I am grateful to Hagar Kotef for her productive and insightful reading of War for Peace. Kotef captures the book’s arguments, and she powerfully draws out the book’s relevance for theorizing contemporary settler colonialism in Palestine and for the rhetoric of the so-called peace process and its recent mutations. She also hones in on the relationship of the book to Fanon, Du Bois, and anticolonialism in order to inquire about the political horizons that the book might open up.

War for Peace focused on ten thinkers across the history of political thought, from Plato to Immanuel Kant and Sayyid Qutb. It examined the discursive operations of peace as a universalized and moralized ideal. In the preface, I indicated some contemporary contexts that its analysis can illuminate, alluding to these at different points in the book and again in the epilogue. These contexts include the mobilization of peace talk in the Global War on Terror and the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, Israeli rhetoric about peace and Palestine, and the way that contemporary sites of protest, dissent, and resistance—across Occupy, Cairo, Baltimore, Ferguson—have been continually reframed through an insatiable demand to be “peaceful.” Other commentators have observed further resonances, ranging from Gandhi’s and Bin Laden’s theorizations of peace and violence to Trump’s rhetoric about Iran. The participants in this forum similarly draw out the relevance of the book’s arguments for Iberian discourses of slavery in the Americas (Ireton), slogans of peace with justice or without justice in colonial contexts (Khoury), “bringing peace to the Middle East” (Vahabzadeh), and here, Israeli discourses of peace (Kotef). The phenomena in question, in other words, are relevant to various contexts, and other sites will resonate with different readers.

Palestine and Israel appear at the margins of War for Peace, in the preface (xv), in a handful of footnotes and somewhat more allusively at various points. I agree with Kotef that the Israeli production of peace as a basic desire, and indeed as the desire that marks “humanity,” is bound up with the polemical, parasitical, and provincial structures of dehumanization, racialized hierarchy, and normalized violence that War for Peace examines. (As I write in my response to Khoury, the transfiguration of the question of Palestine into a question of “peace” has been part of an entire machinery of dispossession.) I am indebted to Kotef for noting that, when reading War for Peace, she was thinking of the context of the “peace process” and the frame of “conflict” in Israel and Palestine and, indeed, for modeling how to make such connections. The book’s arguments can shed some light on how peace operates here and elsewhere: from the weaponization of “peace” as a moral ideal that dehumanizes through racialized ideas about enemies who do not “love” peace, to the temporalities of dispossession inscribed in the deferral and anticipation of peace; from pitting “peace and security” against “peace and justice” without interrogating the work that “peace” does, to how the fictions of symmetry and size elide the asymmetries of colonizer and colonized. Kotef eloquently draws out how Israeli public discourse is framed by these structures.

The framing of the book’s individual chapters also lends itself to unmasking the politics of peace in contemporary discourse. The chapters address the oppositions between well-ordered peace and disordering violence, the peaceful and the warlike, just war and illegitimate aggression, peace-lovers and peace-haters, history’s saviors and theological enemies, the lawful and the lawless, civilized peace and uncivilized war, and productive war and purposeless violence. The naturalization of these oppositions is fundamental to the structures of idealization that the book examined and fundamental to the discursive life of peace today. These oppositions derive from and fortify the idealization of peace; they reflect how peace is discursively embedded in, for example, aesthetics that demand symmetry of like-to-like and those that recast the enemy as an incomplete part, or in racialized hierarchies that designate some places as epicenters of peace and legitimate war, others as sites of pacification and sources of illegitimate aggression. The chapters explored the idealization of peace through domains that are activated differently across contexts: ideas of symmetry, the location of violence, the divine purpose of the enemy, the permanence of the law, development and prosperity, historical progress and modern statehood.

I wanted War for Peace to cover the range that it does—Plato to Kant and Qutb, broad in some ways and very specific in others—because the book is about a morality that is pervasive and unacknowledged. Today, this morality is global, and its tensions and paradoxes have deep historical roots. Kotef models how to take these arguments and themes and trace their lives in a contemporary context. Reading the book’s arguments and resonances in terms of these broad structures, without letting it be determined by one place, also overcomes two interpretive dangers and defensive postures tied to the analysis of peace. On the one hand, the book refuses to stop at the idea that appeals to peace are merely “hypocritical” or “ideological.” Focusing on rhetoric in one place can make it easy to deflect attention from the idealization of peace and to think that the particular discourses are “abuses” of a universal ideal. The defensive maneuver would then relocate the analysis to the beliefs and intentions of those who appeal to peace, rather than the structure of peace itself as a morality. Because the idiom of peace does form a public relations and national apparatus, it can too easily shift the terrain to a discourse analysis of how specific politicians, figures, or organizations deploy peace strategically and whether they do so in good faith. It thereby can shield the idealization and moralization from critique. Second, centering one place, be it Israel or the United States, can provide cover for appeals to peace in a different way, namely by normalizing their weaponization of “peace” and by locating it as in keeping with the “tradition” of political theory. I wanted my book’s genealogy to simultaneously push against notions of tradition and inheritance and to carve out space for unmasking how peace performs different kinds of parasitical, provincial, and polemical work across a variety of contexts. The book’s arguments needed to be neither disconnected from the world nor focused on the particularities of one place, neither about ahistorical laws nor an intellectual history of how some thinkers thought about peace. (There is of course much more to be said about being a political theorist who is critical of peace as a moralized ideal in contemporary discourse and the history of political thought and who is also Palestinian, as well as the constraints and compulsions that come with all this in American academia generally and political theory specifically.)

War for Peace attempted to thread those multiple needles. It aims to provide the groundwork for tracing the broad theoretical architecture of the logics that wind through discourses and sites and for seeing the particularities, differences, and permutations across them. It enables readers to do the kind of connective and disruptive work that points to resonances, disconnections, and constellations in and across contexts—as Kotef models in her response—and that thereby come with alternating positions of critique for recognizing points of fissure or intensification.

It is with this sense of connectivity, disconnection, and interruption that the book’s final chapter resituates Immanuel Kant as a philosopher embedded in empire and Sayyid Qutb as a theorist of colonialism, race, and capitalism. The chapter recovers Sayyid Qutb’s pre-prison international thought: a Qutb whose anticolonialism locates him in relation to other anticolonial projects and thinkers from the Global South that tackled colonialism, capitalism, whiteness, knowledge production, and a federation of postcolonial states. Such thinkers include Du Bois and Fanon (304, 305). The idealization of peace thus tracks the global color line and inflects the opposition between colonizer and colonized as one of “values.” Given the book’s scope, part of its challenge was to think with theorists such as Fanon and Du Bois, but to also recognize the long history of the idealization of peace, that it precedes and exceeds colonialism and has been sometimes uncritically championed by anticolonial and decolonial thinkers. The chapter challenged readers to understand Qutb the Islamist in this frame, as part of a tradition of anticolonial thinking. It thereby invites readers to overcome the normalized silos of political theory and public culture that hive off Islam as something separate and altogether different and to think about the location of anticolonialism and anticolonial thought differently.

In this vein, I agree with Kotef that the work of provincializing today’s dominant values is integral to anticolonialism and that it resonates with Fanon’s thought (xviii, 10, 305). Although Fanon does not say much about peace, there is much to recommend bringing Fanon into this frame of interrogating who idealizes peace, when and how and to facilitate or conceal which structures; this is also to say that it can helpfully disrupt the dominant Anglo-American framings of Fanon in terms of a moralized and abstract opposition between violence/nonviolence. Du Bois, I think, offers a different set of possibilities and interventions. I am, incidentally, writing elsewhere on how Du Bois and Qutb offer pieces of a critique of the idealization of peace in relation to whiteness, colonialism, and capitalism, though their critiques reinscribed the status of peace. Du Bois is interesting to me because, and writing here very provisionally, he discusses peace in roughly three ways. The first is skepticism about white appeals to peace as hypocritical, narrow, and self-serving. The second is his critical analysis of how war and peace track “the color line,” or how the peace of colonialism results in wars of colonizer against colonized, colonizers against each other, and eventually will lead to war of all the colonized against their colonizers. He thus calls for anticolonial unions. The third way is an immanent critique, in which “peace” is a moral universal ideal that would be attained through progress, a genuine commitment, and the desire for peace. In this sense, Du Bois and Qutb were simultaneously critical of colonial invocations of peace but nonetheless reinscribed its status as a universal moral ideal to be attained through the right desires and through federative political forms that use but exceed the modern state. Even as they treated peace as the answer, each outlined some of the crucial components for a critique of peace as a morality.

Such readings of Fanon and Du Bois would also be important as disciplinary interventions, for disrupting how each has been taken up to sanction the valorization of peace and as doing the work that the liberal idealizers of peace want them to do. They are marshaled and mobilized to shield peace from critique, so that Fanon apparently wrote about violence and colonialism because supposedly he really just wanted peace (perhaps even unbeknownst to him?), whereas Du Bois’s antiwar activism puts peace beyond critique. I am interested in how the discipline’s double investment in peace and in race requires that peace, or the desire for it, remain unassailable, and that minoritized thinkers’ own critiques of the rhetoric of peace, its violent structures, and its system of values can only culminate in ventriloquizing the desire for peace—a desire that cannot be critically examined. The issue, then, is less whether Du Bois or Fanon provides solid footing as an ethical exemplar, and more the structure of morals that gives peace a remarkable hold over contemporary sensibilities and the compulsion to idealize it. (There is a different but related way that highlighting Qutb’s anticolonialism makes liberal readers worry about whether it’s a slippery slope to endorsing a theocratic regime.)

Kotef is exactly right that the book refuses to prescribe solutions or to identify alternatives that treat peace as an answer. War for Peace begins by moving beyond the idea that peace is a solution and it ends by resisting easy solutions to peace, let alone the strange idea that the solution to the discursive structures of peace is more peace. Kotef is right that the epilogue refuses to give closure. It also refuses to recuperate peace as an ideal.

Historicizing and provincializing peace, and working to see what it masks and what it colonizes, means treating it as a political idea rather than a moral ideal: this shift makes it possible to draw connections and mark disconnections across formations of violence, to sketch political horizons that are unrelenting in moving beyond peace, and to demand a discipline that is unabashed in seeing the operations of power.

I don’t think the question of Palestine is a question of “peace.” That framing emerges from, and reflects the discourses and interests of, Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and the American imaginary. In fact, the occupation of Palestine exemplifies how the question of “peace” has fortified, occluded, and sanitized settler colonialism, dispossession, and expulsion—or better yet, it is a question of how the rhetoric and idealization of peace as a solution performs the kind of provincial, polemical, and parasitical work that War for Peace outlines.

I wish to thank Nadim Khoury for asking about peace’s parasitical structure, what it does and what it doesn’t do, and the relationship between peace, power, and critique. War for Peace pointed to discursive and political horizons that go beyond peace as a universal and moral ideal, beyond the idea of its weaponization as rhetorical abuse, and beyond what I call its parasitical structure. It was written against the all-too-common refusal to consider that justice and freedom might contradict “peaceful resistance,” that they exceed the dogmatic commitment to “peace,” and that such concepts along with peace transform through their conjoinments in ways that should be critically examined and denaturalized.

War for Peace tried to denaturalize the links between peace and the recurring sets of insinuates, not to naturalize them as ontological truths. I called this a parasitical structure; Khoury calls it a symbiotic relationship. It is worthwhile to dwell on the difference because the latter construes the biological metaphor too narrowly. Symbiosis can be mutualistic (both host and parasite benefit), parasitic (parasite benefits, host is harmed), or commensalistic (parasite benefits, host is unaffected). Khoury’s description of my argument is something like parasitism in reverse, where the host benefits and the parasite is harmed. These one-to-one relations are interesting, but they elide that War for Peace discusses the parasitical structure of peace more broadly to capture something that, to my knowledge, does not have a specific term in the study of organisms and nature. To extend the metaphor I first deployed, it is where the symbionts are transformed in their interaction. Sometimes they are stretched; sometimes constrained. Sometimes this pacifies. Sometimes it produces violence. Sometimes it sanctions hierarchies. (If a biological term were necessary, it would be mutual parasitism, but the strictly evolutionary biological idiom is too narrow and naturalistic.)

War for Peace argued that peace is embedded in polemical structures, not only parasitical and provincial ones. The three structures can overlap or become tightly knit, but they don’t have to. The polemical structures refer to how the idealization of peace reflects antagonisms and facilitates hostility, as through the identification of some as enemies of peace. The polemical structures (and their violence, enmity, and sanitization) are not predicated on the parasitical structure of peace. As a moralized ideal, peace is a polemical concept: the argument of the book is not that removing insinuates ends violence and sanitization, nor is it that the “right” insinuate releases peace from these political structures.

The insinuates blur the boundary between peace and its opposites. One of the book’s challenges was to recognize that the parasitical structure does not simply strengthen, solidify, or improve either peace or these other ideals: “this structure intensifies the potential of peace for radical self-subversion, for contradictions with and among its insinuates, and for its blurring into war” (4). It is not entirely correct to write that in War for Peace, “it is mainly the host (peace) that benefits from its parasites (the insinuates of peace).” I discuss the insinuate in relation to Jacques Derrida on the supplement, or that which adds to replace and “fills . . . as if one fills a void.” I explain: “The insinuate [justice, security, order, etc.] cannot be described as ‘contained,’ for it determines the container itself. It bends peace to its means, makes its aims those of peace, and makes itself appear peaceful” (3). Rather than a simplistic or constant relation of benefit or harm, the point was to shift the view beyond the grammars of “positive” and “negative” peace, beyond the naturalized association of peace with justice, order, law, or security—and vice versa.

Justice, security, unity, law, order, development, civilization, friendship, and other insinuates are certainly neither the same nor equivalent. War for Peace showed that they do different kinds of work, depending on who appeals to them; they do different work depending on to whom the invocations are addressed. Security for the colonizer is different from security for the colonized (which is from colonizers); this theme runs throughout chapter 6 on Kant and Qutb. Concepts—and insinuates—are always situated. They do not hover outside political relations.

War for Peace argued against the view that “constellations of peace” are universal, continual, and perennial. I do not think that “we are always operating within constellations of peace.” This belief in peace belongs to the moralities that War for Peace examined, or the moralities that produce the compulsion to speak in the idiom of peace. The book introduced the view that those compulsions and constellations should be anatomized if not resisted. War for Peace provincialized such universalizations of peace, including that the universality is so inevitable that all subjects (must) cathect in peace and then choose from a settled palette of insinuates. This is where it is important to think of the three structures that the book outlined together: peace is embedded in parasitical and provincial and polemical structures. Operating in constellations and idealizations of peace is not an inevitability: “it need not be so” (321).

All this is basic to my argument about the alternative conceptualizations of peace that the epilogue briefly discusses. When I discuss the truce, it is not a moral prescription or a solution. It is a critical diagnostic, a way of rethinking and interrogating, to denude the work that appeals to peace and appeals to peace with its insinuates perform. Although Khoury acknowledges this, I think he nonetheless treats it as a normative suggestion for solving violence, asymmetry, and oppression. The truce, particular peace, and separation represent ways of apprehending power differently. They are not counter-ideals or solutions, but reorientations toward peace in discourse and toward the relationship between appeals to peace and structures of power. They are important precisely because it is impossible to idealize them (321), and they are precisely about laying bare the structures of violence, silence, moralization, and deflection that peace carries. They continue the book’s critique, or understanding peace as finite, denaturalizing its links, and pointing toward the worlds, constellations, and horizons beyond the idealization of peace and beyond its enduring hold over political imaginaries.

Peace without justice is not peace without insinuates. Just as insinuates are nonequivalent, so too the different lacks of insinuates are incommensurable. Reconceptualizing peace without insinuates is discursively nonequivalent to a group demanding peace without justice. Thinking of peace as without insinuates and against idealization exceeds the positive and negative dyads: peace with or without justice, with or without insecurity, and famously, “peace and security” versus “peace and justice.” War for Peace aimed to undo that hoary discourse of which these framings are symptomatic, namely whether peace should be “positive” or “negative”—all while its discursive functions and moralities go unquestioned.

The idea of the truce interrupts the structure of moralizing and concealing work that peace performs, including in the idea of “a simple peace” discussed by Beilin. The liberal Israeli public discourse does not describe “peace without insinuates.” In fact, the so-called simple peace has, quite simply, always been a demand precisely for peace with insinuates—security for Israel, recognition of a “right to exist,” insecurity for Palestinians, renouncing future claims, racialized hierarchy, etc.—one that is even more pernicious in that it was paraded (and is still viewed in quarters) as simply peace on its own. When Beilin refers to “a simple peace,” he should not be taken at face value. That framing itself has been a weapon. Rhetoric should be scrutinized and situated, especially surrounding peace. War for Peace encourages readers to look more critically and skeptically at such invocations of peace, especially when they have done quite a bit to delegitimize anti-colonial resistance. As Joseph Massad shows in The Persistence of the Palestinian Question (chs. 4–6), the landscape of this peace process discourse, especially the “land for peace” formula, reflects among other things a racial structure in which Israelis simply long for peace while Palestinians can only be peace-haters responsible for all violence. The deployment of peace was, indeed, polemical. And it carried more than a trace of peace as the moral and universal ideal.

At a minimum, War for Peace requires that one be much more wary of the unacknowledged work that the grammar of peace does, including in the investment in a just peace. A “just peace” has been one kind of platform for critique and for some groups to articulate certain kinds of criticisms and demands. My interest is in how peace is the idiom through which some, especially the oppressed or marginalized, are compelled to speak—including in their critiques of power and demands for change. My interest is in how the compulsion to avow the desire for peace has come to be pegged to the recognition of humanity; it is part and parcel of a structure of racialization and dehumanization that simultaneously can pacify and constrain demands for freedom, equality, and justice, and even undo them. This is less to take issue with those who demand peace with justice against injustice, violence, and oppression, and even less to offer recommendations about specific policies or official rhetoric. I neither wish to make some universalistic claim about the effectiveness or desirability of slogans across social and political movements nor to police their speech. Sometimes calling for a just peace is an effective tool; sometimes it isn’t. These are empirical and tactical questions that refer to concrete effects on subjects, discourses, and relations on the ground. (As an empirical question, the particulars on the ground are relevant to what I call “particular peace,” or learning to refer to the peace between specific groups, in order to shift from the subterranean work of peace as an abstract ideal and hone in on the politics of which peace and whose peace.) But in both cases, “peace” exercises an unacknowledged and pervasive affective hold—a wounded attachment for some, a violent disavowal for others.

Palestine only appears in a handful of references across the book, but it exemplifies a number of my arguments. Just as War for Peace scrutinized the productivity of old tropes such as an unjust peace is preferable to war (138–40) or a secure war is better than an insecure peace (54), justice in Palestine is sometimes framed as the either/or of whether peace with justice is preferable to unjust peace. An insistence on such frames elides my invitation to think more critically about how “peace and justice” rewrites justice, not only peace; the insistence elides that the parasitical structure functions not as an arithmetical operation of adding or subtracting but as discursive constellations that naturalize conceptual associations, structures of power, and moralities. The pegging of justice to “peace” has arguably been one of the insinuations that displaced the Palestinian struggle for freedom into one, to paraphrase Ghassan Kanafani, of pacification, capitulation, and talking, which today tend to travel under the umbrella of reconciliation between colonizer and colonized. Who has set the terms of discourse? What are the genealogies of the continual transfiguration of the refusal, critique, and rejection of settler colonial occupation, dispossession, and ethnic cleansing of Palestine into the idiom of “peace with justice”? To whom is the reinscription of “peace” as ultimate value and solution addressed? What political and discursive work does “peace” do to the struggles for justice, freedom, equality, dignity, reparations and historical responsibility, decolonization, and abolition? What structures of power does this reinscription reflect?

More broadly, calls for “peace and justice” can of course put other logics into play, but I suspect that they do not exit the three structures—parasitical, polemical, provincial—that the book highlighted. This is not a normative theory or a general indictment. It is, however, to remain critical of the idea that “peace and justice” offers an exit from power and discursive structures. The remainder of the sentence that Khoury partially cites—on the need to move beyond the anti-historical and moralized demand for peace—points to the need to move beyond the entwinement of this demand with the will to persistently “imagine that this ideal’s parasitical, provincial, and polemical functions have no bearing on its sanitized violence today” (322).

War for Peace refuses to reinscribe peace as a solution. As I wrote in the book, peace is a problem, not a solution. As the current moment shows, this is so for many across the globe and it continues to be so for Palestinians. The idealization of peace as an ultimate and basic value is one that should be dismantled, not as a question of tactics and normativity, but as a structure and morality.

Peyman Vahabzadeh discusses the conceptual background of War for Peace. He explores various avenues for extending the book’s argument to other historical texts and to contemporary contexts, and he considers the possibility of overcoming peace. His focus on semiotics and on what is or is not inherent to peace is an opportunity to restate and clarify the book’s arguments, extensions, and scope.

The idea that “war is for the sake of peace” is central to how idealizations of peace have been elaborated across the history of political thought. The ten thinkers that the book examined, themselves caught up in webs of citation, also cite and contend with some version of the idea. War for Peace studied how this trope functions in the history of political thought to argue that peace is embedded in provincial, parasitical, and polemical structures. The argument goes beyond war-for-peace and beyond its counter-discourses, or those views that only reverse the war-for-peace formula or collapse the opposition between war and peace—that is, those that either read peace as the prelude to war (peace is for the sake of war) or peace as a coded war (peace is war). These simplifications, with their own histories and political productivity, are not outside the genealogy of peace as a moralized ideal. In fact, War for Peace started with Plato’s Laws because it puts on display some of these tropes and discourses—from those that deny peace, to those that subsume peace as prelude to war, to those that declare that war is for peace. Peace, war, and their opposition are more dynamic and pervasive; the simplifications are insufficient for unmaking peace as a morality and an ideal.

My argument that peace functions provincially requires moving beyond investments in its universality, whether as an idea or as an ideal, and beyond the belief that it must always function in the same way or that it has an essence. Claims to universality are embedded in particular power structures and hierarchies that are available to some and not others. I was interested in the contingencies underlying peace as an ideal and the constructions surrounding its categories, ideas, and mobilizations. War for Peace did not take a stance on whether peace is or is not a universal concept, but I am suspicious of Vahabzadeh’s formulation that there is something like “peace as such” in the first place or that it is “clearly a universal idea” of which the one in the book is a cultural variant. One of the alternatives that I sought to recover in the epilogue, what I called “particular peace,” entails “refusing to speak of peace as such” (320, emphasis in original), or training oneself instead to refer to concrete relations and to ask, “Whose peace? Which peace? Why peace?” By treating peace (and war) as discursive artifacts rather than universal concepts or natural notions, War for Peace traced the constellations of structures that differentiate, relate, and moralize them. And thus discourses surrounding peace, it argued, do lots of work. For example, they can facilitate the justification of war. They can arrange and redefine the opposites of peace. What counts as peace can in turn calibrate the boundary between war and other forms of violence (riot, rebellion, revolution, police action, liberation, occupation, etc.). “Peace” can enshrine a present haunted by a war, onto which a past conquest, massacre, or defeat is indelibly stamped. It can make some forms of political organization (like the modern state) seem obvious and legitimate while casting others as unjustifiable and obsolescent agents of violence. Invocations of peace can deflect attention from racialized global hierarchies. And the remarkable idea that peace is a basic human desire sets the stage for recasting some formations of violence, inequality, and domination as the necessary, peace-loving will of humanity, progress, or civilization.

The structure of the book reflects these different aspects of peace as a political idea, in the oppositions that its idealization shores up and in how the oppositions inflect narratives surrounding “Islam” and “the West.” Such narratives are written into how the discipline of political theory narrates history. Plato and Sayyid Qutb—the two thinkers who bookend War for Peace—trouble these civilizational markers; they are both internal to “Western thought” and “Islamic thought” (or neither). At stake are the cultural politics surrounding these categorizations, and how different texts are mobilized to construct racialized narratives and identities. As I noted in the book, al-Fārābī, Ibn Khaldūn, and Quṭb are important today because of what they represent; each has come to represent a distinct caricature of Islam, peace, and war.

I agree with Vahabzadeh that it would be interesting to examine other texts, contexts, and genres, including poetry that recounts pre-Islamic history. This might include the Shahnameh or the Ayyām al-‘Arab (Battle Days of the Arabs), which I only mentioned in passing (92). Both address strife, violence, and justice among blood relatives, and both have a complex and direct relationship to modern projects of postcolonial and ethno-nationalist identity formation. These texts, their representations of violence, justice, and order, and the histories of their deployments and mobilizations, all remain understudied in political theory, philosophy, and intellectual history. I am interested both in what they say about peace, war and violence and in the uses to which they have been put, how they have been read, absorbed, or made to cohere. Just as important in turning to texts inside or outside the conventional bounds of the discipline are the politics of what they have been made to represent, how they are taxonomized as culturally distinct, and how they are made to intervene today (13–14). This is a question of the politics of comparison and its disciplinary histories.1 Another excellent place to look would be the Bhagavad Gita and the histories of its interpretation, particularly in light of the excellent forum that Shruti Kapila and Faisal Devji edited some years ago.2

War for Peace is about the work that “peace” performs in the world and in the history of political thought. As a genealogy of the moralities of peace, or what peace does and how it functions, the book approached peace—the idea, the ideal—as something that is contingent, historical, and political. Vahabzadeh’s propositions about peace as an empty signifier between concept and notion are interesting. They are much more about what peace is and what it means as part of an ontology. Meanwhile, War for Peace examined how such discourses about the meaning of peace (as negation, positivity, theology, legalism, transcendence, etc.) structure its moralization, what they enable, and their continuities and transformations across the history of political thought. I do not think the problem is about definitional positivity or negation, inherent lack or necessary excess. War for Peace moved beyond the hoary opposition of “positive” and “negative” peace. Its argument about the parasitical structure of peace draws attention to the recurrent (and at times competing) sets of “insinuates” that are appended to it—that provide content to peace, that peace sanitizes, and that act as a hinge with war. I agree with Vahabzadeh that “bringing peace to the Middle East” does similarly provincial, polemical, and parasitical work, and that it works euphemistically. I suspect that he is right that the phrase is also an empty signifier. Nonetheless, Laclau’s idea of an empty signifier is, I think, both crucially different and a narrower shift in registers. Although it can be an illuminating analytic, that other understanding of semiotics and struggle dilutes my argument and constrains the critical analysis of peace into a general frame with terms that become vague and contested slogans in fields of hegemony. The argument in War for Peace offers a different approach, one that begins from the specificity of who invokes peace against whom and how, who desires it and who is incapable of desiring it, and the precise terms and power structures through which the name can be extended, withheld, or recognized—along with the realities on the ground that such decisions then make possible.3

War for Peace unmasked three dynamic logics to which peace is attached, not essential or immortal traits. It is neither that every invocation of peace follows an unwritten law nor that the problem is only when the wrong people say peace. Vahabzadeh agrees, I suspect, that peace tends to perform this work irrespective of political affiliation and ideological orientation (as in, for example, Kant and Quṭb). The logics capture the dominant ways in which peace appears in contemporary discourses, not as abuse or misuse. The functions and logics, I argued, are internal to peace and part and parcel of its inner structure: they are neither external accidents to be dismissed as abuses and exceptions, nor are they intrinsic and inevitable essences. Peace is, indeed, a political idea and it can emerge in other forms, attached to other logics (7). To observe that the three functions are not essential means that not every discussion of peace performs this work and that peace can indeed appear in other forms; to observe that they are internal to its inner structure means that these logics are part of how peace operates as a universal moral ideal and a discursive artifact. It neither means that these logics are easily surmountable, nor that there is some other moral notion of peace that somehow solves the problem (7–8, 318). Sometimes “peace” is a descriptor for periods or relations in history without official war. Sometimes its invocations are provincial, polemical, and parasitical; sometimes that is not the most salient or interesting thing about them. Sometimes it is a patriarchal concept tied to domesticity and the home. Sometimes it is a psychologized concept tied to the “disturbed” mind or theologized for the “guilty” soul. Sometimes it describes the auditory environments of “nature”—forests, mountains, lakes—or remote places. Sometimes it rallies workers to strike. Sometimes the idea of “no justice, no peace” means that justice and peace require each other or that there is no peace because there is no justice; and sometimes it is a threat in the dominant idiom: the oppressed want justice, and the oppressors only value peace, so the oppressors will not have their peace so long as oppressed do not have their justice. Each of these comes with entire constellations of politics.

The structures of peace that I outlined in War for Peace have been and remain central to contemporary political orders and imaginaries. Understanding the three structural features of peace’s moralities as pervasive but unacknowledged is fundamental for the alternative modes of approaching peace that I briefly sketched in the epilogue (319–21). The alternatives which I sketched emerge out of the critiques. Vahabzadeh correctly observes that of course they cannot solve or undo a liberal-imperialist hegemonic structure.

The alternatives are alternative critical conceptualizations, not alternative ways of reclaiming or idealizing peace. They offer critical modes of apprehending power. They function as interruptions and interrogatives of invocations to peace, toward un-making the affective hold that the name peace continues to have, including in Vahabzadeh’s own call for an “alternative peace [to] be sought elsewhere.” The book’s broader argument, from unmaking peace as a moral ideal to recognizing it as a political idea (8, 315), does not mean defending an ideal peace, or a non-ideal peace as a new ideal. It means understanding its moralization and idealization as a weapon. The alternatives “interrupt its idealizations” (321): they point to how to critique and move beyond peace in the three functions that the book outlines.

The alternatives also remind readers of a basic premise of any genealogy: nothing needs to be the way that it is. Peace does not need to be an ideal or a morality. Against the parasitical structure in which peace is tied to insinuates, the truce denaturalizes the temporality of peace and interrogate the slippages enabled by idealizations of peace and justice, peace and security. Against the provincial structure in which peace is offered as an abstract universal, the object is to demand that those who invoke peace speak more concretely about which peace and whose peace, if at all. Against the polemical structure in which peace is treated as a desire that points to consensus and friendship, it is to see separation and silence as already inside “peace” and to bring into sharp clarity the apartheids, walls, and violences that peace sanitizes. War for Peace offered an extension of its critical reorientation toward confronting dominant discursive structures, not a way of escaping power.

My argument was that by refusing to search for solutions in peace and refusing to treat peace as the solution, questions of power, discourse, violence, and war become visible, including the concealments and dehumanizations that are facilitated when peace is treated as an unquestioned moral and universal ideal. Undoing the idealization means undoing the demand that the answer must be in peace. Here, too, my point was not Vahabzadeh’s Arendtian observation that the desire for mastery does not leave room for unpredictability, but that the compulsion to speak in terms of peace, to desire it, and to arrange historical narration, institutions, and knowledge around an uninterrogated investment in peace and with an eye to its realization and perpetuity—all this fortifies the racial hierarchies and formations of violence that peace has shielded and carried along with it.

I thank Chloe Ireton for taking up the invitation in the epilogue of War for Peace, to see peace as a problem and to look more critically at peace in other contexts. Conversations across methods, regions, and specializations are among the highlights of forums like this one; they can tune an argument to a different key or highlight the fissures between disciplines. Ireton raises two questions about the range of the argument. The first is about extending the arguments about peace and just war to the discourse of just slavery. The second is what happens to a political theoretic argument about the genealogies of morals when we shift to a social history archive.

War for Peace tracked the genealogies of peace as a moral ideal. It operated in the curatorial mode and disciplinary key of how the field of political theory presents a set of canonical thinkers who are supposedly “Western” or “Islamic”—thinkers whose own theorizations of war and peace have been filtered through civilizational discourses, making them avatars for discourses of peace-loving or warlike cultures. To demonstrate the unacknowledged work that the ideal of peace does in the world, War for Peace showed the imbrication of peace in discourses of barbarism, empire, settler colonialism, and racial hierarchy in the writings of major thinkers, including Erasmus, Hobbes, Grotius, and Kant. The book was less about the universality of peace always or necessarily only functioning in the ways it examined—what I call provincial, parasitical, polemical—and much more about the productivity of, and the investments in, peace’s universalism. These functions, I submit, represent the dominant structure of peace. Across the contextual differences between thinkers, periods, and sites, these functions dynamically wind through the idealization of peace.

Ireton’s question about the productivity of peace for discourses and practices of “just slavery” is exciting. It builds on the way that War for Peace resituated idealizations of peace in a frame with formations of violence, unfreedom, and dispossession. I agree that this nexus, with just slavery at its center, is affiliated but has a different starting point and archive. Taking Ireton’s invitation, I offer here two provisional thoughts about discourses of peace and war in relation to the history of theorizing slavery. First, just as War for Peace discussed how names can be extended or withheld for different forms of violence—be they organized or disorganized, unevenly distributed or partly invisible—the status of “slavery” might be read in terms of its discursive relationship to “war,” hierarchies of violence alongside violent hierarchies. This thread, of how the genealogy of peace is the genealogy of its multiple opposites, reinforces the book’s general aim of troubling and unmaking peace. Second, I agree with Ireton’s astute observation that the justification of slavery can become tethered to peace. The examples that she gives are instructive. They would, perhaps, also point to how the history of justifying slavery intersects with the genealogy of idealizing peace in the history of political thought. I would imagine that more than Plato’s Laws and its history of citations, Aristotle’s Politics and the history of citing Book 1, chap. 5 might feature prominently, especially given its mobilization to justify slavery (Sepúlveda’s Democrates Alter is famous for this). Aristotle here separates slavery from both war and peace: the qualities needed for war or for peace are found among free people, while natural slaves have the qualities for neither—their enslavement is denied the name war, their labor is the invisible foundation of that “peace.” Ireton’s reading exemplifies the kinds of extensions and affiliated discourses that I wanted War for Peace to bring into view.

War for Peace works through a specific set of texts from Plato to Immanuel Kant and Sayyid Qutb. It is a work of political theory that traces the contours of a discipline and the broader civilizational discourses it fortifies. At different instances, it pointed to counter-discourses and to other permutations of peace—whether peace as a purely internal phenomenon in the person or as a watchword of critique or as purely legal category—and it pointed to disciplinarily marginalized discourses in the writings of neglected thinkers, some of whom wrote from positions of social or geopolitical subordination. War for Peace did not focus on discourses from below. Its aim was to demonstrate how the idealization of peace operates in tandem with, and gives cover to, formations of violence, war, and hierarchy. As Ireton notes, these operations resonate, at times dramatically, outside the canon of political theory, not only with contemporary sites of war in the name of peace (and wars that carry the name of peace), but also with a variety of historical contexts. Iberian discourses of peace and the pacification of indigenous peoples of the Americas are precisely such an example.

This structure of peace—as a moral ideal that sanitizes violence, dehumanizes enemies, and re-entrenches hierarchies—inflects the history of political thought, elite discourse, public discourses, and, at least today, the everyday investments of modern subjects. My aim was less to instruct leaders or theorists to speak differently than to unmask how the idealization of peace in political theory, history, and political and quotidian discourses reflects a compulsion to speak, one that has remained unexamined and the violence it travels alongside unacknowledged; in fact, our respective disciplines have often been complicit in perpetuating this structure. The contemporary investment in peace—the desire for it, and the desire for peace to exist as an ideal, one that is immune from critique or is itself even the ultimate source of critique—is symptomatic. It does not examine the work that this idealization performs in the world. It is perhaps for this reason that a series of other concepts and ideals central to political thought have been provincialized, undone, and overcome, while the status of peace remained untroubled: deferred but desired, problematic but salvageable, and in the end, no matter how much violence it carries, still idealized and shielded from critique.

Ireton and I share an intellectual and political investment in the theorization of empire, the politics of contemporary knowledge production in the humanities, and the politics of writing against the grain. Methodologically and disciplinarily, we approach them in different but complementary ways. One way, which War for Peace pursued, works within, against, and at the margins of a discipline’s construction of itself and its narration of the world. That means reading its core works to undo and denude its presumptions while pointing to other political horizons. Another way is to unearth neglected or marginalized archives, to retrieve suppressed voices who write back. When Ireton wonders whether peace was an ideal for the diverse cast of indigenous American, free black, and Castilian men who fought for the Castilian crown, part of this is an empirical and archival question that is well worth exploring. Another part of it is the political or conceptual question about the significance of such invocations or silences for theorizing peace in history and in the present. If “peace” was central to Iberian colonial discourses but Ireton’s cast did not idealize it, what does this disjuncture enable? If they offer a counter-idealization or if they use peace to criticize the crown (or perhaps as a different theology), does it then escape or challenge the structure of the dominant idealizations? And in either case, how do such invocations or silences bear on the present? Can they offer resources for thinking otherwise, perhaps for thinking beyond peace, or do they quietly fortify the function of peace as a provincial, parasitical, and polemical ideal? The two kinds of archives represent complementary projects, though they may put different emphasis on the critique of dominant structures and the recovery of marginalized voices. Nonetheless, both are (or should be) interested in unmasking contemporary morals and overcoming their grammars.