Master Peace provides an intense critique of the international peacebuilding industry through a careful ethnographic study of Lebanon’s post-civil war era. Kosmatopoulos introduces the term ‘master peace’ to describe how peace is often dominated by external experts who wield disproportionate influence through supposedly neutral technologies of conflict resolution. Central to his argument is the notion that international interventions have often failed to genuinely address the complexities of local violence. Instead, these interventions promote simplified frameworks like ‘ethnic conflict’ or ’failed state’, masking deeper socio-political realities. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted in Lebanon, Cyprus, Switzerland, and United States, Kosmatopoulos demonstrates how expert practices – such as conflict resolution workshops and elite-focused diplomatic dialogues – systematically overlook proper engagement and grassroots participation, thus entrenching pre-existing power dynamics. Kosmatopoulos’s exploration of material and moral dimensions of these interventions demonstrates how supposedly objective technical solutions, cloaked in moral superiority, often produce hierarchical relationships that paradoxically deepen divisions instead of resolving them. Particularly revealing is his analysis of how peace experts often operate within implicit colonial paradigms, and at times even engaging local populations through strategies reminiscent of surveillance and control. Ultimately, this book challenges conventional wisdom within peace studies and political anthropology, urging readers to reconsider the ethics and consequences of expert-driven peace interventions. Kosmatopoulos advocates, like many voices within the Global South, for a fundamental reconsideration and transformation of how we understand and conceptualize peace and conflict within emerging frameworks of global coexistence and collaboration. On page 63, Kosmatopoulos incorrectly attributes the mediation of the 1993 Peace Accords to the Peace Research Institute in Oslo. The Accords were actually facilitated by the Institute for Applied Social Science (FAFO).