Kosmatopoulous’ book Master Peace argues against the claim that political violence, real or perceived, and the social stalemate that feeds it are outcomes of endemic divisions in the Middle East to which experts are the solution. Instead, I show that some of them at least have not only exacerbated the violence and designated it as endemic. I challenge the idea that post–Cold War conflict theory and peace practice, either in the liberal or “local” variant, is a solution to political violence and civil conflict. If anything, master peace introduced new unequal relations of domination articulated through diverse forms of “distance.” He will present four types of distance as domination in contemporary peacemaking: memory, mediation, method, and monitoring. I will end with the Palestinian resistance’s “Zero distance” credo as a possible enacted critique of master peace.
Nikolas Kosmatopoulos is associate professor of anthropology and politics at the American University of Beirut and author of Master Peace: Lebanon’s Violence and the Politics of Expertise (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024); co-founder of the research collective Decolonize Hellas and founding director of the Critical Ecologies Lab at the Mediterranean East (CELME).