BOOK TALK | Master Peace with Nikolas Kosmatopoulos & Yasmine Khayyat

Join us for a book talk with author Nikolas Kosmatopoulos on his latest book, Master Peace, which 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 racialized tropes of conflict and communalizing peace practices. The assemblage of these tropes and practices, which Kosmatopoulos calls “master peace,” naturalizes 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. Kosmatopoulos shows how master peace has been framing debates, designing interventions of peace and war, and defining the problem of violence in Lebanon and the Middle East for decades, to deleterious effect. As the supposed moral high ground that justifies external intervention and precludes political solutions or democratic forms of action, master peace has obscured the geopolitical and ideological nature of violence in the region, substituting democratic notions of peace for an elitist antipolitics of expertise characterized by dependence, domination, and epistemic violence. ___ Nikolas Kosmatopoulos is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Studies and the Department of Anthropology, Sociology, and Media Studies at the American University of Beirut. He is co-founder of the research collectives Floating Laboratory of Action and Theory at Sea and Decolonize Hellas. His research and teaching fields of interest include political anthropology, policy expertise and global institutions, and in particular peacemaking, statebuilding and crisis resolution in the Middle East, and as of late, the politics of solidarity and resistance at sea and the political economies of ships. His research has been published in Peacebuilding, Social Anthropology / Anthropologie Sociale, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Public Culture, Third World Quarterly, Social Analysis, Millenium, and Anthropology Today, among others. Yasmine Khayyat is Associate Professor of Arabic literature in the Department of African, Middle East, South Asian Languages and Literatures (AMESALL) at Rutgers University. Her research and teaching interests include contemporary Arabic literature and poetry, cultural memory studies, and human/animal relationships in Arabic fiction. Her first book War Remains: Ruination and Resistance in Lebanon was published by Syracuse University Press on May 15, 2023. It examines the figuration of the ruin as a site of resistance and potentiality in modern Lebanese novels, poetry, and sites of memory. Khayyat has articles published in the Journal of Arabic Literature, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies and Critical Inquiry, among others.