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Sequestration, Scholarship, Sentinel: The Post-Politics of Peace (and War)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 October 2014

Nikolas Kosmatopoulos
Nikolas Kosmatopoulos*
Affiliation:
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland; e-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

In Lebanon, diverse sociopolitical projects have sought to mend the wounds, repair the cracks, and overhaul the loss of the devastating civil war (1975–90). Experts and technopolitics have featured centrally in almost all of them. In my anthropological research on expertise on peace and crisis in Lebanon, I explore how, in the decades after the war, an abstract ideal of peace gave way to a distinct space occupied by diverse groups of experts. I analyze how a previously political aim was transformed into a professionalized field around which specialized knowledge domains were developed and technopolitical practices deployed. In this essay I briefly explore this new architecture of expert power based on the technopolitics of peace (and war) in the contemporary Middle East.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 4: World War I , November 2014 , pp. 787 - 790
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

NOTES

Author's note: I am grateful to Talal Asad, Timothy Mitchell, Miriam Ticktin, and Yasmine Khayyat for precious feedback.

1 Jay Heisler, “Summer Camp Repairs Rifts after Nahr al-Bared Crisis,” Daily Star, 1 August 2008.

2 Kosmatopoulos, Nikolas, “The Birth of the Workshop: Technomorals, Peace Expertise and the Care of the Self in the Middle East,” Public Culture 26, no. 3 (2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, vol. 3, The Care of the Self, trans. Hurley, Robert (New York: Pantheon, 1986)Google Scholar; Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995).

3 Clapham, Andrew, “Non-state Actors,” in Post-Conflict Peacebuilding: A Lexicon, ed. Chetail, Vincent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 200–12Google Scholar.

4 Kosmatopoulos, Nikolas, “Towards an Anthropology of ‘State Failure’: Lebanon's Leviathan and the Peace Expertise,” Social Analysis 55, no. 3 (2011): 115–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 International Crisis Group, Crisis Watch no. 54, February 2008.

6 Reinhardt Koselleck, “Crisis,” Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (2006): 357–400.

7 Kosmatopoulos, Nikolas, “Sentinel Matters: The Technopolitics of Crisis in Lebanon (and Beyond),” Third World Quarterly 35, no. 4 (2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 I expand on this in my book project “Master Peace: Governing Violence in Postwar Lebanon.”