Boundary Flouters – Porous Organizations, Intermediaries Redefined, and the New Unaccountability

The lecture will take stock of the transformation of policy elites and intermediary organizations in contemporary politics. Myriad new spaces of policy, governance, and influencing have opened up over the past several decades, and ever-more intermediary entities and players have arisen to fill them. These intermediaries, increasingly novel entities and players that defy classification, have reorganized relations with states in a remade ecosystem characterized by more porous and blurred boundaries. In this new ecosystem, influencing and resource mobilization are more indirect and difficult to detect, as intermediaries often traverse and suspend boundaries of state and private, enabling new means of deniability and unaccountability and challenging democracy. These new modes of organizing relations with the state suggest that the concept of intermediaries itself may warrant rethinking.

Janine R. Wedel is University Professor in the School of Policy, Government, and International Affairs at George Mason University, Washington, DC. She inter alia published “Shadow Elites” (2009) and “Unaccountable: How Elite Power Brokers Corrupt Our Finances, Freedom, and Security” (2014).

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