Audrey L. Comstock’s thoughtful review raises three important questions about my argument and findings. First, she asks about the role that NGOs and other international organizations (IOs) play in promoting the rule of law after civil war. As she rightly notes, my book focuses almost exclusively on the UN. This is because the UN is more active and ambitious in its rule of law (ROL) agenda than any other domestic or international institution in the world. Although entities like NATO, the European Union, and the World Bank have all contributed to ROL reforms in postconflict settings, their efforts tend to be much smaller in scope. As Calin Trenkov-Wermuth observes, “No other organization has been involved in such reforms to the same extent as the United Nations” (United Nations Justice: Legal and Judicial Reform in Governance Operations, 2010).

I control for the presence of other NGOs at the community level in my within-country analysis of Liberia (p. 169), and I measure ROL promotion by IOs other than the UN in my cross-country analysis (p. 98). However, as I explain in a companion article (Robert A. Blair, “UN Peacekeeping and the Rule of Law,” American Political Science Review, 115 [1], 2021), because the efforts of other IOs are so often implemented alongside (and in support of) the UN’s, it is difficult to disentangle the two empirically. I suspect the UN’s impact on the ROL is much greater than that of other IOs. But this is an empirical question, and I agree with Comstock that answering it is a worthwhile endeavor for future research.

Second, Comstock asks whether acts of sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) by peacekeepers undermine their efforts to promote the rule of law. I agree that this is an important concern; indeed, it is the motivation for one of the three rival theories that I pit against my own (pp. 84–89). If peacekeepers routinely engage in misconduct, and if misconduct undercuts citizens’ trust and cooperation, then I should observe a negative correlation between exposure to peacekeepers and citizens’ perceptions of the UN at the micro level. But I do not. In fact, I observe the opposite: after interacting with UNMIL personnel, Liberian citizens generally express more rather than less favorable perceptions of the mission (p. 204). This is not because UNMIL was uniquely virtuous: to the contrary, UNMIL personnel faced frequent accusations of misconduct toward Liberian women and girls. Although Comstock is right that SEA may undermine the UN’s ROL agenda, and some UN missions may be so predatory that they simply cannot promote ROL at all, consistently righteous behavior on the part of UN personnel does not appear to be a scope condition for my results.

Finally, Comstock asks whether there is a dose-response relationship between UN intervention and the ROL. What fraction of the public must be “exposed” to peacekeeping before attitudes and behaviors begin to shift? What happens if the UN deploys and withdraws repeatedly? This is an important question that my data are unfortunately not well suited to answer. I do find some evidence that UNMIL’s impact on the ROL in Liberia increases with the intensity of citizens’ exposure to UNMIL personnel (p. 191). I also find that the quality of the ROL cross-nationally is an increasing function of the number of uniformed and civilian personnel deployed to each UN mission (p. 108). These results are consistent with a dose-response relationship but are not granular enough to identify a specific tipping point beyond which the ROL begins to take root. Comstock’s question points to a fruitful avenue for future scholars to explore.