Birth of The Workshop

Public Culture
The Birth of the Workshop:

Technomorals, Peace Expertise, and
the Care of the Self in the Middle East
Nikolas Kosmatopoulos
The people were seduced by corruption and did not listen

to the advice of the wise ones.
Ottoman firman, 1860
There will be great storages of force for every city, and

for every house if required, and this force man will convert into heat, light, or
motion, according to his needs. Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does not
I am indebted to the generosity of my interlocutors in Lebanon: Michel Eleftheriades, Nizar
Ghanem, Siad Darwish, Nizzar Ibrahim Rammal, Ghassan Makarem, Bernadette Daou, Ghassan
Moghaiber, Joe Haddad, Hannah Reich, Muzna Al Masri, Sarah Shouman, Irma Ghosn, and my
perennial host, Natalia Linos. I am thankful to them for their profound insights and for their willingness to share them with me. I have changed the names of my interlocutors in this article to protect their
anonymity. While writing, I received valuable feedback from people on both sides of the Atlantic: in
Zurich, I am grateful to Shalini Randeria for very useful comments on this piece and to Carlo Caduff
for a precious intellectual friendship; in Paris, I thank Mark Mazower and the participants of the Reid
Hall Work-in-Progress Seminar at Columbia Global Center | Europe, whose feedback helped me to
further develop my ideas; in New York City, Talal Asad, Miriam Ticktin, and Yasmine Khayyat gifted
me with their intellectual care at the final writing stages. Heartfelt thanks go to Carol Gluck, Tim
Mitchell, and Mick Taussig for their unstinting belief in this work. I benefited greatly from my students in our Crisis Works course (Fall 2013) at MESAAS Columbia University for a collective critical reading and from two anonymous reviewers for constructive and encouraging comments. Last but
not least, I am more than grateful to Manuela Pellegrino and to Thea and Ilias Parikos, whose Ikarian
hospitality inspired the very first draft of this article. Funding for this research has been generously
provided from the following sources: Zurich University Research Priority Program (URPP) Asia and
Europe, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, and the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Public Culture 26:3 doi 10.1215/08992363-2683657
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Copyright 2014 by Duke University Press
Published by Duke University Press
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include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at
which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out,
and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias. Thus
read the quotation attributed to Oscar Wilde on the wall of Utopia Now, the private lounge of Michel Eleftheriades, self-declared emperor of Nowheristan. In
the time of my fieldwork in Beirut (200810), Nowheristan, an ambitious political project that sought to abolish borders, passports, nation-states, and war on a
global scale, beginning from Lebanon, was recruiting virtual supporters through
a digital platform on the Internet. Utopia Now was located in downtown Beirut, directly adjacent to one of the countrys most lavish music clubs, which also
belonged to Eleftheriades. In Utopia Now, there were often dinners for Eleftheriadess invited friends, many of whom were politicians, businesspeople, diplomats,
university professors, and high-ranking professionals in international organizations such as the UN or the World Bank.1
Usually, the emperor would wait for us in the mezzanine, standing between
the mock torture chamber (see fig. 1), a special memory from the Lebanese civil
war (197590), and the baroque-style leather couch (see fig. 2), a special order
from England.2 He would be cloaked in his usual imperial attire: black shirt,
black trousers, and black cape, decorated with golden embroidery from head to
toe. Long, thick brown boots (reminiscent perhaps of his time as a fighter in the
last phases of the civil war) and a wool cap with a Byzantine cross woven onto it
(he was, after all, a Greek Orthodox, and the grandnephew of the archbishop of
Smyrna before the 1922 exodus) would complement the outfit. For Eleftheriades,
Wildes words were the ticket-to-r ide to his own utopian ideal, in which eternal
peace would be guaranteed through the rule of several wise men, knowledgeable
in politics and life in general.
I chose to begin this piece with Eleftheriades because his unique art of theatri1. During my fieldwork, I wrote a piece about Eleftheriadess extravagant persona and about
Nowheristan, his ambitious global project, for a Greek daily (Kosmatopoulos 2008). After the piece
was published, Eleftheriades invited mealong with others who had written about him in the foreign
press (including German, French, US, and Turkish media)for dinner. Since then, I became a frequent guest at Utopia Now dinners and used this opportunity to establish relationships with professionals in the field of peacemaking, peace building, and crisis prevention. In that sense, Utopia Now
emerged as an essential fieldwork site for this research. In accordance with his habit of overstaging
almost everything, Eleftheriades used to introduce me to his other guests as a doctor in anthropology and a Russian spy. He never explained to me the reasons for this label, and I never asked. Now
I realize that I never asked because somehow I was tacitly agreeing with his tendencyand secretly
admiring his abilityto turn almost every interaction into role-playing.
2. The mock torture chamber is a replica of the room in which Eleftheriades was tortured by the
Lebanese forces at the age of fifteen. I just added to it an electric chair, he told me.
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The Birth of the

Workshop
Figure 1 The torture chamber in Utopia Now.

Photograph by author
Figure 2 The baroque leather chair in Utopia Now.

Photograph by author
cal (over)staging of almost everythinghis place in the world, my craft and citizenship, and, more than anything, his idea of saving the world from war and stupidity, as he used to saywas one of the most important gifts I received from him
in my fieldwork. It was indeed Eleftheriadess unparalleled charisma to weave his
memories (real or surreal) of the war into ad hoc performances of a carnivalesque
caricature, into the bizarreness of a former fighter with imperial ambitions who,
almost always onstage, would then easily cross the boundary between reality and
imagination, memory and fantasy, crime and sorrow, lavishness and tragedy. It
was, after all, Eleftheriadess theatrical persona that resolutely directed my ethnographic attention toward the stage as an interpretive frame of politics in Lebanon.
Ultimately, it was through this aesthetic filter that I often caught myself reecting
on peace and war.3 Some of these reections guide the ethnography presented here.
Extravaganza notwithstanding, Eleftheriadess Nowheristan must be counted
among the myriad ideas that sought to facilitate and amalgamate Lebanons return
to peace after the fifteen-year-long civil war. While some of them were performed
within secluded spaces of luxurious clubs in Beirut, others had a much more penetrating effect and a powerful appeal to the entire country. Indeed, in postwar Lebanon a number of important and ambitious sociopolitical projects sought to mend
the wounds, repair the cracks, overhaul the loss, and reect on the experiences of
the devastating war.4 The reconstruction of the destroyed downtown, the libera3. Reenacting and simulating the lethal urbanity of the civil war through paintball games in a
half-destroyed basement in Beirut must be also counted as part of the aesthetic filter I pushed myself
through during fieldwork.
4. Throughout the wars duration, more than one hundred thousand people had been killed,
nearly one million displaced, around the same number injured, seventeen thousand disappeared,
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tion of the occupied South, the recuperation of the disappeared, the preservation of the memory of the war, the reconciliation of the feuding communities
to name just the essentialwere to become both objects of grand visions and
issues of major controversy that would dominate public discourse for many years
to come.
As in Eleftheriadess whimsical appropriation of Platos Republic,5 experts
featured centrally in all those projects: During the turbulent and hopeful years
of the first postwar decade, engineers and architects, employed by the Saudi-
Lebanese construction giant Solidere (Socit libanaise pour le dveloppement
et la reconstruction de Beyrouth), crafted what the latter quite euphemistically
called reconstruction models for Beiruts historic centre-ville (central district).
Strategists and telecommunication specialists, recruited by the Islamic movement
Hezbollah, continue to develop secret technologies to counter Israeli military
offensives and intelligence. Lawyers and human rights activists, approached by
grassroots organizations such as the Families of the Disappeared, provided plans
for action and advocacy toward national and international legal and political bodies. Historians and photographers, involved in academic and artistic projects, like
the Beirut Underground, compiled archives, published books, and organized exhibitions on the war. Trainers and psychologists invited by local nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs) and charity foundations chaired reconciliation meetings in
the villages and the mountains throughout the country. Granted, the rhetoric and
the hope of peace were informing many aspects of these projects. Yet in most of
the cases, peace was indeed understood as the indirect and rather abstract outcome of those very concrete political aims, such as development, liberation, and
reconciliation, respectively.6
In my work, I explore how, in the years that followed the end of the Lebanese
civil war, this abstract, utopian, and ideological imaginary of peace gradually
gave way to a relatively distinct and tangible domain comprised of institutionalized discourses and practices articulated and promoted by diverse groups of
and several billion dollars worth of damage to property and infrastructure sustained (Itani and
Mahmoud 1978; Johnson 2001; Tabbarah 1979; Salibi 1976; Picard 1996, 2000; Ochsenwald and
Kingston 2012; Chaoul 1988; Corm 1994).
5. For Plato, the statesman is the epistemon, he who knows, and he who knows what each is to do
because he possesses true knowledge (Castoriadis 2002: 32).
6. On the reconstruction of Beiruts downtown, see Abisaab 2001; S. Makdisi 1997a, 1997b;
Schmid 2006. On Hezbollah, see Harb and Leenders 2005; Saad-Ghorayeb 2002. On the disappeared, see Barak 2007; Sherry 1997; Wierda, Nassar, and Maalouf 2007; Jaquemet 2009; Young
2000. On the politics of memory and memorialization, see Volk 1994, 2010; Barak 2007.
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experts. I explore how a transcendent hope of peace was transformed into a concrete object around which diverse forms of technopolitical expertise were developed and deployed and how peace, in and by itself, emerged as a utopia of experts,
namely, a particular situation, in which abstract universal ideals transformed into
localized assemblages of institutionalized projects.
In this article, I examine through ethnography and contextual analysis one of
the agship techniques of the peace expertise in the Middle East and elsewhere,
the so-called conict resolution workshop. Faced with the widely recognized fact
that the workshop in conict resolution has become the dominant means of peace
NGOs and others in their attempts to address the past and the future of peace in
almost every postconict setting around the world today, the technique seems ripe
for sustained critical inquiry. Indeed, for the transnational and hypermobile clan
of peacemakers and peace experts, the workshop constitutes maybe the absolute
travel device: it can be transported and deployed everywhere without the need for
translation into local vernaculars; it can exemplify the moral ambition for peace
in the world backed with technical arrangements of space, time, and learning
mostly imported from other disciplinary settings; it can address sustained needs
for knowledge and hopes for personal betterment by introducing a unique style of
pedagogy based on both academic credentials and moral superiority.
In the following pages, I present ethnographic evidence that shows how assemblages of peacemaking, most of them centered on the technique of the conict
resolution workshop, had at least three, often unintended, effects in Lebanon and
beyond.
First, a massive trend toward what one might call the workshopping of peace,
namely, the idea that major issues of broad concern regarding past and future violence, such as negotiating the memory of the war, taming contemporary tensions
among warring parts of the society, seeking justice against past state and militia
repression, and establishing effective structures for protection of the civil population against future repression, can be effectivelyand often solelyaddressed
within secluded spaces of conict resolution workshops. I argue that workshopping peace was the product of a highly skilled and a dramatically downscaled
movement that at the same time reduced the size of the challenge undertaken
from the macroscopic ideal of peace in the world down to the controlled microcosm of the workshop of conict resolution.
A second effect is the widespread acceptance and consequent proliferation of
a particular version of what Michel Foucault (1986) has called the care of the
self. Following this train of thought, I show how the idea of the cultivation of the
self as it developed in conict resolution workshops came to constitute a social
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practice, giving rise to relationships between individuals, to exchanges and communications, and at times even to institutions (ibid.: 45). Even more crucially, the
cultivation of the care of the self gave rise to a certain mode of knowledge about
oneself and others, as well as to the elaboration of a quasi-academic discipline
that practitioners of the field often referred to as the science of conict resolution. The cultivation of the care of the self in conict resolution workshops was
primarily premised on a new configuration of peacemaking that understood the
individual as the primary target of expert intervention in a distinct moral and
technical sense. In the workshop the individual is expected to acquire at once
technical skills, enhancing his or her expertise in peacemaking, and moral values,
guaranteeing his or her moral high ground to apply the expertise.
A third effect is the (re)production of a professionalized field of peace experts,
whose degree of legitimacy andby consequencethe conditions of institutional existence crucially depended on the constant need to reiterate and reify
the binary between an intrinsically ignorant and potentially uncivil society (that
needs to be trained) and themselves (who need to train it). In this, the workshop
of conict resolution can be situated within the long list of ingenious disciplinary
devices that nolens volens keep populations at bay and leave powerful elitesthe
wise ones, as the Ottoman firman has itto do the work of power unabated.
Fighters into Lebanese: Postcolonial Reverberations and the Uncivil Society
The argument presented here certainly wishes to speak to the ongoing debate in
anthropology, and in the social sciences more generally, on the role of civil society in promoting peace and democracy. However, instead of taking the notion of
civil society as an analytical tool to be applied to my research field, that is, peace
expertise in Lebanon, I sought to invert the perspective. I chose instead to see
civil society as an ethnographic object in its historical and institutional making
through, for example, the practices, technologies, and discourses of the peace
expertise. Thus I set out to ethnographically and historically explore the ways
through which peacemakers produce a particular expertise that comes to bear
upon the definition and the making of the civil society. This is illuminating
in a variety of perspectives. For example, the understanding of the term during
the first postwar years in Lebanon could be said to have been closer to current
academic definitions of civil society as a space beyondand often in opposition
tostate power. Civil society was then the primary locus of popular mass mobilization against the war, as well as of the articulation of demands for justice and
social protection addressed to those wielding political power. I argue that today
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this social practice has been radically inverted and mutated. Today the population itself has become the target of intervention by experts, whose techniques and
practices are set to create a civil society, indeed a civilized society, through
the application of technomoral configurations of peacemaking.
If one listens carefully to the peacemakers, one will thus hear that civil society
is not a given but rather a telos that has to be pursued through intervention by
experts. One could then suggest thataccording to this positionwhat is given
is a society that is inherently uncivil and which thus has to be trained in order to
become civil. The adjective civil is now perceived as a technicalized and moralizing qualifier of the noun. This argument has both historical and theoretical repercussions. The historical argument suggests that the expert field of conict resolution sought to institutionalize itself as a rather professionalized response to the
urgent, complex, and highly political questions about past war crimes, continuous
state repression, and social (in)justice. These questions were reected in diverse
sociopolitical struggles over the past thirty years. As stated above, I show elsewhere in detail how conict resolution has historically evolved from a single tool
among many of the antiwar movements in the late 1980s to a professional field
in its own right by the end of the 2000s. This process could also be described as
technicalization and depoliticization, as manifested in the perception that conict
resolution as a method is adequate for resolving all kinds of conicts from interpersonal to international.
However, the claim of depoliticization is tricky. From a closer look, this process was extremely political in another sense. It was accompanied and strengthened by elements of professionalization and internationalization, which brought
with it specific values and concrete social relations (funding, visas, invitations to
study and work abroad, academic titles, job opportunities at home, etc.). It introduced new forms of power relations and new subjectivities, since it propagated
and cemented the binary image of the technically superior and morally elevated
peace expert, on the one hand, and the (potentially uncivil and violent) civil society in need of education, on the other. At the same time, it introduced a highly
selective filter on what is political, since other voices, choices, and agendas (such
as the focus on war tribunals and popular and social justice, solidarity as value,
and war memory as a field of social engagement) were thus either eclipsed or
silenced.
The theoretical part of my argument situates the emergence of a new technomoral configuration as an integral part of the establishment of a transnational
expertise in peacemaking within genealogies of (post)colonial interventions and
their civilizing missions. To be sure, the need to educate and civilize an uncivi535
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lized population is not new; this is how the nation and the empire were formed
(Cooper and Stoler 1997; Fischer-Tin and Mann 2004; Weber 1976). Seen from
this perspective, the rise of the conict resolution workshop in Lebanon (and in
Palestine for that matter) was utterly crucial in important transformations of civil
society, power, and politics that occurred in the past twenty-five to thirty years.
Postcolonial theory teaches us that powerful projects seeking to radically transform entire societies usually begin with and result in the rearticulation of semantic tropes and the reformulation of language through mimicry (Bhabha 1984) and
what Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (1997: 3) call the grammar of difference. In Lebanon the rise of the workshop and the spread of a technomoral
configuration of peacemaking meant to change radically the received meaning
and the political use of peace. Thus during the last years of the Lebanese civil
war and its immediate aftermath, peace was, for the most part, articulated as a
Kampfbegriff (battle concept) on the part of a civil society engaged in struggles
against the political power holders. Civil society efforts were directed at assigning accountability and at demands to hold the political class responsible for the
civil war as a collective crime against the Lebanese society. In this sense, peace
was used as an alternative trope for social and popular justice, inherently linked
to the rule of law and to the idea of a civil society premised on the political claims
of rights-bearing subjects. In this understanding of the role of civil society, the
judicial arenain the form of a war tribunal, for examplehad an essential place
and an important role to play.
Two decades later, the courtroom, as one of the desired loci of popular mobilization for peace and justice, has given way to the workshop as the primary site
for the training of the population. One could say that many Lebanese members of
civil society wanted a war tribunal, but they got the workshop for conict resolution instead. This phenomenon, I argue, is evidence that processes of juridification of politics, witnessed by anthropologists in places such as South Africa and
India, are clearly losing ground in Lebanon. Rather, processes of dejuridification
of politics are on the rise in which judicial paths for civil societys claims for justice are blocked, ignored, or rendered irrelevant under the inuence of a new form
of expertise that prefers to organize the care of the self rather than to challenge
existing power relations. So what we have is a shift from a political civil society,
with strong demands for justice, that would then regard peace as the outcome of
this process toward a rather paralyzed uncivil society that came to accept training in peace and forget anything that has to do with justice. Structured through professional ambitions and persuaded about the inherent incivility of the targeted
civilians, peacemaking has come to be largely identified with the task of training
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and educating the very same population that, only a couple of decades earlier, was
seen as the legitimate source of political demands for a better world. A vibrant
political society gradually saw the reconfiguration of demands for social justice
and just peace by actors with domestic legitimacy and credibility turning into an
exclusive domain of experts with international legitimacy, backing, and funding.
On their part, the peacemakers had the unique chance to participate in a global
community of select experts and pursue international careers premised on easy
mobility without visa problems and travel restrictions. But professionalization
came at a price. Lebanese peace experts found themselves reproducing an essentialist image of a principally tribal, inherently violent, and potentially uncivil
society, often against their will, as Samir, a Lebanese peace NGO worker many
times told me. Altogether, one could argue that the peace experts actively participated in the sociopolitical process that sought to make fighters into . . . Lebanese,
therefore suggesting a given unity in belonging that was rather the product of a
shared history of suffering as much as of the broad application of technomoral
configurations and civilizing techniques.7
Downsizing Peace
Sitting comfortably on the terrace of Beiruts luxurious Mvenpick Hotel and

Spa, on a warm, sunny afternoon, overlooking the calm Mediterranean Sea, Paul
Najjar looked content and excited.8 His main project for this year, 2007, the Summer School on Conict Resolution, couldnt have had a better kickoff. On the
second day of the workshop, one participant sat in the middle of the circle and told
everybody the story of his own father, who had been kidnapped some months ago.
He described how he had also been kidnapped and tortured by the mukhabarrat
(Arabic: secret police), when he ventured to the local police station to ask about
his fathers fate.
The story made it onto the news, producing many interesting articles, Najjar
tells me, sipping his cappuccino:
The mukhabarrat came to him and beat him. This was the beginning of
the article in the [French-speaking newspaper in Lebanon] LOrientLe
Jour. . . . I attended this [workshop] session; usually I dont say anything,
but after this session Monica [the trainer] asked me to say something.
7. Here I am invoking the well-k nown argument by Eugen Weber, albeit somewhat reworked to
rid it of its modernist undertones and rather attached to postcolonial imaginaries.
8. All appearing names have been modified to conceal the identities of the persons except in
cases of evidently public personas, such as Eleftheriades.
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[What I said] was about the culture of submission: it begins from school,
from the family. . . . After, we had a very important discussion. It was
very important for me during this summer school not only to deal with
techniques related to conict; the first three days we had many techniques:
dialogue, negotiation, mediation, communication. They took [sic] these
techniques, but its not only the techniques. . . . I think with Monica we
began to discuss the why. And when we see injustice, what can we do?
From this we can open to the conict; it is an important connection.
Najjars depiction of the workshop introduces a principal tension, which I often
observed during my fieldwork. On the one hand, there are the big questions: the
(non)institutionalized memory and the judicial (non)handling of the crimes of the
war, the ongoing trauma of the families of the disappeared, the pervasive injustice
and inequality in the social and structural sense, and the causes and the effects of
endemic violence that often revive comparisons to the war. These questions, Najjar hopes, may allow the discussion to open to the conict, as he says.
On the other hand, there are the techniques of conict resolution: mediation,
negotiation, and dialogue, which the workshop participants had taken, as Najjar notes. Yet Najjars optimistic excitement at what he regards as the workshops
success reects both the pressing anticipation to address these questions and the
shaky confidence that it can be done without relying on the techniques. This stance
is recurrent among activists and NGO members in Lebanon, but it nevertheless
leads often to frustrations. More often than not, the small techniques are prioritized
over the big questions. As a result, widespread anticipations often turn to endless
exasperations. The questions that everyone has in mindhow did this happen, how
can we make sure it will not happen again, how can we talk about itremain unanswered. Instead, the small techniques come to the fore. Here size matters in the
sense that experts attempted to downsize peace by squeezing the big questions
into the small spaces of conict resolution workshops. Thus the techniques were to
be applied at the micro level and, crucially, within the controlled space of the workshop. This downsizing strategy is reminiscent of Bruno Latours description of the
laboratory. Latour and Steve Woolgar (1986) explain that microbiologists decided to
take their battle with the microbes to the secure space of the laboratory, where they
could control the conditions and overpower the enemy.
I observed a striking imbalance between the importance granted to the small
techniques over the big questions within the conict resolution workshop and
within the wider peace NGO world. Arguably, this uncomfortable and unbalanced
coexistence is the constant source of tension. I regard this tension as the primary
product of multiple efforts to reconcile essentially technocratic forms of expertise
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with highly political and legal claims for social and historical justice and of the need
to deal with collective memory in a satisfactory manner. Early on in my fieldwork,
I noted how hope and frustration coexist among many antiwar activists and peace
NGO members in Lebanon. Later on, I became aware of their agonistic efforts to
position themselves or, more accurately, to adjust their discourse and practice in
accordance with an emerging conception of peace and peacemaking.
The new perception was premised on two basic features: first, the appropriation of technical skills, mostly included within the understanding of peacemaking
as an emergent domain of specialized knowledge and a professional field in its
own right, and, second, the proliferation of certain humanist values, which often
had to be manifested through theatrical testimonies of suffering and staged performances of mutual understanding. However, I also noted the resistance that such
efforts were met with and which involved a critical, and often, cynical stance. I
observed participants in conict resolution workshops openly questioning or even
mocking some trainers decontextualized and ahistorical discourses on political
violence, social justice, human rights, or international law. At other times, participants refused to accept the images and narratives of (self-)victimization altogether, seeing them as imported from a moral universe that had nothing to do with
their own. Thus they insisted on rejecting a morality that was arbitrarily associated with what they saw as Eurocentric and Western notions of civility and, even,
humanity. The critique, and sometimes the hostility, of the participants to much of
what they saw as imported forms and formulas, as well as the technocratic fundaments and the substance imparted to them, was a standard tenet in my fieldwork.
But, also, many of the experts themselves, some of whom became close friends
during the course of my fieldwork, would often reveal to me their profound doubts
about, and lack of faith in, the very practices and morals they preached.
Despite criticism and doubt, by the end of the first decade of 2000, the practice of the workshop in conict resolution formed the bedrock of peace expertise
in Lebanon. The workshop formed not only its principal mechanism of service
delivery but also the only form that was imbued with legitimacy among NGOs,
donors, and government officials. Naturally, it became the main focus of most
NGO documents and manuals of conict resolution (Balian 1998), as well as the
most central part of autobiographies of the field (Safa 2007). Ultimately, it came
to be depicted as the chief solution to challenges to the moral and social order
posed by political violence. With significant foreign funds owing into the field
by (mostly) Western governments and organizations, US and European university
programs that specialized in peacemaking, negotiation, and conict resolution,
and visa waivers and travel stipends for practitioners and prospective students, the
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workshop became eventually an ideal springboard for a promising career in a new

professionalized field of expertise.
In the late 2000s, every year a considerable number of young Lebanese, Palestinians, and other Arabs apply for participation in workshops organized by local
and international peace NGOs, UN agencies, and Lebanese university departments.
These workshops have more or less similar features but may differ at the target
populations. Workshops that are geared toward career making (Training of Trainers, also known as ToT) usually choose participants among university students,
but in the meantime workshops can be targeting broader groups and categories in
a given society, such as schoolteachers, villagers, women, and other segments
of what many NGOs understand as strategic elements of civil society. Workshops
can be daily or may include several overnight stays in a venue as remote as possible from urban centers or from the country altogether. The workshops I attended
and which Lebanon-based groups organized took place either in a rural house in
the mountains of Lebanon, on the remote campus of a university, or in a hotel in
Cyprus. The body of trainers comprised mostly Lebanese and Palestinian Arabs
but also Western nationals. The training material encompasses a heterogeneous
spectrum of sources, which includes academic publications on ethnic conict
and ethnic violence by political scientists, theater sketches and role-playing,
videos from aikido classes in alpine landscapes and school fights in South African schools, questionnaires on listening and problem-solving skills, and diagrams
about the similar nature of interpersonal and interstate conicts, as well as paraphernalia of the peacemaker such as the mirror, the shifting mat, or the peace doll.
In what follows, I present some ethnographic insights from a variety of conict
resolution workshops. Most of them I attended as participant observer. In one
case, I traveled to Cyprus to take part in a workshop that sought to train Lebanese schoolteachers in peacemaking and conict resolution in schools. My ethnographic material is presented as evidence to my main argument on the emergence
of a particular configuration of peacemaking that can be divided into two types of
rationalities: the technical and the moral.
The Technical: Career of the Self
The Third Annual Summer School on Conict Prevention and Transformation

(2007) was co-organized by the Canadian development organization, a Lebanese
think tank, and a UN agency. Western embassies and Lebanese banks funded it.
The ten-page information leaet praised the culture of peace, which was said to
be promoted by civil society initiatives and movements. It also noted that this
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summer school should be considered as part of this effort, since it was planned
to provide young civil society activists the opportunity to be trained on conict
transformation skills. Additionally, it was argued that the workshop constituted
a unique experience for these activists to develop project ideas that will be
implemented in the near future with the support of the organizing bodies (fieldwork notes).
The workshop program was focused on practical skills and techniques
conveyed through an interactive methodology, including role-plays, case studies, simulations, a field visit, and innovative learning methods such as mainly
theater-based training. Moreover, training in interpersonal and intergroup
conict transformation and in local practices in reconciliation was also offered.
Skill packages included Interpersonal and Intergroup Conict Transformation
Skills, covering problem solving, conict analysis, communication skills, and
negotiation; Theater and Creative Conict Resolution; Multi-party Mediation
in International Relations; and lectures and lessons titled Introduction to Peacekeeping Operations, The Role of International Organizations and Civil Society
in Conict Transformation, Environmental Consensus Building, and Religion
and Conict Resolution; and much more (see fig. 3).
Upon arriving at the university campus, I found the participants, young women
and men mostly in their early twenties, chatting outside the big classroom. I then
Figure 3 Schedule, Third Annual Summer School on Conict Prevention and Transformation
(2007). Source: authors archive
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searched for the director, a Northern European in her fifties, and went straight
to her. She had agreed to let me participate. Without delay, she introduced me to
Alex Katz, a conict resolution trainer from the United States, in his early forties. Katz gave me a big smile and asked me where I come from and what exactly
I was researching. He seemed very interested in my research. Dressed in earthy
colors, he looked like a down-to-earth person. As soon as the next session began,
Katz introduced me as the anthropologist colleague to the young participants.
The participants were young, engaged, and ambitious. Most of them were
Lebanese students at the two renowned private universities in the country, the
American University of Beirut and the Lebanese American University. Only one
of them was studying at the state-funded Lebanese University. Some had traveled from different Arab countries, where they also studied in superior academic
institutions, such as the American University in Cairo, the American University
in Kuwait, and the Birzeit University in Ramallah. Most of them gave the impression of a dynamic young youth looking for possible career paths.
The walls in the classroom revealed a familiar workshop design, with chart
sheets hanging in all corners after a laborious opening day, in which the students
were divided into distinct working groups with self-chosen names such as social
healers, white hands, laugh live long, and live out loud, among others. This
particular day included three sessions focusing on different content. In the first
session, Dorothy Dowry, the other US trainer, presented a case study of a Mexican village in conict with a big landowner over the ownership of a large chunk
of common land. After describing the situation, the working groups were called
upon to design a project proposal to submit to the donors. To facilitate a pragmatic
setting, the trainer proposed a theatrical appearance, in which the trainers played
the role of donors, and the participants enacted members of NGOs who seek funding for their activities. The main focus of the training was on attending to funding
deadlines, enhancing the quality of project presentation for donors, and learning
new methods of fund-raising. After the afternoon break, both US trainers held a
session on the possibilities of further studies of peacemaking and conict resolution in the US academic landscape.
Dowry was definitely an impressive presence in the workshop. A theologian
in training, she used her dominant voice and figure to intervene every time she
thought that the discussion was going the wrong way. In her early fifties, she had
much experience teaching on conict resolution. Although a Catholic herself, she
was working for the Eastern Mennonite University in Virginia. She was inspiring for the students, reecting an aura of authority in the field. She was the most
knowledgeable trainer when it came to donors, funding, and career making in
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the field. Self-confident and brisk, she often commanded the students to return to
English, when she felt she was missing something important in their discussions
in Arabic.
The next session, titled Public Conversations/Dialogues, was about to start.
The room had been split into two with dividers, and a third room would also be
used to facilitate three different dialogue groups. Students were slow in coming
back. A paper on the board described what dialogue is: a conversation that is
focused on a search for understanding others and ourselves better, not an attempt
to persuade, convince, or inuence. Katz opened the session: We will be using a
dialogue technique which is universally used. Its spirit is focused on understanding others. We are going to split into three groups. It is going to be a listening
exercise. The role of the facilitators is to remind you of the norms and to keep
time and maintain a safe space, and, lastly, to ask a series of questions. If you
dont want to answer, you can pass, pass for now, or answer.
After this brief introduction, Katz wrote the following norms on the board:
Come prepared, stay engaged, keep working

Speak for yourself, from your own experience
Practice empathy
Actively participate
Intention of building peace
Listen carefully
Respect diverse experiences
Tolerate different moral principles
Freedom to share (without attribution)
This universally used dialogue technique appeared to be an important skill

for the future peacemakers, since it was placed at the center of the workshop along
the donor-NGO simulation exercise mentioned above. The technique involved
several aspects that once learned would equip future experts with particular skills
in facilitating public conversations and debates that are nevertheless placed within
limited temporal (keep the time) and spatial frameworks. In general, the way
these workshops seek to simulate real situations presupposes a rather hierarchic
and structured situation in which every participant knows more or less his or her
position. As in the case of the donor simulation exercise, the workshop participants are trained in how to be in their prospective expert positions and not in how
to become. This certitude seems to galvanize the sense among them that peacemaking is a professional field and that career opportunities are attainable as long
as one is able to demonstrate particular professional techniques.
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Indeed, as many of the students told me in the aftermath of the training, the
hope and the lure of a promising career in the field was an important element in
their decision to participate in the workshop. In fact, the success of the entire
workshop for them seemed to be measured by the degree to which this promise
was seriously promoted or not. For many students, participation in the workshop
is understood as one more important station in their training as future experts,
as one more element in their curriculum vitae, as one more crucial step in their
professional career in the field of development at large. Lana, a twenty-year-old
Lebanese, situated her participation in another workshop this way: I took part
at the summer school, because I wanted to know more about conict resolution.
I graduated with a BA from International Affairs and Diplomacy at the LAU
[Lebanese American University] with concentration on development studies.
Generally, I am concentrating in development; there will always be conict and
development. Her imagining of a personal future was very much in line with the
general format of the workshop, in which participants received information about
funding proposals and studying opportunities and learned how to build their own
personal inventory of conict resolution.
As a source of inspiration and confirmation of future expectations, the trainers were often presented as successful examples of conict resolution experts,
mostly through both their practitioner and academic credentials. Thus Dowry
often referred to Katz as Professor, although he didnt have a PhD, nor did he
hold any university position. Dowry also presented herself as the first graduate
with a PhD in conict analysis ever. In so doing, the workshop trainers employ
a variety of technical means that have a very particular origin: academia. Trainers become professors with academic titles and posture, which inspire career
aspirations among the students.
The presented ethnographic material documents what one may call the career
turn in the field of conict resolution and peacemaking in Lebanon. The emergence of the attitude that I suggest calling the career of the self can also be
perceived through a historical perspective where the trend toward professionalization can be juxtaposed with previous attitudes within the antiwar movement in
Lebanon and finally raised as a generational issue, as Marwa, an anthropologist
and trainer in conict resolution workshops, suggested:
There is a generational issue in the development of conict resolution in
Lebanon. There is the first generation of people involved in it [she gives
their names]. There is the second one . . . [among whom she identifies
herself and others, by name]. We were old enough to know the war well
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enough, but at the same time young enough not to have been engaged in
it. If the war had ended later, we could have been fighters. And as soon
as you are a fighter, you cannot take another position. For us the war was
something bad. The older generation doesnt see it the way we see it. They
were engaged politically, in parties, in fighting. For us all the parties were
bad; for me the war was bad and ugly. The third generation is doing that
[conict resolution] for other reasons, I have the feeling, for professional,
moneymaking reasons. Not all of them, but surely most of them. The
times have changed. When I was younger, I used to volunteer in many
NGOs, while the first generation was active in political parties. Five years
later, the NGOs dont have any volunteers anymore. The younger generation does only professional things. In our times, it was not only about war
and peace; it was also about social engagement.
The Birth of the

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The Moral: Caress of the Self
Helen, a trainer, had just written the word conict on the blackboard. She turned
to the participants slowly and asked in a calm voice, What do you feel about
this word? The participants, schoolteachers in the beginning of their careers,
responded in different voices and tones: confusion, interests, misunderstanding, different needs, excitement, energy, war, winners, victims,
exchange, violence, peace, hate, truth, interaction, empowerment,
relations.
Helen kept turning to the blackboard every time a new word was aired and
meticulously scribbled it down. Then she said, Lets think of some colors, some
emotions around that same word. The schoolteachers cum students of the workshop proclaimed: fear, anger, revenge, depression, remorse, regret,
shame, happiness.
What about colors? Helen insisted.
Red, blue, gray . . . light blue.
Any metaphors? Helen expanded.
I think of a volcano! said one young man in his late twenties.
Tree, two people pulling on the same thing! said another man, maybe
younger than the first one.
Seed . . . petrol . . . thunderstorm . . . giraffe, the suggested metaphors filled the air of the hotel room in Cyprus, where the workshop with
Lebanese teachers was being held. And what about in terms of what
is going on in Lebanon? Helen sought to invoke some apparently missing
context. Sects . . . death . . . history . . . destroyed buildings . . . bombs . . .
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ignorance . . . crying . . . children crying . . . homeless . . . refugees . . .

land . . . water . . . nationality . . . contrast . . . paradox . . . rights, each
word took its place on the busy blackboard.
Are you talking about human rights? Helen asked the young female
teacher.
Ehmmm . . . yes, human rights! the teacher responded readily.
The others continued: Revolution and resistance . . . enemy . . .
opportunity . . . meze . . . weapons . . . politics . . . and religion . . . ego . . .
love . . . sex.9 Helen seemed impressed and went on a monologue:
What a list! What is this list telling us? It is an amazing list! What
else is this list telling us? That conict has many shapes? Thank you . . .
it is multifaceted . . . that it could be difficult to define it. . . . If somebody
came from another planet and asked what do you mean by conict, he
would be very confused. . . . We got causes here and symptoms . . . we got
links with nature . . . words like water. . . . Who said seed? . . . Explain
that. . . . Tree! Explain this. . . . Who said land? Can you say something
about land? Scarce resources . . . its not always about land but also about
values, dignity!
Same like in South Africa . . . we had similar words: blood, violence,
necklacing . . . daily life . . . when apartheid was being dismantled their
association of conict was death and destruction. There might be times
that conict can be extremely destructive. But who said meze? I want to
know.
I meant the cultural and linguistic mosaic of Lebanon, the voice
defends its choice.
Who said opportunity? I remember the Chinese definition of
conict . . . it can be an opportunity for change and growth!
Helen was a white South African woman in her fifties. She was calm and
serene, despite sometimes struggling to make sense of the answers to her questions given by the Lebanese participants at the Training of Trainers workshop in
Cyprus. As a way to relate to Lebanons conict, she would often bring examples
from South Africa. However, she would rarely ask many questions about Lebanon, apart from obvious ones, such as the meaning of meze in English. After all,
Lebanon was not the point here. It was not by chance that the organizers chose to
run the workshop in Cyprus. As the Lebanese head of the organizing institution,
a well-known United Statesbased peace NGO, told me, the Greek-speaking part
of the island was chosen to bring the participants into a place where they can feel
far away from the conict [in Lebanon]. Another participant justified the choice
9. Meze refers to Lebanese delicacies and appetizers.
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of place in similar ways: Since the trainer comes from another culture and we
from yet another, it is useful to meet in a place where both of us can move away
from our own cultures and communicate.
For Helen, this was the first time she was invited to train people coming
from Lebanon, or the Middle East, in general. Her obvious lack of contextual
knowledge about the conict that has for decades engulfed the country and the
region at large often made the overall atmosphere awkward. Especially noteworthy were moments when particular historical events, political persons, or specific placesloaded with meaning and semantics pertaining to the Lebanese
conictwere given as responses to Helens answers. She chose to deal with this
occurrence by either ignoring these comments or asking careful contextual questions in the breaks between sessions. On one occasion, Helen had inquired about
the history of the Lebanese civil war in a car ride around the island three days
after the workshop had begun.
Helen is a freelancer who cooperates with different centers for conict resolution mainly in South Africa but also in Europe and the United States. She began
working in 1998, when she needed a job, as she told me. She was hired by Quakers to work for a project on violence against children funded by a German foundation. When she joined the field, there was no funding: It was just a passion that
overwhelmed me. Then she began networking, which she sees as one of her
assets, one of her strengths. As she explained, being part of a center helped a
lot, [since] they have their own networks, but in general it is always good to meet
people, because otherwise you are in a cocoon. For this job now in Cyprus, it was
her US networks that introduced her as a specialist in school education in conict
resolution to the United Statesbased NGO, which had decided to return to Lebanon after an almost ten-year absence and launch a peace-building project, whose
bedrock would be introducing problem-solving workshops in schools around the
country. The basic idea was to train teachers in conict resolution.
However, the call for school directors and individual teachers was not very
successful. Some of them came, but many stayed away, even though the costs
were covered. Instead, some young Lebanese university students attended, such
as Marcel, whose dream was to become a professional trainer in conict resolution. Marcel was one of the most active participants in the workshop, and one
could immediately see that he had experience in workshops. Indeed, this workshop was the third that Marcel was taking part in. As he told me, he considers
this practice, namely, attending one workshop after the other, as the best entryway
into a very promising professional field.
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In the hotel lobby, during a workshop break, Helen tells me that her principal
method is the focus on the self. Her aim is to introduce the habit of constant
reection among all the participants of the workshop. It is important for her that
the participants learn to ask the right questions and that they can come up with
the right answers. After attending three days of the workshop, it was obvious to
me that she understands this process of reection in a distinct moral way. The
self-examination is mainly, if not exclusively, focused on matters of the soul and
especially in questions of doing good or doing evil, as I discuss below. Helen is an
advocate for a particular care of the self, in which technologies and technical elements are instrumental. Thus Helen advises the participants to develop their own
personal peace toolbox, which must be carried along on every peace-making
occasion. A crucial ingredient of this toolbox is the mirror, which is used to symbolically remind the participant of the necessary reective attitude.10
This particular focus on the self was more than evident throughout the different sessions of the workshop. One session, for example, invited the participants to
take a position vis--vis a chair placed in the middle of the room and labeled the
conict. According to Helen, this exercise sought to make people aware of their
personal positioning toward the conict, no matter how one decides to define
the latter. In the next session, called the conict spectrum, participants were
motivated to reect and think about whether they had a personal conict pattern,
namely, an individual way of dealing with conicts. For example, some might
discover that they are rather aggressive, while others are rather passive, and few
may choose to ignore the conict altogether. Each time their turn came, the participants were asked to describe their habits, their overall approach, and their
opinion. However, there was hardly any discussion on the findings afterward.
Opinions were not debated, exchanged, or commented upon; they were rather
accepted as given.
In the second part of the workshop day, the cultivation of the care of the self
involved multiple ways of introducing role models. Participants watched a series
of short films that told stories of peaceful beings. The first one, called The Magic
of Conict, featured a white, tall, blond man struggling with two other men, all
of them dressed in white uniforms that reminded one of Asian martial arts. An
alpine mountainous background gave the sense of a serene environment in which
the instantaneous struggle took place. The background seemed to be staged in
10. As the symbol of reectivity par excellence, the mirror plays a crucial part in the care of the
self. In Technologies of the Self, Foucault (1988) notes that looking at ones soul, in a similar way that
a mirror functions, constitutes the principal way to know of what the soul consists, and thus one can
discover rules that serve as a basis for behavior and political action.
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such a manner as to resonate with the main idea in the first part of the film, called
The Nature of Conict. As the voice of the narrator told us, Years and years
of conict took the mountains to become as they are today, thus providing the
natural evidence that conict is natures proprietor for change. The same voice
claimed that the art of aikido is based on the principle of embracing conict. It is
a martial art that is lovely linked to nonviolence, as Helen noted to us after the
film was over.
Before this long workshop day came to an end, Helen distributed questionnaires, asking the participants for their opinions about what they considered
a peaceful being to be (see fig. 4). She then asked them to name some famous
examples of those beings. The participants stated the obvious, such as Mahatma
Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Mother Teresa, but one of them nominated
Rafiq al-Hariri, Lebanons slain prime minister
and multibillionaire Saudi-Lebanese entrepreneur,
to the post.
During this discussion, I kept thinking that
Helen definitely made the impression of a peaceful being to me, albeit a rather tormented one. She
had also experienced tremendous amounts of suffering, which she revealed to me the night before.
As we sat next to the hotel pool, she narrated to me
the story of how her close relative was stabbed by
a fellow black prisoner, rushing to add that many
people from her own community did not understand how she could continue to try to reconcile
the communities after such a crime. Nevertheless,
she went on, experiencing incredible levels of
pain, having seen her elder son dying (she didnt
elaborate on this loss) and her younger son brought home stabbed. It seemed that,
for her, personal experiences of suffering constituted the sine qua non condition
to be a good trainer in peacemaking; I posed this question to her openly. A good
trainer is one who can link the personal with the professional, she responded
almost diplomatically. However, I felt that, for her, this meant more than anything
to have a tangible share in suffering. Indeed, without being asked, only minutes
later, she went on to tell me that very often she feels vulnerable. But then she
added, as if the utterance were left unfinished, that these incredible levels of pain
make credible the persons who do this work and that, after all, we teach at the
heart level.
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Figure 4 Features of
a peaceful being (chart
in a conict resolution
workshop). Photograph
by author
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In that sense, Helen did not need to know more about Lebanon to teach the
Lebanese how to face the challenge of peacemaking in the Lebanese conict;
she already knew enough about human suffering, having been through incredible
pain herself. To connect with her students she did not need to share any common
experience with them, apart from the universal, moral context of pain. Suffering
is the necessary translating device that brings Helen and her students on the same
page and in the same room. Thus Helens version of distant suffering (Boltanski
1999) was constituted both through the given geographic distance to Lebanon and
through the experiential proximity to the locus of an abstractly defined universal
suffering. Finally, this version of the cultivation of the self, I argue, is in a crucial
way different from the Foucauldian prototype. Foucault (1986: 57) notes that the
cultivation of the self pictures the self not simply as an imperfect, ignorant individual who requires correction, training, and instruction, but as one who suffers
from certain ills and needs to have them treated, either by oneself or by someone
who has the necessary competence. My analysis of the rise of the workshop and
the particular care of the self that went with it would fully confirm Foucaults presupposition on the given ignorance but would most probably reject his assertion
on the need to treat the ills from suffering. In fact, the self needs not treatment for
having undergone suffering but reward for having endured it. The self needs not to
be cured but to be caressed, to be handled with care. This particular version of the
care of the self is often theatrically staged through public testimonies of suffering.
Theaters of Individualism
As in the aforementioned workshop with Monica praised by Najjar, the Cyprus

workshop with Helen kicked off with an intense icebreaker, namely, the public announcement of each participants position vis--vis the conict. Trainers in
workshops I attended in Lebanon and elsewhere often asked the following question as soon as the workshop began: How have you personally been affected by
the conict? In the aftermath, I observed participants opening up themselves
to the group and narrating very personal stories of loss and suffering due to the
violence inicted upon them, either during the civil war or in the years that followed it.
There is a concrete constitutive structure at the core of the moral process that
seeks to introduce reections of the care of the self in conict resolution workshops. The public testimonies of suffering function as theatrical rites de passage into a postviolence life that can begin anew, from the moral scratch, that
is. In fact, it seems that often trainers seek to constitute this passive experience
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of violence and the subsequent pain inicted upon the individual as the lingua
franca among the participants, not only because it is often the only connecting
link among diverse biographies, narratives, and belongings but also because it
clears the way for the rewriting of the individual. This is especially so in cases
when one seeks to stage the contextual setting as theatrically as Monica did. The
public confession that one has undergone pain and suffering functions to pose the
soul as a moral tabula rasa having erased crime through suffering. This form of
bonding is peculiar in a philosophical sense because it is based on both abstract
humanitarian principles and concrete individualistic stories; this form of confession is peculiar in a juridical sense because it seeks to denounce the perpetrator
but, at the same time, forgive the crime; this form of testimony is peculiar in a
moral sense because it elevates the individual after, and only after, his or her confession of having been through the experience of pain. But this form of bonding
works in a theatrical sense, where participants are invited to enact their presumed
status of the victim onstage and at the center.
In that last sense, the theatrical enactment of pain and suffering at the core of
the workshop presupposes and introduces a religious format of moral superiority.
The individual is awarded not only because he or she underwent suffering and
endured it but also and mainly because he or she considers it a formidable source
of inspiration and spiritual guidance and is ready to admit all this in public. Arguably, the religious format assumes an evidently Christian character in cases of
organized public testimonies of mutual forgiveness between different religious
communities in Lebanon, as some conict resolution and reconciliation workshops in the villages of the Chouf mountains in Lebanon have been seen by some
locals.11 Samir, an experienced trainer in conict resolution workshops in the villages of the Chouf, recited a telling incident to me. In one of these workshops, the
participants, most of them former fighters in the war from both sides, Christian
and Druze, were asked to narrate their involvement in the war. Samir, a Druze,
was shocked by what he saw as the lightness and self-effacement with which the
Christian fighters described what happened to them in detail and condemned the
crimes from both sides. The Druze, by contrast, would simply refuse to talk
about the war and the crimes of either side, believing that killing is a constitutive
part of every war and, therefore, that one cannot gain anything by confessing
11. The Chouf region has its own distinct place and its own particular web of narratives of coexistence, conict, and cooperation within the complex historical and anthropological landscape in
Lebanon. For a comprehensive history of Lebanon with a particular focus on the Chouf and the new
forms of sectarian government introduced by the Ottomans and favored by the European governments of France and Britain in the nineteenth century, see the superb analysis of U. Makdisi 2000.
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his or her participation in it. They saw such confession as hypocritical. In my

discussions with Samir, we often entertained the idea that the effect of this ritual
of confession was to simultaneously achieve a level of moral superiority for the
confessor and a sense of shared responsibility for all, thus excluding the concrete
political and historical context of the crime committedcompare similar findings by anthropologists on the truth and reconciliation committees in South
Africa (Wilson 2001).
Thus public testimonies of suffering do not always produce submissive subjects, who then have to be treated by external experts in health or reconciliation
(cf. Nguyen 2010). In a peculiar way, testimonies of suffering in conict resolution
workshops may have the double effect of liberating the individuals while placing
the blame on the community at large. They produce morally elevated individuals within a community that comes to bear the responsibility for not only past
but also future crimes. In subjugating the individual under the community to
which the individual belongs and by presuming where his or her allegiance
and by default the main incentive for his or her past crimesis placed, it is the
community that is charged with the moral burden of bad conscience. As such, this
process resembles at the collective level what Friedrich Nietzsche calls Verinner
lichung at the individual level, namely, the process of internalizing the repressed
instincts and their subsequent transformation into the individual soul, which can
then bear the burden of sin. Through ritualized and theatricalized public confessions, the internalization of the repressed instincts and the bearing of sin are
expanded overif not solely attributed tothe community to which the individual belongs. The workshop, thus, tends to recreate and reproduce those frightening fortifications, yet not against the old instincts of freedom against which
the state protected itself, as Nietzsche (2009: 6667) argues, but rather against any
effort to pursue justice for the past crimes committed by individuals or groups of
individuals. This process occurs through a wholesale attribution of bad conscience
among members of the communities. The same process reasserts the sectarian
belonging of the individual to the community and thus reconfirms in a circular
way what Ussama Makdisi (2000) calls the culture of sectarianism in Lebanon.
Conclusion
Summer Camp Repairs Rifts after Nahr al-Bared Crisis, read the title of an
article published in the Daily StarLebanons English-speaking newspaperon
Friday, August 1, 2008 (Heisler 2008). The five-day summer school was funded
by the governments of Italy and Spain and was jointly organized by the UN
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Development Program (UNDP), the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies, and the
Lebanese Palestinian Dialogue Committee. The piece reports that the organizers hailed as successful this project in which young people from Lebanese and
Palestinian communities were isolated in the mountains and encouraged to open
a dialogue. The stated goal, which was to ease tensions between Palestinian residents of the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp and Lebanese living around the camp,
was achieved. Indeed, a UNDP official from Spain is quoted as saying, In five
days theyve been able to overcome these prejudices. For the participants and the
donors alike, the workshop did succeed in mending the wounds that the crisis of
Nahr al-Bared had produced.12
Arguably, this story is the final stage of the series of developments I outline in
my article. The newspaper piece is centered on two main themes, namely, crisis
and the workshop (referred to as summer camp), which taken together suggest a
very particular reading not only of the events surrounding the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp but, one could add, more general patterns of violence and peacemaking
in Lebanons civil society today. Thus the overall spirit, and the main argument
of the newspaper piece, reects a growing tendency among peacemakers, namely,
the idea that sudden eruptions of political violence must be understood as temporary crises that can be addressed with the wide application of workshops.13 In
these workshops, the civil society can exchange views, receive training from specialists, and thus resolve the crisis through dialogue and mutual understanding.
This example not only confirms this articles argument about the increasing
relevance that the practice of workshop acquires in present-day Lebanon.14 To be
sure, the story is paradigmatic of the implications from such developments, and
especially about the role that the workshop increasingly plays in efforts to define
the overall problem and to design a response. It is telling that a five-day-long
12. The Nahr al-Bared refugee camp is located in northern Lebanon, near the city of Tripoli
(Ar.: Tarablus). In 2008 a group of armed men who used the camp as their retreat zone engaged in a
number of clashes and ambushes with outposts of the Lebanese Army, which then held them under
siege and eventually destroyed the entire refugee camp, killing many civilians.
13. The growing trend to think of complex situations of political violence and disorder through
the frame of crisis and through what Craig Calhoun (2004) aptly describes as the emergency imaginary is one of the main findings of my fieldwork not only among peace builders but also among
development specialists in the UN and the world of international aid in relation to postconict
situations.
14. It is telling that the main donors are (1) the governments of Italy and Spain, whose share in
the total amount of development aid to Lebanon is among the highest annually and whose committed forces to the UN Peacekeeping Force in southern Lebanon top the list; (2) the UNDP, the largest
UN agency in Lebanon and among the most inuential in the entire UN system globally; and (3) the
Lebanese Center for Policy Studies, one of the countrys most established think tanks.
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workshop featuring twenty-five participants is described as a successful measure to repair the rifts of a series of events that featured the Lebanese National
Army laying siege and shelling a refugee camp of thirty thousand souls almost
daily for a period of four months. Beyond this apparent shortcoming, I would
suggest paying attention to the linguistic connotations involved here. Thus, as a
response to the crisis, Lebanese and Palestinians were isolated in the mountains. Then, it is truly remarkable, if not cynical, to suggest that for Palestinians,
who are denied citizenship in Lebanon and, most probably, have spent most of
their lives in refugee camps, the best place in which they might overcome their
prejudices is yet another camp, even if this is euphemistically called a summer
camp. Note how metaphors and words that otherwise might be part of the jargon
of a military operation are strategic and constitutive of this practice. These linguistic borrowings should not be underestimated. Rather, they hint at an alternate
reading of the conict resolution workshop, that is, within the long genealogy of
disciplinary mechanisms (Foucault 1995).
Indeed, throughout this article, I have described the conict workshop as an
assemblage of particular technomoral arrangements that aim at organizing (and
finally disciplining) the ways that bodies behave, move, and express feelings,
opinions, and attitudes. These arrangements relate not only to the ways that space
and movement within that space is regulated (and restricted, in the sense of isolation, for example). In fact, making sure that the people involved are securely
confined within a spatial arrangement that is both secluded and relatively away
from familiar environments (as in the mountains, in a camp of sorts, on the
island of Cyprus) is only the first element of the disciplinary logic. The next move
is to divide the time available into slots, in which different tasks will and must be
accomplished. To be sure, these insights are not necessarily new. Foucaults work
has opened an enormous field of research, whose possibilities have been explored
in different directions. My sole contribution to the study of disciplinary power is
the argument that the conict resolution workshop constitutes an effort to put in
place a particular mechanism of subject formation that, premised on a number of
arrangements, aims at two particular aspects: the moral and the technical. In the
first case, the moralized care of the self is expected to develop those embodied
attitudes and values that signal forgiveness, civility, and, finally, peacefulness.
In the second case, the technical self is trained in the embodied skills and the
techniques of professionalization.
This line of thought prompts us to go beyond the rhetoric of repair of wounds,
which is what the organizers claim the workshop is about. It points to another
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direction, that is, to the underlying ideas and assumptions about the human qualities and the general constitution of the individuals who are selected to take part in
these workshops, as well as about the larger society of which they are members.
As already argued, the image that guides these interventions is one of a morally
handicapped society, one that finds itself in a generalized state of civil disintegration, hence an uncivil society. Notably, there is an interesting historical parallelism here. U. Makdisi (2000) notes that during the rebellions of the Lebanese
peoples (Ar.: ahal) against their feudal rulers (Ar.: zuama) in the second part of
the nineteenth century, the latter sought to construct the image of the former as
being in a constant state of ignorance (Ar.: jahal). The elites responded by proposing as a solution to this problem massive campaigns of civil education through
which the aha l were expected to become modern civil subjects and listen to
the wise ones. Today the claim of the ignorance of the aha l seems to have
returned in a different guise, namely, as an inherent and widespread deficiency in
technomorality. Contemporary campaigns of civil education seek to treat the
population in workshops.
Needless to say, this treatment is what experts expect. But it would be an exaggeration to suggest that this idea is the outcome of those rather contradictory and
trivial forms of intervention. All in all, it seems that the hopes for future careers
among young members of the Lebanese society are rarely realized. Lana, the
young Lebanese who hoped that her participation in the workshop would help her
pursue a career in the field of conict and development in Lebanon, was eventually obliged to leave the country for a job in the blossoming labor market in the
Gulf countries. A major player in the field in Lebanon began earning his living
from it only after almost a decade and a half of work. The workshop targeting
teachers in Cyprus was unable to enroll the preferred schoolteachers and therefore
had to compromise with the participation of career-oriented university students.
The image that I disseminate through this article, namely, that the workshops on
conict resolution must be perceived as aspirins that are advertised as therapies
for cancer, is not mine solely. It is shared by the majority of the people in Lebanon
and by many of the experts themselves. To be sure, as with the educational campaigns more than a hundred years ago, as portrayed by U. Makdisi, todays workshops are not finite designs on the paper of power. Instead, they often become
battlefields in which the peopleas described in the Ottoman firmanoften
rise up against the wise ones.
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The people were seduced by corruption and did not listen

There will be great storages of force for every city, and

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Figure 1 The torture chamber in Utopia Now.

Figure 2 The baroque leather chair in Utopia Now.

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Sitting comfortably on the terrace of Beiruts luxurious Mvenpick Hotel and

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workshop became eventually an ideal springboard for a promising career in a new

The Third Annual Summer School on Conict Prevention and Transformation

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Come prepared, stay engaged, keep working

This universally used dialogue technique appeared to be an important skill

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The Moral: Caress of the Self

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ignorance . . . crying . . . children crying . . . homeless . . . refugees . . .

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As in the aforementioned workshop with Monica praised by Najjar, the Cyprus

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his or her participation in it. They saw such confession as hypocritical. In my

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Abisaab, Malek. 2001. Beirut: Reviving Lebanons Past. International Journal

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