I am grateful to Jessica A. Stanton for her generous reading of my book. She has captured a great deal of what I see as its main contributions, especially those related to the despotic character of counterinsurgency rule. What she identifies as its main limitation, especially in relation to case selection, is broadly accurate. Economy of Force offers a new history and theory of Anglo-American counterinsurgency with major implications for social, political, and international thought. The historical case studies focus on late-colonial military campaigns in Malaya, Kenya, and Vietnam, as well as on the more recent multinational campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. The book does not address the very many other comparable historical and contemporary pacification campaigns conducted by other imperial or postcolonial states, though many of its main arguments would certainly apply to them. While the primary motivation of the book was not to pinpoint variation in forms of civilian coercion across cases (the central focus of Stanton’s book) it does not entirely neglect major differences in this regard. It argues that the dynamics of oikonomia in the use of force varied in relation to the level of organized resistance, to the resources available to the counterinsurgency state, to the perceived racial “Otherness” of the target population and other racialized and gendered practices, and to the degree of external support provided to insurgents.

My work is motivated not only by the inadequacies of existing theories of counterinsurgency war, but also the ahistoricism of approaches to social and sociological theories in international relations more generally. Stanton did not take up this wider contribution. This book not only seeks to historicize and critique social and sociological theory to give a better account of so-called armed social work. It also challenges the deeply ahistorical manner in which the field of international relations has imported social and sociological theories. While IR practices a form of what I have called elsewhere “sociolatry,” or the worship of things “socio” (“Method or Madness: Sociolatry in International Thought,” Review of International Studies, 41 [no. 4, 2015]: 655–74), it has ignored the historical origins of distinctly social theorizing. As such, it demonstrates very little sense of when and why sociological explanations of human affairs first emerged and what this history might reveal.

Economy of Force explains why this matters. International and even much political theory has been blind to the more fundamental governance form of which the modern social realm is a concrete historical expression. The late eighteenth-century rise of social forms of governance in the core of the major European capitalist empires did not destroy and replace household activities and forms of thought, as both liberalism and social theory have claimed. They are instead the distinctly modern and capitalist variant on the science and practice of household rule. This is why neither liberalism nor social theory has offered an adequate theory of politics, assimilating it to household rule. In contrast, my book conceives politics as nondomestication and thus, pace much contemporary critical theory, is able to distinguish between politics and war.