Seeing politics through intermediation and intermediaries

This study-day is about exploring the conceptual expanse of intermediation at local, national and international scales. The neo-liberal transformation of regimes of accumulation greatly affected the arrangement of political and state power (Jessop, 2007), functional logics of political actors, governance mechanisms and international diplomacy. Simultaneously, the type of competencies demanded in these fields also adapted to this new configuration. In the process, forms, meanings, and roles of intermediaries morphed into a mass of actors ranging from individuals (brokers, patrons, fixers) to NGOs (national and transnational) and Think-Tanks to nation-states. In this study-day, researchers will present their work about envisioning intermediation not as a peripheral activity but something that connects different fields and scales of socio-political activity together. The sinews of intermediation connects the citizens with state, policies with governments, ideas with political imaginaries and fields of domestic policy and politics with international diplomacy and migration management.