The study of peacebuilding in the aftermath of armed conflict has treated actors on the ground, whether domestic governments, peacekeeping missions, or NGOs, as homogenous units, void of meaningful variation in interests, behaviors, and actions. Yet, individual people make up these organizations, which means that an in-depth exploration of the professionals who compose these organizations is sorely needed. Catherine Goetze’s book, The Distinction of Peace: A Social Analysis of Peacebuilding, gives us a glimpse into these individuals and provides perhaps one of the first attempts at understanding how peacebuilding identity is formed and sustained. She argues that the peacebuilding profession has evolved to reflect the configuration of global power, resulting in a professional space in which membership depends on holding certain values, beliefs, and backgrounds. Individual peacebuilders largely represent middle class values such as autonomy, efficiency, leadership and accountability. In this way, she argues that the practice of peacebuilding reflects the global power structure dominated by the Western middle class, and is sustained through the creation of a habitus and the recruitment of highly individualized people whose values and beliefs align with the core foundation of the peacebuilding field.

Much of the literature on peacebuilding assumes that peace operations implement policies and reforms in an unbiased way. Goetze’s scholarship, however, aptly demonstrates how peacebuilding is not neutral. Peacebuilders’ agendas, as she shows, are shaped largely by the identities of the individuals who make up the organizations. These individuals adopt Western, cosmopolitan, liberal identities. Pioneering figures such as Dag Hammarskjöld, the second Secretary-General of the United Nations, developed the basic practical framework for peacebuilding, but it was those he was surrounded by who shaped the identity of this framework. Ralph Bunche, a key architect of the United Nations Organization in the Congo (UNOC) mission (1960–1963); Andrew Cordier, Undersecretary in Charge of General Assembly; and Heinz Wieschhoff, advisor to Dag Hammarskjöld, among others, all embodied key elements of Western middle-class values. These include beliefs that wage income is earned through professional merit, value is bestowed on self-education and self-promotion, distance ought to be maintained from the lower class, and those in political power should exhibit a preference for state-centered public policy. This identity developed despite representation at the UN by a diverse population of Member States. Goetze argues that even though geographic origin does play a major role in the attainment of visible positions within the UN, so does background, especially educational and family background, and the backgrounds of high and mid-level UN bureaucrats are similar. National origins are less important than the sociological homogeneity of the field of applicants for such positions.

Unlike many other books on peacebuilding, Goetze’s approach is sociological. She develops the framework of Pierre Bourdieu, who uses the “field” as an empirical tool of analysis. A “field” privileges social relationships and social actors instead of institutions and institutional actors. Most books on peacebuilding have focused exclusively on the latter, but Goetze extends the concepts of the former into the realm of peacebuilding. She develops the Bourdieun concept of “habitus,” or the “modus operandi,” of culture to explain the sustainability of the peacebuilder identity. Professional identities persist because practices, habits, and behavior do not change easily once identity is internalized or normalized as “habitus.” She uses different types of data—including two waves of surveys, prosopography analysis, in-depth interviews, extensive biographical research, and network analysis—to demonstrate the formation and preservation of peacebuilding culture. Using this framework and methods she concludes that the peacebuilding field encompasses a specific profession with institutionalized and normalized careers obtained through particular middle-class education, and that this identity is what is important to understand the domination of a particular type of Western liberal peacebuilding.

In comparing her work to other scholarship on peacebuilding, it is striking that she highlights a need to understand the individuals who compose peacebuilding efforts, yet her analysis demonstrates the pervasiveness of homogeneity. Thus, one of the ironies of the book is that in demonstrating a need to unpack the homogeneity assumption of peacebuilding, the conclusion demonstrates that the practice of peacebuilding can be well explained by a hegemonic and homogenous identity. At first blush, one might contend that this obviates the need to undertake the exercise in the first place, in that the observed homogeneity gives credibility to rational choice scholars who assume a unitary actor. Goetze’s contribution, however, is extremely important because the book demonstrates how the actor is biased. In other words, we now have information about the assumptions we can make about actors, and we should be cautious in assuming that peacekeepers are impartial agents of conflict resolution.

One aspect of her explanation that could have been better developed is the connection to other sociological models of norm diffusion and learning. The use of the Bourdieun framework adds value to the book and allows Goetze to center her discussion on established concepts. Nevertheless, that she shies away from either more directly comparing her method to epistemic communities or incorporating the literature on epistemic communities into her framework presents a missed opportunity. An epistemic community is “a network of professionals with recognized expertise and competence in a particular domain and an authoritative claim to policy-relevant knowledge within that domain or issue-area” (Peter Haas, “Introduction: Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coordination.” International Organization 46[1]: 1–35 [1992]). According to Haas, such communities “have (1) a shared set of normative and principled beliefs, which provide a value-based rationale for the social action of community members; (2) shared causal beliefs, which are derived from their analysis of practices leading or contributing to a central set of problems in their domain and which then serve as the basis for elucidating the multiple linkages between possible policy actions and desired outcomes; (3) shared notions of validity that is, intersubjective, internally defined criteria for weighing and validating knowledge in the domain of their expertise; and (4) a common policy enterprise—that is, a set of common practices associated with a set of problems to which their professional competence is directed, presumably out of the conviction that human welfare will be enhanced as a consequence” (Haas, 199, p. 3). At face value, this framework appears to be complementary to Goetze’s approach, yet a thorough discussion of this potential alternative mechanism and others is mostly absent from the book.

Another aspect of the book that leaves the reader wanting more relates to the implications for the practice of peacebuilding. Goetze explicitly refuses to comment on the policy implications for her critical analysis, which makes her book unable to speak to what makes one form of peacebuilding better than alternatives. Yet one way that she frames the book is to begin with the premise that peacebuilding is rarely, if ever, successful, thereby posing the question of why peacebuilding professionals take on the vocational roles that they do. On the one hand, such a frame raises the question of what is going on in the emerging consensus from quantitative studies of peace operations that find that peacekeeping and peacebuilding operations improve the prospects of at least a negative peace. Is this consensus wrong? On the other hand, the frame also leads the reader to believe that the current practice of peacebuilding needs to be improved, and yet Goetze is silent on how to make on-the-ground peacebuilding more efficacious. Rather than addressing current debates about peacebuilding practices, which mostly all assume that peacebuilding is necessary without questioning the paternalistic and potential neo-colonial nature of peacebuilding, she attempts to move beyond such discussions as she finds them particularly problematic. Instead, she tries to understand the origins of peacebuilding’s authority, power, and centrality. One area where we see this pivot is through her discussion of the debate surrounding “local ownership of peacebuilding” that has proliferated in recent years. She argues that debates about local ownership are futile because they have been co-opted by peacebuilders who view such practices as another task that has to be done. It is, to put it crudely, another box to tick off. Goetze’s challenging goal is to analyze how the box-ticking mentality formed in the first place.

While understanding that the origins of peacebuilding culture is important, she misses an opportunity to link peacebuilding identity to peacebuilding practices on the ground. That is, given the peacebuilder’s identity that she so clearly traces and explores, how does this translate to the implementation of local ownership on the ground? Even more simply, what do peacebuilders do on the ground? How does the peacebuilding identity affect the decisions they make? What are the consequences of the identity for how peacebuilding is performed? We are left to wonder what the implications of her findings are for the practice of peacebuilding if done differently.

Finally, it is worth noting that although the book refers to peacebuilders, the idea of peacebuilders is largely limited to senior and mid-level bureaucrats at the United Nations. Dag Hammarskjöld, Ralph Bunche, Andrew Cordier, and Heinz Wieschhoff are hardly representative of the peacebuilders on the ground. Most peacebuilding missions undoubtedly include senior civilians and mid-level bureaucrats, but the actual practice of peacebuilding is largely carried out by low-level civilians, military officials, and police officers. For example, take the job of re-building the police forces of countries with peacekeeping missions. The responsibility to rebuild the local police force lies strictly with UN Police Officers (UNPOL), with minimal civilian involvement. Even though these police officers are working within the framework created by senior and mid-level bureaucrats, it is likely that they develop their own identities in the field. Thus, it is possible that peacebuilders have multiple identities depending on the subsets we observe.

Criticisms aside, Goetze’s contribution is undeniable. Her work is convincing in making the point—oddly absent in existing scholarship—that individuals make up the institutions and organizations that implement peacebuilding (and other interventions). Consequently, there are particular cultures and identities that form and are sustained. These individuals and the cultures they create have profound consequences for the type of peacebuilding we see on the ground. In this way, we cannot truly understand peacebuilding without first reading Goetze’s book.