I want to thank Jonathan Fisher for his extremely valid points regarding crucial avenues for further research. These critiques, among other things, led me to reflect more on how The Security Arena in Africa relates to the newest literature and on how generalizable my results are beyond the three cases studied.

Although hybrid-order scholars often ascribe different ordering practices to different types of actors—for instance, bureaucratizing state actors versus talkative customary actors— I propose instead to view the ordering actions independent of the actors. That is, any person or group can use a range of actions on the fluid–stable ordering spectrum described in my book. I thus agree with Fisher that an overemphasis on actors can obscure some of the structural dimensions of state-building and the legacies of colonialism. I also try to emphasize in my ongoing work how The Security Arena in Africa reflects on the security of those often “silenced”—to use a term from the feminist security scholar Lene Hansen—by many security studies. Institution-centered structuralism can obscure the dynamism that people can develop to change their security arena even without formally organizing into actors.

This is in line with the newest trend in the literature on vernacular security. It offers more people-focused understandings of everyday security than the “felt threat of physical harm” (p. 20) I propose in the book and that Fisher rightly criticizes. In fact, the notion of security was one of the key aspects I remained unsatisfied with during my work for this book. Therefore, I am now working on a new project that studies the “security paradox”: instances in which observable and subjective aspects of security diverge. As Fisher mentions, a view of the multiplicity of security forms, from spiritual to ontological to physical, can also strengthen our appreciation of what kinds of (in)security inhabitants face in their security arena and from whom.

Fisher encourages me to think of The Security Arena in Africa’s generalizability beyond the three cases studied, especially those with more pronounced histories of peripheral public authority. Although I have not had the chance to conduct fieldwork in the four countries of East Africa after Liberation—Eritrea, Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Uganda—I have recently used the book’s concepts for studying Haiti’s and Lebanon’s security landscape. Even more, I would say one could just as well write a book titled The Security Arena in Europe: with the rise of right-populist parties, urban dwellers often attribute violently extreme sentiments and behavior to rural populations, despite crime there being no more rampant (or often less so), in a similar way to the securitization of the outer circle in the three African countries studied.

Although we believe ourselves in Europe to be fully “stable” (in contrast to normative ascriptions of African states as “fragile”), we Europeans indeed fortunately exhibit numerous fluid elements in our security production. A few years after I moved to Berlin, ticket agents on the subway started receiving commissions for each passenger caught without a fare. Whereas before you might have gotten away with a warning, now there was no incentive for leniency. If every rule were so rigidly enforced and monitored, you would live in constant fear of fees and imprisonment for crossing a red light as a pedestrian even at night or for accidentally breaking a law you were not even aware of. Fluidity is part of the security arena in Europe and elsewhere and is often actually a reason why we feel so safe—just as fluidity in African states, as I show in the book, is not always an entryway for “chaos” but instead often an opportunity for flexible conflict resolution.