Peace studies has long been considered an inherently critical endeavour, but how this criticality should be emulated beyond rejecting the normalcy of war and pursuing peace has been heavily debated. While the last two decades of peace research have shown increased willingness to engage with critical approaches, many have lamented the depoliticised and deradicalized ways these have been employed – improving rather than transforming international peacebuilding efforts. Drawing on a range of interviews with prominent critical peace scholars, this article explores how the rationales and understandings of researchers encourage an ‘uncritical critique’ of peace, which is further exacerbated by the performances of the neoliberal academy itself. As such, it argues that ongoing attempts to renegotiate the aims and methods of peace studies are unlikely to revolutionise scholarship unless they can directly address and transform the values at the heart of the discipline and of researchers themselves.