<i>Sentinel matters</i>: the techno-politics of international crisis in Lebanon (and beyond)

Kosmatopoulos, Nikolas

doi:10.1080/01436597.2014.924063

Cited by 10 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Notwithstanding the differences in the ways the authors approach their topics, all of them retain a strong ethnographic focus on practices, devices and technologies through which knowledge, labour, biopolitics and capital are re‐organised during and after crises and disasters. All of them place at the centre of the inquiry the ‘technopolitics of crisis’ (Kosmatopoulos ), such as in Redfield's close investigation of the refugee camp, the armband, the global kit, Roitman's second‐order examination of financial products, and Adams' rather loose exploration of bureaucratic regulations.…”

Section: Conclusion: Morality Returnsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Crisis works

Kosmatopoulos

2014

Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale

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What do anthropologists have to say about crisis, the buzzword of our times? How does the discipline most known for radical suspicion towards global notions approach one of the most universalised and universalising words today? How does the anthropological response to modernity's eternal love affair with crisis navigate between outright rejection and creative engagement with its ethnographic and theoretical potential? The title of this review essay encapsulates both a rapidly proliferating trend in anthropology today, i.e. ethnographic research on crisis, and the chief approach adopted by most of these works, i.e. crisis as constitutive of new subjectivities and power formations. Three recently published (2013) books taken together offer a kaleidoscopic view of the different perspectives and challenges facing the inchoate anthropology of crisis.In this review I will draw on class discussions in a homonymous course, which I taught last autumn at the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University in New York. In Crisis Works we approached crisis not just as a modern category of thought, but rather as an emerging field of expertise, an advanced technology of government and a rewarding ethnographic challenge. In the course I selected these three books as core readings, not only because they are representative of a contemporary anthropology of crisis but also because they study classical crisis cases (natural disasters, disease epidemics, financial meltdowns, respectively) from different points of view (affected communities, medical doctors, expert and lay analysts) and based on a variety of methodological and theoretical frameworks (marketisation, humanitarianism, narrativisation). Hence, this review is written both from the perspective of an interested reader and an engaged teacher eliciting student insights and responses to the readings. D i s a s t e r m a r k e t s

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Section: Conclusion: Morality Returnsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Crisis works

Kosmatopoulos

2014

Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale

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“…Third-generation studies in the field of conflict/intervention comprise works that are focused on the epistemic practices of conflict knowledge production and expertise (e.g. Denskus 2014, on peacebuilding conferences and research as ritual), or on the limiting effects that material structures and objects can have on our representations of conflict and intervention, such as Kosmatopoulos's (2014) study of the effects of the format of the crisis report on representations of violence in Lebanon (see also Smirl 2015; Kühn 2016b). These generations are not clear-cut and many authors' studies straddle the analytical boundaries erected here.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Knowledge production in/about conflict and intervention: finding ‘facts’, telling ‘truth’

Guevara¹,

Kostić²

2018

Knowledge and Expertise in International Interventions

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This article has a twofold aim. First, it discusses the contributions to the scholarly field of conflict knowledge and expertise in this special issue on Knowledge Production in/about Conflict and Intervention. Second, it suggests an alternative reading of the issue's contributions. Starting from the assumption that prevalent ways of knowing are always influenced by wider material and ideological structures at specific times, we trace the influence of contemporary neoliberalism on general knowledge production structures in Western societies, and more specifically in Western academia, before re-reading the special issue's contributions through this prism. Our main argument is that neoliberalism leaves limited space for independent critical knowledge, thereby negatively affecting what can be known about conflict and intervention. We conclude with some tasks for reflexive scholarship in neoliberal times.

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“…Third-generation studies in the field of conflict/intervention comprise works that are focused on the epistemic practices of conflict knowledge production and expertise (e.g. Denskus 2014, on peacebuilding conferences and research as ritual), or on the limiting effects that material structures and objects can have on our representations of conflict and intervention, such as Kosmatopoulos's (2014) study of the effects of the format of the crisis report on representations of violence in Lebanon (see also Smirl 2015;Kühn 2016b). These generations are not clear-cut and many authors' studies straddle the analytical boundaries erected here.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%