Paper short abstract:

The paper advances the thesis that contemporary peace expertise is guarding one of the most fundamental b/orders in modernist political thought since Hobbes, namely the b/order of violence that cuts through modernist antithetical pairs such as state/society, but also nature/culture.

Paper long abstract:

The tackling of political violence in Lebanon and in the Middle East has recently witnessed an increasing participation of diverse kinds of peacemaking experts. Older accusations of normalization efforts or crude interventionism have been enhanced by more elaborate critiques pointing towards pathologization of political resistance or feminization of state structures. However, these critiques fail to go beyond Marxist-based or feminism-inspired analyses. The paper advances the thesis that contemporary peace expertise could be perceived as guarding one of the most fundamental b/orders in modernist political thought since Hobbes, namely the b/order of violence that cuts through modernist antithetical pairs such as state/society, but also nature/culture. Thus, processes of concealment and depoliticization of state violence often go hand in hand with practices of delegitimization of societal anti-violence through its culturalization or localization. Despite acclaimed diversity, contemporary peacemaking is almost unanimously premised on a neo-Hobbesian understanding of violence, state and order.