The Sociology Department at Boğaziçi University cordially invites you to the Sociology Talks 2025-2026 seminar series. Nikolas Kosmatopoulos'

talk titled "Master Peace: On war by other means in Western Asia (Middle East)" will be held on November 6, in Şerif Mardin Seminar Room, Sloane Hall (Sociology-Psychology Building) between 15:00 – 17:00.

Abstract:

Based on multi-sited ethnographic research centering on Beirut, but tracing international peace work as far as Switzerland and the United States, Master Peace 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.

About Nikolas Kosmatopoulos:

Nikolas Kosmatopoulos is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Studies and Public Administration and the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Media Studies. He is the co-founder of the research networks "FLOATS" (Floating Laboratory of Action and Theory at

Sea) the research collective "Decolonize Hellas" and founding director of the Critical Ecologies Lab in the Mediterranean East (AUB). He researches and teaches global politics and political anthropology, international political economy (esp. in the oceans), with a particular interest in the Mediterranean East and the Global South. His recent book "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. His research has been published in leading peer review journals such as Public Culture,

Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Social Analysis, Social Anthropology, Peacebuilding, Third World Quarterly, South Atlantic Quarterly, Comparative Studies of Africa, South Asia and the Middle East, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Environment and Planning D: Society and Place, Antipode: A Radical Journal for Geography, among others. He is currently writing a book on maritime insurgencies.