If You Build It, They Will Come…But Perhaps Not for the Reasons You Think

This paper investigates how positions form in an emerging, hybrid field that takes field-making itself as a moral-professional project. I use as a case study the emerging field of peace engineering. I conducted 29 interviews with actors in the field as well as 51 hours of participant-observation at meetings, conferences, and retreats. The main finding is that positions form through an interplay of symbolic opposition and strategic cooperation. A novel finding is that skepticism plays an important role in the emergence of fields by validating its existence and stimulating the articulation of differentiated positions around symbolic boundaries. Finally, the case study suggests that field emergence and settlement may be less stage-based and more fluid than previous research indicates. I propose the concept of an unruly field to capture how the multiple forms of agency at play in an unsettled field thwart and subvert actors’ intentions.