Programme de bourses "Jeunes Chercheurs"

Expert Institutions: Peacemaking in Lebanon
 

"Peace in the Middle East” embodies today much more than one of the chief messages of prayers in mosques, churches and synagogues around the globe, or the main motto of world leaders and Nobel Peace Prize laureates. Rather, it constitutes a widespread institutionalised and professionalised field of expertise (discourse and practice) based on distinct historical roots and structured through particular “situated knowledges” (Haraway). Yet, despite – or perhaps because of -the popularity of the peace discourse, the professional field of peacemaking is rarely the object of research from the perspective of critical anthropological inquiry. Rather, in most cases, researchers either investigate the efficacy of peacemaking interventions stemming from the West to the “Rest” (eventually to find them failing or in need of improvement), or attempt to shed light on some structural features of peacemaking institutions either in the West or in the “Rest” (eventually to offer recommendations and shifts in orientation). This research project was less concerned with recommendations or with the need to examine the efficacy of peacemaking interventions. It adopted a radically different perspective that takes the formation of a field of expertise as the sociological point of departure. Thus, it valued questions pertaining to expert authority and legitimacy, competition among peace experts and the relationship between the producers and consumers of expertise, the latter being state elites or simple citizens. In this sense, this project offered new insights and spurred action-oriented debate on two different levels: academic and societal. At the academic level, it sought to analyse the specific ways in which experts in peacemaking are functioning, i.e. how do they produce knowledge, undertake advocacy, secure their legitimacy, render their accounts authoritative and address their diverse constituencies. Moreover, it attempted to delineate the interactions and entanglements of the peace expert field with other professionals in adjacent fields (diplomacy, media, official politics, state bureaucracy, local community authorities). At the level of the broader public, the project spurred considerable debate on these issues. Instead of taking the field of peacemaking as a coherent monolith that allows for no diversity, the research project sought to differentiate between different actors, practices and ideal-types of the field. Thus, there were three distinct institutionalised forms of peace expertise that were ethnographically approached: first, the beefed-up military presence of the United Nations Peacekeepers in the South of Lebanon (UNIFIL); second, the initial efforts of an international peacemaking NGO to set foot in the country; and third, the semi-official dialogue sessions between leading Lebanese political personalities which have been taking place under the auspices of the Swiss government and the Swiss Foreign Ministry. One of the main arguments of the research is that expert backgrounds, as well as legitimacy struggles among different types of expertise, play a significant role in the ways that “peace” In Lebanon is defined, addressed and acted upon. These struggles often result in a growing disentanglement of the peacemaking structures from those domains of political action and articulation, where emancipatory politics and civil initiatives are strong and influential. Additionally, instead of comprehensive linkages to local society, other mechanisms of accountability, visibility and control have been put into place, such as media and external donors. Away from the domain of “politics proper”, the issue of peacemaking/conflict resolution/dialogue was eventually transformed into an expert domain, where mechanisms of exclusion, a-historical perceptions, essentialised paradigms and processes of depoliticisation prevail.

Presented by:
Nikola Kosmatopoulos

Address in Switzerland
Department of Anthropology
Zurich University, Büro AND 5.11
Andreassstrasse 15, 8050 Zürich
Tel. +41 44 635 22 45
Email: kosmatopoulos@ethno.uzh.ch

Thesis Supervisor:
Prof. Shalini Randeria, Anthropology Department Zurich

Local Partner Institution:
Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs (IFI)
408 Diana Tamari Sabbagh (DTS) Building, American University of Beirut
P.O.Box 11-0236, Riad el Solh,
Beirut 1107 2020, Lebanon
Tel: +961-1- 737627, ext 4150
Email: ifi@aub.edu.lb

 

Story Telling:

War in the neighbourhood

“Just one or two windows broken”, my landlady reassures me over the phone. “We will fix them soon, but it is hard to find glass-cutters these days. They have no time”. I have learned not to believe her. Especially ever since she promised me she would get that radiator fixed and never did before it was summer. I flew to Beirut on the first flight from Athens, a few hours after the airport re-opened. In the taxi to Hamra, the accusation of treason grew stronger and stronger in me, amplified by a perverted cynicism that often characterises travellers in History. My apartment in Hamra was my "first-row table to the show", as I used to say; yet, when war did happen, I was out for ...cigarettes. Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History came to my mind; I was quite sure I saw him out of the aeroplane’s window leaving Beirut exhausted as I was landing. The spectacle before my eyes as I entered the apartment took my breath away. Dust and smithereens everywhere, windows all down, walls riddled with bullets, wooden doors cracked, the air-conditioner hanging virtually dead. An RPG rocket had been pinned into its guts, Kalashnikov bullets had pierced the balcony’s concrete. A hole was hanging open at the ceiling. “Time to finally meet the tight-lipped neighbour", I cynically thought to myself. The American of the third floor didn’t speak much when I ran into him at the stairs: a true sphinx. I took him for a shy guy, the out-of-fashion chequered short- sleeved shirts he was wearing only stylishly adding to that view. Yet now, machine guns had offered us an irresistible communication channel that would only close by a good dosage of plaster a few days later.
The sense of lapse from duty was relatively soon replaced by a feeling of perplexity, as I could not understand how and why the commandoes deprived us of our only source of cool air in the middle of the summer on the one hand and what reasoning was behind this unprecedented form of cross-Atlantic dialogue they had launched on the other. Friends of mine, reporters, had told me that generally commandoes did not shoot randomly, their targets were chosen. Houses all around, windows, balconies, air-conditioners they were all in perfect condition, a fact that made our own riddling with bullets even more arousing. The existing general local people’s wariness towards almost every one from the West -in this case me and my Westeuropean roommate- was now boosted by the implied accusation of “knowing in advance”, considering that we had both abandoned Beirut a few days before May’s events. One doesn’t need to have a paranoid mind to end up with the conclusion that firing at the air-conditioner was a mere warning for the imminent “change of climate” towards us.
I spent the first night tossing and turning in bed beneath windows and suspicions hanging dangerously over my head. The next morning, unusually early, I went down to the first floor and knocked on the door of the landlady, determined to solve the mystery. The house-owners, an aged couple with an only spinster daughter, are Christian Orthodox, of the old middle-class of Beirut, with love for honour and love for money and with an innate belief that these two should absolutely go hand in hand in every occasion. They treated me Arab coffee and Damascus sweets, presenting me what was left from the anti-air-conditioner rocket almost with a sense of pride, as if they had launched it themselves. At the first sip of coffee, they served me the first version of events. Officially, nobody really knew exactly why the shooting had taken place but probably it was the poor African Ethiopian servant’s fault, who wanted to admire the warriors behind the curtain. “They took her for a sniper and opened fire at will.”
A good effort, I think to myself, but this scenario is too surrealist and grotesque, even for the Arab homeland of surrealism, Lebanon. The young age and lack of experience of certain fighters could not rule out misunderstandings, but to confuse a chubby housemaid with a skilful gunman was too much; all the more, shoot almost two floors above the alleged target. Without any further resistance, house-owners fled in panic defeated by my distrusting battery of questions and formed their second line of defence behind this new explanation: our next-
door neighbour, at the level of my balcony, is a follower of Jumblatt, the Druze government- allied leader. Bullets served as a warning! My most of the time hard-of-hearing landlord in fact claimed that he heard them yell the name of the Druze leader, embellishing it with “words of love” as they fired at the balcony across the street!!!
Ingenious minds those Lebanese: they have deservedly earned their reputation for the best Middle East merchants: they can sell you sand for gold, in this instance, bullocks for whizzing rockets and vice-versa. Embittered by the coffee and blind talk, half-way through I get up and leave, strongly emphasising on the protesting character of the attempt. Stimulated by a Sherlock Holms mood, I decided to approach the alleged root of evil, the housemaid. A few minutes earlier, as I was walking up the stairs, I had seen her hang the laundry in the backyard. Immigrants from Africa and East Asia are the hidden disgrace of Lebanese petit bourgeois. Waltzing into and out of their houses every day, working for a piece of bread, they are in the best position to wash their bosses’ dirty linen in public. I approach her attentively and awaitingly, bid her good morning and ask her what happened that fatal night. She greets me with a coy smile only to reveal her perfect teeth and an impossible, unbelievable story.
That night she had really been hiding behind the curtain, watching fighters move with much caution through the alleys. She had however made sure to turn lights out before, to be certain that nobody could see her. Suddenly, as gunmen approached the next corner, a blinding shining lit up the alley. The shining came from our building’s third floor; it was so intense that gunmen were taken aback. Almost impulsively, they aimed high and fired with the Kalashnikovs to give the RPG shooter time to arm. In a few seconds, the shooter placed the small mortar over his shoulder and launched the rocket, destroying the air-conditioner in a big blast. The rest of the fighters hurried to find cover behind the wall, waiting for the answer back. A few moments pass by in breathless suspense, before the most composed of the fighters yells out loud that the shining was most probably coming from a camera, nothing more lethal than that! It appeared that what intensified the shining was the neighbouring building’s façade covered from top to bottom in glass, which was all at once made into a huge mirror! The servant breathes again relieved; fighters quickly overcome this ridiculous situation swearing and move ahead running. The American of the third floor hides his camera and runs too inside the apartment to get cover, only to find a bullet embedded in his mattress. The thread unravels. The next day, the Lebanese landlords decide in chorus to blame the African servant in order to protect their American lodger.
Why does all this remind me something of a post-colonial syndrome?, I wonder waiting for no reply. Having unravelled the mystery, I light up a cigarette at my balcony, gazing at the three- storey building that hosts me being reflected on the glass panels across the street. Passing my glance from the third to the first floor, all the way to the back yard, I realise how easily this neoclassical Hamra building turned into a symbolic metaphor of the world situation in times of "war against terrorism". Armed with vengeance and Kalashnikovs, Islamists and all kinds of allies sweep the Arab streets, while their moves are being monitored and recorded by American semi-tourists entrenched in their penthouses, tripping up in their every step. Underneath, the Old Continent mumbles groundless reproaches in its sleep and right beneath, local Arabs put the blame on all kinds of poor buggers, whether a servant from Africa, or a refugee from Palestine. As for me, a misfortunate Sherlock Holms, I am seriously thinking of leaving my home in Hamra and accept the invitation of a friend to spend the summer in a lonely apartment with a unique view to the Mediterranean.