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 context of war and armed conflict, 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 response 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 the legitimization of territorial control and forced assimilation. Complex dilemmas emerge: should SLBs continue providing services to the population—thus risking complicity with the occupiers and being branded as “traitors”—or should they refrain from any contact with them, at the risk of facing violent punishment? Our analysis draws on qualitative data collected through fieldwork in six Ukrainian regions; semi-structured and in-depth interviews (both online and face-to-face) with education professionals who experienced the Russian occupation; and qualitative document analysis of media coverage and human rights reports. Following an abductive research design, 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 response strategies—exit, accommodation, local defiance, and remote adaptation—each grounded in distinct moral decisions. 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.