This article aims at investigating how fear shapes everyday interactions between teachers and their ‘chiefs’ (primary school inspectors and pedagogical advisers) in Benin. Drawing on a fifteen-month ethnography in two school districts of the country, the article largely focuses on class visits and inspections, considered as critical events for the study of ‘fear at work’. These moments constitute contexts for immediate encounters between hierarchical authority and teachers and have been the subject of multiple transformations and normative recodifications partly led by international actors, particularly requiring important emotional work from the chiefs. Through a look back at the history of relations between teachers and their chiefs since independence, I suggest that fear works as an operating tool, enabling us to investigate notions of legitimacy and authority through which the state is spoken and performed.

With the affective turn, scholars pay increased attention to the emotional dimensions of everyday life. This special issue builds on this work through an explicit focus on bureaucracies to show what a more sustained attention to affects and emotions can bring to the study of the state, both as an apparatus and as an image. Contributions highlight the importance of ethnographically studying the affective relations and emotional engagements of public servants to understand how representations and practices of the state are brought together in often intangible, sometimes unspoken, but nonetheless powerful ways. In this Introduction we situate our wider contribution and the individual articles in debates about the social lives of the state and the daily practices of public servants. We postulate how affective intensities give rise to particular political imaginations and subjectivities, and we reflect on ethnography’s unique position within the study of emotions and affects in political anthropology.