Organizing Political Displacement: Expertise, Bureaucracy and the Neutralization of Conflict

This session examines how political conflict is displaced into organizational arenas. It starts from the observation that conflict does not simply disappear when it leaves parties, parliaments, unions, or protest movements. It may instead be processed through expertise, bureaucracy, and governance devices.

By "political conflict," the session refers to disputes over rights, resources, recognition, public priorities, or legitimate forms of political voice. The central question is how such conflicts are translated by organizations through expert procedures, bureaucratic categories, professional norms, administrative files, consultation mechanisms, or project-based formats.

The session’s working hypothesis is that organizational displacement often neutralizes conflict by transforming political claims into technical problems, procedural issues, or manageable cases. Yet this neutralization is never complete. The same organizational arenas may also generate new forms of contestation, refusal, visibility, or negotiation.

The session welcomes papers on the political displacement of conflict through expertise, bureaucracy, and governance devices. It is especially interested in bureaucratic, professional, developmental, international, public-private, or reform-oriented organizations operating in contexts often described as post-political, such as authoritarian or post-authoritarian settings, crisis governance, environmental transitions, migration management, welfare reform, and labor-market or professionalization policies.

Rather than opposing “real politics” to “mere organization,” the session asks how organizations become practical sites where political conflict is displaced, translated, neutralized, and sometimes reopened.

Contributions may be theoretical, empirical, comparative, or methodological and may draw on different regions, including the Middle East, North Africa, the Mediterranean, Latin America, Africa, and Asia.