Sabrina Karim and Kyle Beardsley’s review confirms my initial thought that our books fall on opposite sides of Robert Cox’s distinction between policy-oriented and critical research. While Karim and Beardsley wish to solve policy problems as they present themselves in the given world order (how can we keep, let’s say, French peacekeepers in Central Africa from prostituting refugee girls) the aim of my book is to ask how we even come to think that it would be a good idea to have French security forces police Central African refugee camps. What gives a specific group of people in the world the authority to say how peace must be built and what “good” peace is? I analyse the field and habitus of peacebuilding in order to understand why some people, some ideas, and some practices are recognized as authoritative while others are not. And this is why I do not refer to Haas’s “epistemic communities” (or other constructivist ideas of norm entrepreneurs for that matter); there, authority derives from the inherent values of ideas.

I argue and show, however, that international peace experts across different organizations and missions hold positions of authority because they hold many other powerful resources through which they impose their ideas as “right.” The value of ideas is an expression rather than a source of authority. Such an approach implies a counterfactual: there could have been other authoritative ideas and practices but these have been discarded. I do not presume that they have been overshadowed because they are less valuable. I argue that they do not fit into the wider power structures of this world. Or said more simply: the people suggesting these ideas and practices have not graduated from an OECD-country top-100 university; their professional practice is not akin to an American consultancy firm; they do not reduce négritude to Nelson Mandela; or, maybe, they defend radically different political and social visions. I show the depth to which ideas and practices of peace are rooted in Eurocentric ideas of individualized society, liberal politics, capitalist professionalism, and bourgeois sensibilities. I also argue that the outcry “But we are saving lives . . . ,” with which peacebuilders refute most fundamental critique by claiming moral grounds, is part of this power struggle.

Indeed, the question whether peacebuilding creates effective peace is a case in point: it cannot be answered empirically as any definition of “effective peace” will depend on how casualties of peacebuilding are counted (compare the work of Virginia Fortna with Alan Kuperman’s). But analyzing how some ideas dislodge others allows understanding which peace is considered successful or not, and why so. It is true that my book does not consider those populations “there” who might benefit or not from peacebuilding; the analysis of the inner workings of the Eurocentric peacebuilding field took sufficient effort and time. To complement my research with the “view from there” I would imagine my book on a shelf between, for instance, Meera Sabaratnam’s Decolonizing Intervention and Gearoid Millar’s An Ethnographic Approach to Peacebuilding. The starting point of these books, and mine, is indeed a very different one from Karim and Beardsley’s, who do fabulous work in picking up the critique where I (and similar scholars) leave it, namely with the question of what happens once those intervention structures and spaces are in place and how we can guard the guardians.