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In this article I focus on the crisis experts in Lebanon and, in particular, on one celebrated expert response to crisis, the crisis report. I
suggest looking at the report as a techno-political tool that seeks to
produce and disseminate knowledge about crisis and conicts in different parts of the world, while packaged and structured in a universal format. As a rst step I analyse the particular features of this
format, such as size and scale. The main argument is that the report
presents itself as an assemblage of a series of technical characteristics
that help to shrink the world and make it t the model format of the
crisis expert. In a second step I open up the perspective and link the
reports micro-format to bigger questions on governing the world
today. Here, I argue that, within current imaginaries of emergency,
impending crisis and global terrorism, the crisis report functions as a
particular kind of sentinel. I show that it can speak through the language of constant alertness and, crucially, the production of sentinel
subjectivities that must be continuously monitored.
Keywords: crisis; expertise; think tanks; sentinel; techno-politics;
Lebanon; International Crisis Group (ICG)
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Under the text there was detailed reference (along with hyperlinks) to three relevant publications by well known Western mainstream media outlets the BBC,
International Herald Tribune (IHT) and Reuters on different events featured in
the brief text above. The BBC piece draws the Army into Lebanese crisis, the
IHT reports on the car bomb against Lebanese intelligence ofcer, and Reuters
announces the efforts by Arab mediator to broker Lebanese rivals meeting.
We agreed on a bomb, Robert told me decisively, when I asked him about
the image next to the entry for Lebanon in CrisisWatch, the most read publication from the ICG. During my eldwork in Beirut (200810) he was the main
researcher on the ground for the organisation. Robert is a Swiss national and
sociologist by training. He joined the ICG a few months before the 2006 July
war (arb tammz) between izbullah and Israel. He was tall and blondish,
with a soft voice, good manners and proper comportment. I spent long evenings
with him discussing local and global politics, but also the thorny issue of
knowledge production in academia, diplomacy, intelligence and think-tanks.
Before Lebanon he had been working in Egypt for many years, and contributed
a sociological study on Islam and the market there.
We decided on a bomb for a lot of reasons, Robert rephrased his initial
sentence that spring evening of 2008. We had the clashes, the very bad reaction
of politicians to street tensions compared to the situation last year and so on.
So, we had an internal discussion that went from Brussels to Damascus and to
me in Beirut and back again. Robert was extremely eloquent when I asked him
about the logic behind the publication of the organisations most inuential
report. He was very forthcoming about the process of exchanges of knowledge
and opinions between the different layers and levels of the organisation, which
stretched both in hierarchy (from high-ranking ofcials to eld researchers) and
in geography (from Beirut to Brussels and Washington, DC). All these layers,
he insisted, play a crucial role in the production of each CrisisWatch. This is
especially so in difcult times, when tensions and concerns rise to dangerous
levels in times such as those of January and February 2008 in Beirut and
Damascus, in which car bombs respectively killed an investigator of the Lebanese Army and a military commander of izbullah. The country seemed to be
in a terrible mess: car bombs, clashes and sectarian tensions in the streets; a
vacant presidency, a diplomatic deadlock and a power vacuum in the echelons
of power; rockets, explosions and roadside bombs in the South; all seemed to
concur with the pithy assessment that the risk of violent confrontation in and
over Lebanon [is] heightened.
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Yet a plea to integrate non-humans into human history is not just what
Mitchell is after. He wants and succeeds to do much more than that, namely to
tell a fascinating story of interconnection between numerous factors that have
been left out of ofcial accounts, but whose interactions appear random and
unexpected, yet fundamentally powerful in the changes in modern Egyptian history. Altogether his account is a masterful interweaving of highly heterogeneous
factors into one complex grid. Hence the impact of the Aswn Dam on the creation of fertile grounds is related to the expansion of the railways, which also
sponsored rapid mosquito advance to Upper Egypt; British military policy,
which shifted shipping routes in favour of vessels from Sudan, is connected to
British fears of US involvement in Egypt that stopped the former from asking
the latter for an existing remedy for malaria. In addition, the food habits of
Upper Egyptian peasantry, who consumed disproportionate amounts of sugar,
are juxtaposed with the inability of the Cairo-based medical experts and politicians to come up with a swift diagnosis and plan of action.
As already mentioned, one of the rst lessons that comes out of this insightful account is not merely that humans are not alone in the making of their own
history, but that we need to seriously rethink our denition of human agency
altogether. Rather, an assemblage of actors and forces, such as war and colonialism, covert and overt violence, expertise and bureaucracy, technology and nature, makes not only history and economy, but also human agency. Another
lesson to take from Mitchells approach is that each particular context warrants
its own detailed account of forces and actors as they are deployed in time and
space and in relation to one another. In other words, we must resist the temptation to nd analytical refuge in all too general and familiar frames, such as the
political elites, the economy, the state, and capitalism, or in grand theoretical
constructs such as eld theory, as discussed further above. Having said that,
we should emphasise that this does not mean we must ban power and powerful
actors from our analytical focus, but rather that we need to look at the particular
assemblages of techno-politics that give power its powerfulness. With these
insights in mind, I turn now to my own research question and look at how the
crisis report can be analysed through a similar lens, that is, as an assemblage of
forces and actors as they are deployed in time and space, and in relation to one
other.
Size: overlapping academia and journalism
Robert, the Swiss-born and -educated sociologist we met at the beginning of this
article, was the major analyst on the ground in Beirut for the ICG during the
bulk of my eldwork there between 2008 and 2010. His essential task was data
collection for research on crisis situations and militant groups in this small but
turbulent country. Collected knowledge would then ow into the writing of crisis reports for the organisation. Roberts inauguration into the habit of writing
crisis reports happened in the most direct and intense way possible, since the
bloody clashes between izbullah and the Mustaqbal movement in May 2008
were, by all measures, a rst-class crisis. As such, it warranted analysis and
commentary in a crisis report, and quite urgently too. Roberts crisis report on
the May events the fastest he had ever written, as he told me came out only
one week after the clashes.
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N. Kosmatopoulos
It was only a few days after that when Robert invited me to his home to talk
about my research on him and his crisis organisation. At home his entire
family was present: wife and child, along with the entire local ICG team, namely
him and his Arab colleague and translator. Robert had a unique way of
conating these two institutions family and ICG in his life. His wife, a native
Arabic speaker, would often be helping him with translation and other
professional tasks, while his ofcial translator and research assistant, a smart
Moroccan man, would eat and spend time with them as if he were a regular
member of the family. The long working hours, especially in crisis mode, would
compel his assistant to spend them at Roberts home, which had been effectively
turned into the local ICG headquarters. The TV was always on, loud, and xed on
the news. While I was talking to Robert in the dining room, his wife, child and
translator would chat and watch the news in the living room only meters away.
Robert was always conscious of and reective about his gradual but steady
transformation from an academic researcher to a think-tank analyst within the
past months. This had produced considerable amounts of self-reection but also
admiration for his new job. He talked to me enthusiastically about the impact
factor of the report:
Our email list comprises of 600,000 people who receive our reports electronically
on a monthly basis. We have a policy of hard covers, too, and here we try to target the most efcient people, such as a few ambassadors, all political leaders here
[in Lebanon], except from Nasrallh, because we dont have an address [sic],16
but we send it to some people in izbullah here. We also send a hard copy of
the report to people such as Fouad Siniora, Walid Jumblatt, and few people who
we consider relevant or inuential, such as deputies.17 To give you an idea, I send
something between 50 and 70 printed copies for every report to most inuential
people in the country.18
A basic fact that Robert got to learn during his brief training as a crisis report
author was not only to write such reports in a mode and state of emergency, but
to make sure that they were attractive to mass audiences worldwide, something
of relative concern during his previous academic career. The attractiveness of
the crisis report was a collective concern within the organisation, and all the ICG
experts I talked to conrmed it. An essential part of this concern was a preoccupation with the technical characteristics of the report: total page length, the
length of the commentary on every country (not longer than a paragraph), the
analogy between the analysis section and the recommendations, etc. Another
high-level ICG expert told me that the basic decisions on the technical format of
the crisis report and the overall repertoire of Policy Papers, CrisisWatch and
Background Reports were taken during the time when the organisation was
led by Gareth Evans, a long-time former foreign minister of Australia and
high-level ofcial in some powerful global institutions. Evans introduced the
25-pages-max rule because that is the maximum readable by top level people,
as he was quoted as saying. As a foreign minister he had never had time to read
long texts, but he would rely on his people to digest them.
The introduction of the principle of maximum readability brought about a
series of technical innovations in the report format. Some of them revolved
around the question of time and how the report format could guarantee optimal
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The comparison between the necessary time to get into an academic paper and
the time to glance through a crisis report is illuminating not only because it
offers an insider perspective on the desired degree of depth that the organisation
wishes to provide in the analysis of crisis per country, but also because it
portrays in a nutshell a particular balance that is built into the report format. To
be sure, the built-in balance is related to the decision on the optimal amount of
information provided so as to keep the readers interest high. Nevertheless, and
crucially, it is also connected to the particular genre of the crisis report, which,
in the hands of diplomats and global policy makers, often serves as an
orientation leaet in the case of an emergency. Thus, it must be brief enough to
provide the reader with an idea of what these people who are ghting might
want, along with the possible policy options that the reader could support in a
potential decision-making process on that very ghting. From the perspective of
a high-ranking diplomat, therefore, the critical mass of information included in a
crisis report should be enough but not too much.
It must contain enough contextual information to forebear deep analysis, but
not too much to disenchant the reader as an academic paper would do; it should
offer enough recommendations to give an overall idea, but not too much to step
on the toes of the local and global actors involved (therefore many recommendations are considered watered-down or irrelevant compared with the preceding
analysis); nally, it must disseminate enough sense of a world in constant crisis,
but not too much to give the impression that the crisis cannot be xed, if the
recommendations are followed.
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N. Kosmatopoulos
The ability to have access to the rebels on the ground is the pride of most of
the ICG researchers I talked to. This pride is often explicitly celebrated in the
video clips that the organisation has produced to advertise itself, in which the
researchers are said to have dust in their boots. In a video marking the 10th
anniversary of the group, former president Gareth Evans interjects that ICG
researchers do not sit behind computers in Brussels or in Washington.21
Instead, we watch them visiting and talking to members of what seem remote
tribes in an unknown African hinterland. There the token ICG eld researcher is
a tall, white, blond male, sporting safari clothes, a cool attitude (giving high
ves to local kids in the streets) and a clean-cut appearance. At the other end of
the thread we watch the ICG advocacy bureau members, in suits and ties, talking
to high-level ofcials and news broadcasts. The language accompanying the
description of the ICG work at each site is telling: while researchers on the ground
embed, penetrate and extract knowledge, their colleagues in the bureau
advocate, talk to the people that matter, trying to inuence the terms of the
debate.22
In the lm, in their own publications, in my interviews with them, all ICG
members recognise the added value of the organisation to be qualitative
knowledge produced along the long thread that begins in the eld where crises occur and ends in the bureau where decisions on intervention are
taken. This self-condent assertion of quality is undoubtedly linked to the
techno-politics attached to each station along this thread between eld and
bureau. Each station is made up of a repertoire of borrowed practices from other
domains of professional practice, such as (war) journalism, diplomacy and
academia (see further below).
In the eld the primary source of information is interviews, rst-hand interviews, quite difcult to access, Elizabeth says:
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ICG experts are supposed to be experts on the situation, so the questions they ask
tend to be very precise and targeted; questions that even trained journalists sometimes would not think of because their presence in the eld is not entrenched.
Indeed, these are ne-tuned questions, based on long and informed stays in the
eld.23
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N. Kosmatopoulos
The strong event orientation is equally observable in the crisis report, clearly
demonstrated for example in the content quoted at the beginning of this article.
Car bombs, political assassinations, clashes, explosions, the ring of rockets,
roadside bombs, but also parliamentary votes and endorsements of roadmaps,
constitute the core of the report. To be sure, the extent to which (some of) these
events will eventually be considered signicant in an analysis of an overall estimate on the eruption of crisis is always open to speculation and subject to
diverse calculations. Nevertheless, the event and with it the assumed built-in
ability to analyse and assess it in relation to future developments constitutes
an essential structuring element of the crisis report.
Second, the crisis report employs and embeds the analysis of past violent
events into a clear call for future action. Again, the foundational myth bears
upon the moral responsibility with which the urgency to act is invested in the
report. The knowledge embedded in this call is undoubtedly of a particular sort.
Elizabeth calls it a specic kind of knowledge to be understood as the ground
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to act. Robert goes one step further when he describes the crisis report as a
political thermometer, inadvertently echoing Foucault, who denes crisis as
the phenomenon of sudden, circular bolting that can only be checked either by
a higher, natural mechanism, or by an articial mechanism.29 Yet, as the
controversy around the report that opened this article aptly demonstrated, the
efciency of that mechanism cannot be easily gauged. In the words of Charles,
a member of the ICG in New York City,
if you issue warnings of potential outbursts of violence, you are always right. If
violence erupts you will say that you were right to predict it on time but nobody
listened. If not, you will say that it did not happen because you were able to
predict it on time and mobilise to counter it.30
In other words, constant calls for action and intervention ahead of an awaited
escalation, an impending crisis or an unexpected tension do not seem odd or out
of place. In the worst case they can be easily justied within the emerging
framework of preparedness.31
In their treatment of the sentinel from a critical anthropological point of
view, Keck and Lakoff suggest a series of analytical inquiries that help us dissect the power of, and the controversy around, the use of sentinel devices. Most
of these questions revolve around the following themes: the construction of the
sentinel and the perception of threat, and the negotiation of the ne line between
normal and abnormal, risk and noise; issues of reliability and legitimacy of the
sentinel devices, especially in relation to communities of experts, but also to
given abilities and struggles around truth-making claims. Finally, there are
challenges in relation to the move from detection to response, such as the ability
to produce credibility, a sense of collective urgency and, last but not least, a
collective recognition of the validity of the signal.
Certainly these are all highly relevant issues that lie at the core of the construction of the sentinel as a powerful device. Yet one is left wondering about
the acute bio-political effects of this powerfulness, which are not, in my opinion,
addressed adequately in the above approach. The missing question, as I see it, is
the one that explores processes of subjectication as they are developed and
produced through the deployment of mechanisms such as the sentinel. How is
the sentinel linked to particular subjects that might have been identied as the
principal actors of threat? What are the effects of the sentinel upon them?
My research responds to that inquiry by clearly identifying a trend on the
part of the ICG to place recalcitrant entities under a regime of knowledge accumulation that often borders on direct surveillance. Gareth Evans, for example,
claims in the 10-year anniversary video that the work the Group has done in
Southeast Asia in penetrating and understanding the roots of terrorist violence
has been described by some of the major intelligence agencies as gold standard.32 The ICG researchers who come next in the same video build further on
that claim by alluding to the provision of crucial information to the Indonesian
police, which led to the arrest and condemnation of violent Islamists. In general the selection criteria of researchers for the organisation are often directly
related to their proven ability to provide knowledge on the recalcitrant entities.
Arguably the ability of ICG researchers to penetrate the local society, as Wesley
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N. Kosmatopoulos
Having said that, he was also fascinated by the possibility of working for a
think-tank. He wrote the report and all went ne with it. The next thing he
knew was an invitation to join the organisation, and go wherever [he] want[ed]
in the Arab world. Mainly for family reasons he chose Lebanon, but when he
arrived he did not know where to start. They told him that they wanted him to
focus on Salasm, Jihadism, such a thing, and he did that for a while:
I was a little bit lost at the beginning, so I went to the North [of Lebanon] to nd
my Sunni groups and I began to work there for one month and a half and they
agreed OK, Islamist groups in the North.34
Only a few months later the July war broke out. This event led him to reorient
his focus. The new challenge was izbullah, the militant Islamic party ercely
countering the Israeli military offensive against the country. From then on, no
crisis report could appear credible to its international readership without being
able to persuasively claim unhindered access to the strategists within the party
that had the world up in arms against it. Securing this access was Roberts basic
preoccupation as soon as the war broke out. Needless to say, this priority applies
to many if not all (mostly foreign) war journalists, conict researchers and
political commentators in the country.
Two years later Robert was obviously proud of the contacts he had within
the party. In fact, he broached this subject of his own volition:
[Now] I got much better contacts with izbullah. First contacts were during the
war. Then a friend introduced me to AF and WS [izbullah public gures]. From
them I met M [izbullah press ofce head]. He came back with two criticisms
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on the report; he didnt like part of it. And we began to discuss. After that I met
two people of the political party of izbullah [he names them]. I dont remember
direct access to izbullah without having corridors through the press ofce.
Through them we were able to get access to [name of ofcial], the [person]
responsible for the South, and further on with the higher cadres [sic].35
The problem with the contacts within izbullah maintained by many (Western)
researchers and journalists can be best understood within the context of the latters militarised conict with Israel and its inclusion on the US list of terrorist
organisations. Being extremely cautious and conscious of the ne line between
research and intelligence when it comes to it, izbullah ercely guards the ow
of its internal information, but also effectively monitors movement within what
it considers its territory.36 One of its strong points is arguably the notoriously
strategic and canny ways in which Hezbullah handles this vested interest by
foreign media, journalists, think-tanks and academic researchers. Thus, although
many members of the party I talked to consider the ICG to be an outright representative of Western interests, if not a covert spy network in the country, they
choose to keep channels of communication open for multiple reasons. As we
see from Roberts description, one of these reasons is the possibility of being
given draft ICG reports to read, comment on and criticise before they are published and thus to push changes when they disapprove of the content. In
exchange for this the ICG researchers maintain their valuable access to the party.
As one can imagine, this mutually rewarding relationship is a formidable
exercise in political acrobatics often characterised by mutual suspicion and risk.
Hence it does not always run smoothly; sometimes it can lead to costly repercussions for those involved. Throughout my eldwork, for example, I was able
to observe how Roberts successor in the organisation could not maintain proper
contacts with the party, which apparently cost her her job. I was also able to
observe an inverse case, which again, however, forced the researcher to pay the
price for suspicion. In a US-funded think-tank with a branch in Beirut
the researcher-expert on izbullah was accused of being the mouthpiece of the
party within the organisation.37
My research conrms in multiple ways that the acrobatics of mutual
suspicion between the subjects and the objects of crisis knowledge constitute a
principal tenet of the structures of international crisis expertise in Lebanon. To
be sure, it is a daunting if not impossible task for the anthropologist to
explore this question much deeper than the level of observing the obvious. At
that level I could, however, clearly witness how mutual suspicion included
practices of information collection and manipulation by both sides. These practices often blurred the already shaky boundary between disinterested knowledge
production for peace and conict resolution, on one hand, and intelligence gathering for war-waging and state-led counterinsurgency operations, on the other,
especially in the context of ongoing, subtle or overt, military conict between
Israel and izbullah.
However, the crucial difference here is that in the case of the ICG contrary
to izbullah those activities are integrated and presupposed within the
mechanism of the sentinel and thus diffused within a broader and seemingly
non-partisan rationale of crisis warning. From a cynical point of view this practice despite the resolute denial by the organisation brings the function of the
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N. Kosmatopoulos
sentinel back to its initial meaning, which belongs to the military world and
refers to the soldier who goes to the front in order to see whether an enemy is
advancing.38 The suspicion of partisanship is shaken off by the integration of
information collection into broader systems of alert-and-response that appear to
be representing not particular states and interest groups, but the universal desire
for peace, prevention of genocide and resolution of crises and conicts through
dialogue and non-violence. Altogether the sentinel-related techno-politics of the
crisis report seems to imply a peculiar ontological difference between
the observed and the observers. Thus, the former, ie the rebels, the terrorists,
the recalcitrant entities on the ground etc, are guided by particular interests,
holding parochial world-views always rooted in the old game of partisan
politics. The observers, on the other hand, are adhering to universal values,
equipped with quasi-scientic mechanisms of analysis and alert, already inhabiting a post-violence world.
Conclusion: Cei est la nature!
Throughout this article I have attempted to show that the ontological division
between the observers and the observed is increasingly articulated and organised
in techno-political ways that taken together allude to the emergence of a
novel style of reasoning in the expert politics of international crisis. In order to
explore the techno-politics of crisis knowledge, I have focused explicitly on
innovations, ie on those forms of borrowings and associations, overlapping and
fusing, which have been applied in the production of the crisis reporting. In
order to interrogate this new kind of knowledge production, I pay particular
attention to new associations of elements regarding space, size, scale and function. In order to assess the possible impact of this new way of thinking (and
predicting and acting) about international crisis, I did not wonder whether it was
successful in the declared aim of conict resolution. I did not pursue this inquiry
because I believe that what is noteworthy about this novel style of reasoning is
not how it contributes to the resolution of conicts and crises. Instead, the major
impact of this ontological difference begins with the proliferation of imaginative geographies of crisis and emergency, according to which crisis seems to be
a perpetual, indeed, the normal state of affairs.39 In this sense, for example, the
question of the accuracy of the decision to place a bomb next to the Lebanon
entry in the March 2008 ICG report appears irrelevant. Since Lebanon is part of
the imaginative geography of crisis, the bomb will never look odd.
Yet imaginary geographies of crisis do not exist a priori. Rather, they are
the outcome of particular combinations of practices, ideas and forces, among
which we must count the techno-politics of the crisis knowledge, as I have been
analysing them thus far. I argue in particular that the combined effect of the
techno-politics of size, scale and sentinel is a binary geographical imagination
that divides the globe into spaces in which crisis is perpetual, on the one hand,
and spaces in which a critical decision is pressing, alternately into spaces of
crisis and spaces of decision.40 The techno-politics of the crisis report are crucial
in constructing this binary because they attach particular forms of knowledge,
language, materiality, functionality and subjectivity to each of these spaces.
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Notes on Contributor
Nikolas Kosmatopoulos is a cultural anthropologist. Currently a postdoctoral
researcher at Columbia Global Centers | Europe (Paris), he teaches at Sciences
Po and at the cole Polytechnique Fdrale de Lausanne. His research interests
include the anthropology of expertise in violence, crisis and peace making, the
anthropology of globalisation and global governance institutions, the anthropology and history of the Middle East, the political anthropology of social movements and imagination, and science and technology studies.
Notes
1.
This is the rest of the entry which features enough reasons to stay alert: In Beirut, the 3-year anniversary commemoration of former PM Raq Hariri assassination 14 Feb coincided with funeral for Hizbollah
commander Imad Mughniyeh, killed in 12 Feb Damascus car bomb. Thousands of troops deployed but
no serious violence; low-level clashes between rival political factions throughout month. Hizbollah threatened open war against Israel. 28 Feb US deployed 3 warships off Lebanon coast. Arab League SG
Amer Moussa left Beirut after failing to mediate presidential succession crisis; parliamentary vote on post
delayed to 11 March; speculation Moussa may return 9 March; 19 soldiers charged over killings of 6
opposition protesters during clashes in southern Beirut on 27 Jan; followed accusations by Hizbollah of
army bias. Fatah al-Islam leader Shaker al-Abssi and 4 Syrian members of group charged for 13 Feb
2007 Beirut bus bomb. Lebanese prosecutor indicted 56 individuals for involvement in al-Qaeda-linked
groups, including Fatah al-Islam, 18 Feb Israeli forces killed Lebanese man near border town Ghajar 3
Feb: circumstances disputed.
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3.
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N. Kosmatopoulos
This threat could be said to be credible, especially because the Secretary General of the party, Hassan
Narallah, rarely uttered such statements without letting them be followed by adequate actions.
Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe. Distinguishing between resemblance and similitude in visual representation, Foucault pointed out that, while in the former one assumes the ontological superiority of reality
over image, in the second the objective referent disappears, thus things and images are more or less
like one another without any of them being able to claim the privileged status of model for the rest.
Ibid., 10.
Agamben, State of Exception.
Calhoun, A World of Emergencies.
Stone et al., Think Tanks Across Nations.
McGann, The Global Go-to Think Tanks, 2.
Medvetz, Murky Power; and Medvetz, Think Tanks in America.
Cf. Bliesemann de Guevaras introduction to this issue.
Tolstoy, War and Peace; and Latour, The Pasteurization of France.
Mitchell, Rule of Experts.
Kosmatopoulos, Pacifying Lebanon.
Kosmatopoulos, The Flotilla Machine; Kosmatopoulos, The Birth of the Workshop; and Kosmatopoulos, Toward an Anthropology of State Failure.
Mitchell, Rule of Experts.
The title is a direct allusion to Ghayatri Spivaks Can the Subaltern Speak?, one of the fundamental
texts of postcolonial studies.
The reason why the ICG does not have Nasrallahs mailing address is that his whereabouts are kept
secret because of the lethal risk posed by Israel, which killed both the partys preceding secretary-generals.
Walid Jumblatt leads the Progressive Socialist Party, which mostly represents the Druze in Lebanon. Sinioura is a previous prime minister and a leading gure in the Future Party of Raq al-Hariri.
Interview, Robert, Beirut, May 2008.
Interview, Sandrine, New York City, November 2012.
Ibid.
ICG, International Crisis Group (video).
Ibid.
Interview, Sandrine, New York City, November 2012.
Kosmatopoulos, Toward an Anthropology of State Failure.
Wesley Clark, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, quoted in ICG, International Crisis Group.
Lakoff and Keck, Preface; and Keck, Une Sentinelle Sanitaire.
Ibid.
Interview, Sandrine, New York City, November 2012.
Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 88.
Interview, Charles, New York City, December 2013.
Collier and Lakoff, Distributed Preparedness; and Lakoff, The Generic Biothreat.
ICG, International Crisis Group.
Interview, Robert, Beirut May 2008.
Ibid.
Ibid.
For example, during two of my visits to Dahiyeh, the neighbourhood in South Beirut in which much of
the izbullah infrastructure and constituency is based, undercover members approached me and kindly
asked me to follow them into an ofce for questioning.
For more on this, see Kosmatopoulos, Pacifying Lebanon.
Lakoff and Keck, Preface.
Agnew, Sociologizing the Geographical Imagination; Soja, Thirdspace; and Massey, Spaces of Politics.
Here, the ancient use of the word can be helpful. In ancient Greek crisis has two meanings: it designates a critical situation (a patient on the verge of life and death, for example) and a critical decision on
an important issue (the doctors decision on the patients treatment, for example).
Interview, Charles, New York City, December 2013.
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Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
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