The rise of critical reflection of the peacebuilding and wider aid enterprise over the last decade has been accompanied by a steady investigation into local contexts. This reflects an awareness of the need to better understand the diversity and dynamism of the social processes, institutions, practices and capacities that exist on the ground. Simultaneously, there are greater efforts being made to understand the diversity, innovation and adaptation in practices aiming to respond to crises. The notion of hybridity has found its way into peacebuilding discourse to describe and explain these phenomena, and JPD is fortunate to have adept scholars on the topic – Roger Mac Ginty and Gurchathen Sanghera – as guest editors to help us examine this topic.
As Mac Ginty and Sanghera illustrate in their introductory essay, the concept and practice of hybridity have steadily gained interest in the critical peacebuilding literature in recent years. As our guest editors observe, the concept encourages us to look beyond state- and institution-centric analyses, focusing instead on a fuller cohort of actors and examining contexts shaped from the bottom up. The topic of hybridity thus finds a natural home with JPD audiences, where our driving concern is to place local actors at the forefront of analysis aimed at constructive action for peacebuilding and development that better serves societies.
We hope that this issue of JPD will extend the flourishing academic debates to conversations about policy and practice as it examines both the underpinnings and evolution of hybridity as a concept and practical cases that help us to understand peacebuilding and development in new ways.
With this special issue, JPD is launching an innovative component to its portfolio, one that was strongly endorsed by our International Advisory Board at its last meeting at the International Studies Association conference in San Diego in April 2012. Our ‘Policy Dialogues’ section will engage decision makers and opinion shapers on critical topics in international policy.
We are delighted to initiate ‘Policy Dialogues’ with a set of inter-related topics on the minds of many who follow policy developments in our field – the New Deal for Engagement in Fragile States (New Deal) – and the discussions around a new framework for the post-2015 development agenda. Perhaps not surprisingly: these topics reflect the notion of hybridity in profound and influential ways.
The ‘New Deal’ is the product of a grouping of 17 fragile and conflict-affected states called the ‘g7+’, who have come together with development partners and international organisations through the ‘International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding ’ to change the way peacebuilding and statebuilding are practised and aid delivered. The ‘New Deal’ builds upon the Millennium Declaration, proposing a set of peacebuilding and statebuilding goals, focuses on new ways of engaging, and identifies commitments to build mutual trust and achieve better results in fragile states. As part of this process, the International Dialogue hopes to transform the post-2015 development agenda – dominated for the past 15 years by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – to incorporate a wider set of peacebuilding and statebuilding concerns. Critically, the agenda and the process are being led by the g7+ and put forward as a bottom up course of action that is fostering a transformation of the ‘business as usual’ syndrome in aid decision making, analysis, planning and implementation – all of which will be explored in our coming issues as this process unfolds.
To kick-start Policy Dialogues we offer two exciting contributions. The first is a reflective essay by Helder de Costa , the Director of the g7+ Secretariat based in Dili, Timor-Leste. He explains the evolution and mission of the g7+, driven in part by the Timor-Leste experience, which inspired the Timor-Leste Minister of Finance to lead the development of the g7+ movement. The second is the full text of a declaration by 56 civil society organisations calling on United Nations member states, the UN's High-level Panel and system task team and other stakeholders to include conflict prevention and peacebuilding commitments in the post-2015 UN development agenda. This grouping of civil society actors constitutes a third ‘leg’ of the International Dialogue, which traverses the North and South and operates locally, nationally and internationally as it brings critical and constructive voices of a wider terrain of societal actors to bear on the dialogue, and into the social and political processes it is fostering at all levels.
JPD will continue to focus on issues surrounding the ‘New Deal’ and discussions for a new international framework for post-MDG development, but we will remain open to engaging other pressing policy dialogue issues that link to the Journal's mandate. As always, we will give pride of place to Southern actors to set the terms of these debates and contribute to them.
We hope you find this special issue's engagement with the topic of hybridity as inspiring as we do for charting new directions in our field. Our visiting editors have played a key role in nurturing this issue to fruition, and we thank them for their invaluable contributions.
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