How Wars Impact Public Administration and Street-Level Bureaucracy: Teachers and Education Professionals on the Frontlines of the Russian Occupation in Ukraine

Abstract

The actions of street-level bureaucrats (SLBs)—such as teachers, healthcare workers, and police officers—during crises and emergencies have received growing attention in Public Administration scholarship. Yet a critical and underexplored dimension remains: the role of SLBs in contexts of war and armed conflicts, where threats to personal safety, political coercion, and institutional collapse converge. This article investigates how war—and military occupation in particular—reshapes the everyday work, moral dilemmas, and coping strategies of SLBs operating under extreme conditions. We focus on the war in Ukraine—the most intense armed conflict on European soil since World War II. Within this context, we examine education professionals, as schools and universities have become strategic targets of Russian occupation forces: cultural frontlines central to territorial control and forced assimilation efforts. Our analysis draws on a semi-remote ethnography combining fieldwork in six Ukrainian regions, semi-structured and in-depth interviews (both online and face-to-face) with education professionals that experienced the Russian occupation, as well as qualitative analysis of interviews, media coverage, and human rights reports. Using an abductive approach, we identify four structural features that distinguish war from other crises: forced interaction with enemy state actors, institutional weaponization, loyalty dilemmas, and bureaucratic rupture under contested sovereignties. Building on these findings, we propose a fourfold typology of SLB coping strategies—exit, accommodation, local defiance, and remote adaptation—each grounded in distinct moral dispositions. By bringing SLBs into the analysis of wartime governance, this article contributes to an emerging research agenda on frontline bureaucracy under conditions of armed conflict—contexts that, alarmingly, are no longer exceptional.