Governing Conflict: Expert networks in Lebanon and beyond

Responsible for the doctoral project: Dr. Nikola Kosmatopoulos (doctoral thesis 2012)
Funded by: URPP Asia and Europe
Project duration: March 2007 – February 2010
Tutor: Prof. Dr. Shalini Randeria
Research Field: Verflechtungsgeschichten

Abstract

The PhD research project focuses on the institutionalization of the "crisis/conflict/peace" expertise structures between Europe and the Arab world. It pays specific attention to translocal processes of expert knowledge transfer and institution making, as well as to internal struggles for legitimacy and supremacy within the given expertise field. The project uses Lebanon, and by implication Palestine, as a case study in order to understand the proliferation of the crisis-peace-conflict field after the end of the Cold war, the transnational network of actors involved in the production, dissemination and translation of this expert knowledge and the specific socio-political needs that this new knowledge meets in different contexts.
 
Globalized discourses pose major empirical and epistemological challenges to anthropology. A research agenda under the critical premises and promises of anthropology should therefore include the study of such discourses, their transnational diffusion and local domestication.
 
Main research sites are Beirut and Geneva, which both boast an excessively institutionalized expert landscape (think tanks, research institutes, international organizations, NGOs etc.).

Projected completion date: End of 2010