historical Overview of Development’s Impact on Rural and Urban Governance in Iran

: The constitutional revolution in 1906 was the beginning of a new era for Iran. A national parliament was established for making laws that established modern institutions such as city and village councils and mayors over the decades. Urban governance was renewed and the land reforms in the 1960s transformed rural governance, changed landlord– peasant relations and reduced the traditional authority of village headman (kadkhodas) in village administration. The 1979 revolution introduced a new kind of local governance, Islamic councils for governing cities and villages. This article discusses the main changes and challenges of local governance in Iran by using theoretical concepts of dependent development. The changing pattern of authority and penetration of state bureaucracy through the creation of several rural and urban organizations before and after the Revolution of 1979 is discussed. The article also explains how the establishments of these rural and urban institutions have helped to increase the domination of the state officials within both cities and villages.

Chinese-driven Ghana rosewood trade: Actors and access dynamics

The growing demand for rosewood in China has led to systemic and rapid illegal exploitation in many forest-rich countries in tropical regions, especially in Africa. It is speculated that there is a 26-billion-dollar rosewood industry in China. West African countries contribute about 80% of rosewood to global trade. Ghana has been ranked second in Africa and fourth in the world among top suppliers of rosewood logs to China by volume. Drawing theoretical insights from access theory and based on original empirical research conducted in Ghana from April to August 2022, we analyze how a constellation of actors along the rosewood trade chain had access to that natural resource. In the same vein, we scrutinize the complexity of the related formal and informal network arrangements both between key actors and within state bureaucracies in Ghana. Our research broadly responds to the question of how Chinese investors got access to rosewood in Ghana and examines the different institutional arrangements which encouraged the Chinese-driven trade of rosewood in Ghana. Our findings reveal that there was no formalized agreement between Ghana and China’s rosewood trade as the related domestic market was sporadic and informally initiated in 2009 by a Chinese entrepreneur. The study reveals that different non-state and state institutions (including sectoral state bureaucracies and individuals) benefited from the rosewood trade without recourse to a formal governance structure. The study reveals an embedded informal system of national and community-level arrangements, which enabled access to rosewood and its attendant benefits. This research makes an empirical-based contribution to what drives access to and who benefits from the globalization of natural resources in African countries characterized by ‘political disorder’. From a China-Africa relations perspective, this work contributes to the politics of natural resources and the related sustainability challenges in the context of increasing global Chinese influence in Africa.

Simone Weil and the dangerous Myths of Science and Technology


 In this article I aim to clarify the role of science and technology in Weil's account of the formation and maintenance of the bureaucratic state as a totalitarian form of State, which allows to identify the similarities between capitalist, fascist and communist regimes. In the first section I characterize Weil's conception of modernity. Having The Need for Roots as my main reference, first, I reconstruct Weil's conceptualization of human nature, after I explore the meanings and signs of uprootedness and Weil's critique of Marxism. In the second section, I analyze the relationship between Revolution, Totalitarianism and the invention of the bureaucratic State. I retake Weil's critique of Marx and the Marxists arguing that science and technology must be subjected to a new criticism today, for they have been reduced to mere means of a totalitarian logic, which ultimately reinforces social oppression. I conclude by rescuing Weil's defense of the fundamental value of individual freedom and of thought, for our humanity lies in it.

Ambiguous Ages, Ambivalent Youths: How Asylum Seekers in Germany Navigate Age Categorization

Many of the unaccompanied young migrants who have sought asylum in Germany since 2015 do not own documentation of their birth dates or even know their exact ages. Yet asylum and youth welfare laws distinguish precisely between minors and adults, down to the day, thus making it necessary for the German state to estimate the birth dates of young migrants and compelling some of the migrants to claim to be minors. In this article, drawing on years of ethnographic fieldwork in Berlin, I examine four features of the German state’s age categorization regime that make it so powerful: the discretion of street-level bureaucrats; the weight of written records; a prioritization of precision over accuracy; and—most important—the ability of bureaucrats to switch between the previous three features at will. I analyze the strategies young migrants employ against this regime to influence the outcomes of their own age categorization as well as the challenges inherent in living as a minor or within liminal, uncertain age categories. The latter include widespread distrust and fear of being found out as well as feelings of infantilization and emasculation. I use age categorization as a context in which to reflect on the agency of migrants vis-à-vis state bureaucracies and conclude that young migrants can try to affect only the determination of their own birth dates but have little impact on the prevailing definitions of age and youth. This article thus contributes to the study of categorization processes in international migration, the possibilities for migrants’ resistance, and the politics of time.

To Empower or Safeguard? How Novice Rape and Domestic Violence Victim Advocates Render Institutional Complexity Visible

Organizational life is patterned by shared meanings and practices known as “institutional logics.” Often, multiple logics exist within the same organization in a potentially tense state of “institutional complexity.” Extensive research examines how organizational elites and professionals (i.e., “experts”) manage this complexity by replacing, combining, or segregating contradictory logics. However, experts sometimes manage complexity tacitly, which obscures tensions between logics. This paper, drawing on an ethnographic study of an anti-gender-based violence organization, theorizes inexperience as a lens through which tensions become visible. Analysis of the data reveals that novice victim advocates noticed conflicts between directives to both empower and safeguard victims, practices originating from professional social work and bureaucratic state logics, respectively. In contrast, expert volunteers and staff members tacitly combined these competing logics by empowering victims to safeguard themselves. For organizational scholars, these data show how novices bring attention to contradictions that experts take for granted.

Sanctuaries or Battlegrounds? State Penetration in Places of Worship, University Campuses, and State Bureaucracy for Pro-Government Mobilization: Evidence from Iran (2015–2019)

What factors shape different levels of pro-government mobilization in authoritarian regimes? The existing literature has considered the threat of anti-regime protests as the primary driver of pro-government mobilization. While we confirm this finding in the literature, we argue that the regime’s organizational infrastructure significantly contributes to pro-regime mobilization. We identify places of worship, university campuses, and state bureaucracy as three main sites where states could extend their organizations for pro-government mobilization. Previous scholarship has considered universities and places of worship as free spaces for oppositional activities, but we argue that states might try to penetrate these sectors to extend their organizational reach. The statistical analyses of our original data on pro-government mobilization in Iran from 2015 to 2019 at the district level ( n = 429) provide robust support for this argument.

Господство государственной бюрократии в России

Sociological studies of the last two decades show that according to the vast majority of citizens opinions the Russian state bureaucracy has become a special social estate, separated, alienated from the rest of society. About half of the respondents believe that the power of the bureaucracy in the economy exceeds the power of the President of the Russian Federation, and the majority believe that in modern Russia there is no force capable of limiting the power of the bureaucracy. In public opinion, government officials are practically the only social group that hinders rather than contributes to the development of Russia. To understand the social reality that has developed in our country, it is proposed to use the concept of the state bureaucracy dominion over society and the state. This dominion is ensured by the fact that the state bureaucracy has formed into social estates that serve the state and receive special rights and privileges for this, which are inaccessible to those who are not included in these estates. The service estates receive from the state the necessary resources for their services, which they master, but do not develop. The appropriation of resources for the state bureaucracy is more important than the solution of socially significant problems. Using its dominion to strengthen such an economy, which can be called a distribution economy, the state bureaucracy uses market relations to replenish the resources of change and distribution, and not for the consumption development. A specific bureaucratic reality is being created that differs from the actual one, and therefore the reforms designed within the framework of this reality only bring a worsening of the situation (an example is the reform of the Russian Academy of Sciences). As a result of such bureaucracy dominion market relations are distorted, modern technologies are inefficiently used or not used at all in the economy, public administration poorly uses science in decision-making systems, justice is violated in Russian society and socially significant problems have not been solved for decades. And it can be predicted that, despite such negative consequences for society of its dominion, the state and municipal bureaucracy will not abandon it in the foreseeable future.

Public Administration Under Populist Rule: Standing Up Against Democratic Backsliding

ABSTRACT What happens to democratic administration when populists come to power? This article depicts the contours of the debate within the discipline of Public Administration (PA) about populist attempts to transform the state bureaucracy. It presents the results and limitations of recent empirical research about populist public administration policies and discusses the options for generating more systematic insights. The argument is that populist public administration research needs to improve on three fronts. First, more comparative research is needed in order to identify and explain similarities and differences across affected administrative systems. Second, the threat of democratic backsliding requires scholars to revisit questions about the ethical basis of public administration. Third, as populist backsliding endangers the survival of liberal democracy, PA needs to provide pragmatic and concrete answers as to how administrative systems can be made resilient against threats of illiberal state transformation.

Democratic facades, authoritarian penchants: post-communist monetary restructuring in the Baltic states

ABSTRACT This paper argues that the paths taken by Estonia and Latvia in their departure from the rouble zone are illustrative of authoritarian neoliberal governance. By challenging the widely assumed simultaneity of ‘democratic’ and ‘market’ revolutions, it critiques institutionalist literature on Baltic exchange-rate regimes and sheds light on the various methods employed to curtail democratic political discourse and participation. The paper delves into the origins of the Baltic neoliberal historical blocs and identifies the social forces that influenced the development of monetary reform initiatives. It then explores the construction of exchange-rate systems through the lens of power struggles within the state bureaucracy, as well as the restructuring of state apparatuses to limit public oversight of monetary policy formulation and implementation. Finally, the paper demonstrates how Baltic currency boards effectively facilitated the establishment of externally-oriented capital accumulation regimes.

Contact and control: Engagement and influence among women of color state agency heads

AbstractWhile scholarship is delving into the representation of women and people of color within the U.S. bureaucracy, less is known about these individuals' discretion within their roles. Using an intersectionality framework, this article explores the experiences of women of color in leadership roles within state government agencies, their communication with elected superiors, and perceptions of their own policy discretion and communication compared with White men and women, and men of color. Leveraging the American State Administrators Project, we find that women of color have less communication with elected officials and their staff but also perceive that they have less discretionary control over their departments. This article highlights that while women of color are increasing in leadership roles within state bureaucracies, disparities exist between women of color and their colleagues. We call attention to the disproportionate levels of oversight and discretion perceived by women of color.

Rulemaking Speed in the US States

Abstract This paper explores the speed of rulemaking in American state governments. Drawing on a unique data set of over 250,000 individual rules issued by states from 1993 through 2009, we introduce new measures of the speed and breadth of rulemaking in American state bureaucracies, providing a new way of evaluating the incidence of rulemaking delay within and across governments. We focus specifically on how professionalism and oversight powers of state legislative and executive branches affect rulemaking speed and find that states with more professionalized legislatures and governments with extensive legislative/executive oversight powers experience greater delays in rule adoption. These findings provide important new insights into the politics of regulatory delay and suggest disparate ways in which sub-national governments approach regulatory policymaking in a federal system.

Working with and against the bureaucratic state: histories of grassroots organising for public education reform, 1970s–1980s

ABSTRACT The article introduces an international Special Issue that addresses the significant question of how and why people organise to engage with policy making in the public sphere of education, from a historical perspective. Focusing on the phenomenon of ‘grassroots' community organising during the key formation period of the 1970s and 1980s, the issue collects articles from Australia, Canada, Chile, South Korea, Spain (Catalonia) and the United States for the purpose of examining what ‘grassroots' organising might look like or encompass under different kinds of states and state bureaucratic arrangements. This introductory article outlines the editors’ own research into the Australian context before highlighting how the various articles individually and collectively contribute to questions of 1) expanding understanding of what it means to organise at the grassroots level; 2) the complex relationships between state and school; 3) connections and disconnections between the local, national and international educational domains; and 4) how, methodologically, to capture people, experiences and organisations that may be fully or partly absent from official top down historical records.

Suspicious compassion: On affect and state power in the Dutch asylum procedure

This paper offers a glimpse into the affective work inherent in the practices, objects, and institutional design of the Dutch procedure for seeking and granting asylum. In doing so, I develop the concept of suspicious compassion to make sense of the productive tensions and affects generated in the process of subjecting applicants to a meticulously designed procedural itinerary. Along this itinerary, applicants must ‘open up’ to different immigration officers, who gather and interrogate distressing and intimate information, and inscribe such information in the reports that travel to the next stop on the itinerary. While applicants wait, their accounts are scrutinized by officers in the quiet of ‘objective’ decision-making. By following the procedural itinerary and analyzing the affective complex of suspicious compassion, I contribute to scholarship on asylum and suspicion, and to the study of intimacy and affect in state bureaucracies, moving beyond a focus on single emotions and individual feelings.