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IAS Book Launch: Master Peace. Lebanon's Violence and the Politics of Expertise
12 May 2025, 6:00 pm–8:00 pm
Join author Nikolas Kosmatopoulos for the launch of his new book which examines the politics of expertise in the practices of peacemaking in post–civil war Lebanon.
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
Institute of Advanced Studies
Location
-
IAS Common Ground (G11)ground floor, South WingUCL, Gower St, LondonWC1E 6BTUnited Kingdom
ABOUT THE BOOK
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 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 Kosmatopoulos 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 Kosmatopoulos 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.
Master Peace. Lebanon's Violence and the Politics of Expertise was published in December 2024 by University of Pennsylvania Press.
ABOUT THE EVENT
Join the author Nikolas Kosmatopoulos for a presentation of his book. He will then be in conversation with Craig Larkin (Institute of Middle Eastern Studies, King's College London). The evening will be chaired by Estella Carpi (UCL Department of Risk and Disaster Reduction).
This IAS Book Launch is a collaboration with the UCL Middle East Research Centre.
About the Speaker
Nikolas Kosmatopoulos
Assistant Professor of Politics and Anthroplogy at American University of Beirut
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.