Political philosophy scholarship on large-scale transformation (environmental, digital, and political) has concentrated overwhelmingly on two moments: the drivers that precipitate change, and the end-states scholars hope to secure or avert. Comparatively little sustained attention has gone to the interval between them. Each of these transformations unfolds faster than existing institutions and norms can adapt to, yet lasts long enough to constitute a distinct political condition in its own right: one that is neither the status quo ante nor the order the transformation is bringing about. This Workshop takes that interval as its object of analysis, asking how institutions and norms inherited from the declining order attempt to guide political life during a period for which they were not designed, before the institutional forms and norms proper to whatever comes next have taken shape. The literature offers several vocabularies for this condition (liminality, transition, transformation, disruption…) each carrying different theoretical commitments and disciplinary lineages. The Workshop does not presuppose any one of these as privileged; contributions are welcome regardless of which conceptual frame they adopt, or whether they propose an alternative altogether. The primary focus is meso-level: institutional and domestic-political responses. The Workshop also welcomes work engaging the micro level (e.g., individual experience of transformation) and the macro level (e.g., norm contestation and change in international politics), since the structural features of this in-between condition plausibly recur across scales.
Existing literatures on climate and ecological crisis, digital and algorithmic governance, and democratic backsliding have developed their own vocabularies for describing rapid institutional strain (resilience, adaptation, erosion, disruption) without much cross-talk about the temporal structure they arguably share. Where the in-between period is addressed at all, it tends to be treated as a problem to minimize on the way to a settled outcome, rather than as a political condition with normative demands of its own. This panel aims to bring together political theorists from diverse traditions, working across the environmental, digital, and political transformations to test whether the interval between these transformations can support genuine comparative and conceptual work, and to put varied vocabularies into direct dialogue.
