Scholars have long documented changes in knowledge regimes and power relations characteristic of state‐centric drives to pacify conflicts and govern populations. But the mechanisms through which social conflicts are “made legible” in routine policy processes – as well as the reasons why some ongoing conflicts are pacified and others are persistent – have remained less clear. I explore these issues through an analysis of the shifting analytic terrain of national‐level commissions of inquiry, an historically powerful form of government organization designed to combine publicly‐engaged and “objective” explanation with recommendations for concrete policies of governance. Drawing principally on 19th and early 20th Century British Royal Commissions, I show how investigations into three fields of social conflict – involving prisoners, the working class, and colonial populations – were characterized by cyclical drives to bureaucratize conflict. Yet strikingly, only two of the three substantive fields – prisons and labor – achieved relative bureaucratic closure. Evidence from commission reports is marshaled to explain why some types of conflict have been resistant to incorporation, while others are more readily absorbed into an apparatus of governance.