Based on multi-sited ethnographic research centring on Beirut but tracing international peace work as far as Switzerland and the United States, Master Peace: Lebanon's Violence and the Politics of Expertise (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024) examines the politics of expertise in the application of metropolitan theories of violence and practices of peacemaking in post–civil war Lebanon. Through ethnographic encounters, archival research, and interviews that shed light on the worlds of academic research, UN agencies, NGOs, and think tanks, Nikolas argues that so-called experts, from violence researchers to peace professionals, have often misrepresented and exacerbated the violence they claim to be tackling, through their deployment of racialised tropes of conflict and communalising peace practices. The assemblage of these tropes and practices, which Nikolas calls “master peace,” naturalises social and structural inequalities by collapsing them into supposedly innate cultural and sectarian divisions. Master Peace installs unequal relations of domination through the work of metropolitan theories, as in “ethnic conflict” and “failed state,” and practices, such as conflict resolution workshops and crisis reports, converting the radical demand for just peace into a postcolonial regime of dependence on technocratic tools, unaccountable experts, and external donors.

About the speaker

Nikolas Kosmatopoulos is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Studies and Public Administration and the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Media Studies. Before joining AUB, he taught at Columbia University, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Sciences Po Paris, and University of Zurich. He is the co-founder and member of the research network "FLOATS" (Floating Laboratory of Action and Theory at Sea) and the research and community work collective "Decolonize Hellas". He works at the intersection of global affairs and political anthropology, international political economy and insurgencies in non-human environments, particularly the oceans, anticolonial action and thought in the Mediterranean East. His research interests include: peacemaking and crisis in Western Asia; insurgent politics and political economies at sea; decoloniality and the Global South.