The Birth of the Workshop: Technomorals, Peace Expertise, and the Care of the Self in the Middle East

Dehumanization in War and Peace: Encounters with Lebanon's Ex‐Militia Fighters

“…I also noticed that participants—rather than tackle issues around sources of corruption, the economy, borders, Israel, Syria, refugees, the state's monopoly on violence, or a myriad of other political debates, arguably very difficult to resolve—were motivated instead by the idea that war is inhumane and immoral ( al‐ḥarb lā‐insānī wa‐lā ʾakhlāqī ). While participants were diverse, this article draws on observations with activists connected to NGOs who, drawing on Kosmatopoulos (), were “workshopping for peace” and with former fighters who were involved in, or at least influenced by, NGO peacebuilding activities.…”

“…In such gatherings, one could hear such sentiments as “the war creates monsters” ( al‐ḥarb b‐tikhluq wuẖūsh ), “we lose something, we lose our humanity” ( mnikhsar shī, mnikhsar insānīyetnā ), or “enough already” ( khalas baʾa ) with this politics because it will lead to war, and war is “inhumane” ( lā‐insānī ). Kosmatopoulos () notices that in these discussions actors did not take civil society as given; rather, there was a sense that civil society would be created through their intervention, which would result in a “civilized society.”…”

“…In these encounters, I often found various actors advocating for dialogue, tolerance, and understanding between different sects in an effort to civilize an uncivil society (Kosmatopoulos , 535), or what I saw as an effort to make people recognize the humanity of the other and, relatedly, to realize the barbarism of combatants. As in the example above, frustration arose time and again when participants were confronted by those who wanted to bring party politics into the conversation or raise questions around resistance to Israel.…”

“…Yet in turning to locate war, as a social act, in such human aggressive tendencies rather than focusing on socio‐political conditions and contexts, as he earlier suggests, Freud inadvertently decontextualizes war. While he maintains that war is political, he slips from a focus on political ideology to how to be a better human, and this slippage, repeated time and again among peace experts (and nonexperts; Kosmatopoulos ), is instructive. What I've noticed is that diverse actors, from scholars to professionals to activists, recognize the politics and specificities of war yet continue to be preoccupied by the idea of its inhumanity.…”

Crisis works

“…Those affected are expected to become self‐entrepreneurial and market‐visible, but must also appear needy, indebted and self‐accusatory in the eyes of the donors. Powerful technologies and practices, such as opaque debt regulations and home value programmes, Sisyphean negotiations with insurance companies and loan agencies, moralised relationships with church‐run charities are constitutive of the ‘techno‐morals’ (Kosmatopoulos ) of the post‐disaster reconstruction.…”