Hybridity in peacebuilding and development: a critical approach

Abstract

The concept of hybridity has been used in numerous ways by scholars across a range of disciplines to generate important analytical and methodological insights. Its most recent application in the social sciences has also attracted powerful critiques that have highlighted its limitations and challenged its continuing usage. This article, which introduces the collection on Critical Hybridity in Peacebuilding and Development, examines whether the value of hybridity as a concept can continue to be harnessed, and how its shortcomings might be mitigated or overcome. Specifically, we seek to demonstrate the multiple ways to embrace the benefits of hybridity, while also guiding scholars through some of the potentially dangerous and problematic areas that we have identified through our own engagement with the hybridity concept and by learning from the critiques of others. This pathway, which we have termed ‘critical hybridity’, identifies eight approaches that are likely to lead scholars towards a more reflexive and nuanced engagement with the concept.

Keywords:

• Hybridity
• peacebuilding
• state-building
• development
• critical approaches

The concept of hybridity has been used in various ways by scholars across a range of disciplines to generate important analytical and methodological insights. Its most recent application in the social sciences, particularly, though not exclusively, in the area of critical peacebuilding, has also attracted powerful critiques that have highlighted its limitations and challenged its continuing usage. This collection explores whether the value of hybridity as a concept can continue to be harnessed, and how its shortcomings might be mitigated or overcome. This is necessarily an exercise in interdisciplinarity because hybridity has been used as a term or touchstone across multiple disciplines and areas of practical engagement over the past decade – including peacebuilding, state-building, justice reform, security, development studies, anthropology, and economics. We seek to encourage a dialogue about the uses and critiques of hybridity from a variety of perspectives and vantage points, including deeply ethnographic works, high-level theory, and applied policy work. Our response to the question of whether there is still value in the concept of hybridity is, as will be demonstrated below, affirmative. However, we also argue that this value can only be realised if the concept is engaged with in a critical way, and we set out a number of key considerations to guide such an approach. At its core, a critical approach to hybridity is reflexive; it engages with the concept in ways that acknowledge and interrogate its political and gendered dimensions, and account for its historical, temporal, and spatial settings, as well as the user’s own positionality and assumptions.

Renewed interest in the notion of hybridity in recent years derives, in large part, from its usage in the critical peacebuilding literature. Hybridity in this context acquired prominence as part of the larger critique of the liberal peace and state-building interventionism that became a standard western response to internal conflict and instability in recent decades, particularly in parts of the global South. Liberal peacebuilding has been premised on the view that liberal democracies are intrinsically more peaceful, stable, and law-abiding than other kinds of political system. Its proponents advocate the adoption of the institutional and ideational framework of liberal democracy as the antidote to problems of endemic conflict and instability. The hybridity critique of liberal peacebuilding attributed the disappointing results of the spate of post-cold war international interventions largely to the perceived incompatibility between the liberal institutions being established or strengthened and the pre-existing socio-political and normative orders in the local contexts of intervention. With its focus on interactions between ‘the international’ or ‘the global’ and ‘the local’, the hybridity lens critiqued the top-down character and universalist assumptions of liberal peacebuilding and state-building interventions. Instead, emphasis was placed on the hybrid formations of liberal and non-liberal institutions and values that inevitably flow from such interactions, as denoted in notions like ‘hybrid political orders’ and ‘the hybrid peace’.¹

Subject to growing scrutiny and interrogation, the hybridity concept, as used in and beyond the peacebuilding literature, has acquired considerably more nuance in recent years. While its usage has been criticised for oversimplification and for the reproduction of problematic binaries such as that between the ‘local’ and ‘international’,² scholars in various disciplines now use hybridity as a heuristic device for exploring complex processes of interaction and transformation occurring between different institutional and social forms, and normative systems, in a wide range of contexts. An example has been the use of hybridity to highlight the fluid, dynamic, and adaptive characters of ‘traditional’ or ‘customary’ social orders in post-colonial societies including those subject to contemporary state-building interventions.³ While the outcome of these interactions between different institutional forms and practices is highly contingent and context-specific, the resulting entanglement revealed by the hybridity lens serves to breakdown older binaries including, for example, that between the exogenous ‘modern’ and the endogenous ‘customary’.⁴ As Albrecht and Wiuff Moe observe, ‘hybrid forms are never simply a mix of two otherwise pure forms, but are perennially ongoing processes of amalgamation and dissolution’.⁵ In emphasising hybridisation as a dynamic and ongoing process, the agency of actors at all levels is also highlighted, thereby avoiding well-intentioned but often misleading depictions of the passivity and powerlessness of local actors and informal institutions in the face of significant liberal interventions.⁶

The focus of hybridity on the processes, and outcomes, of mingling across institutions and other categories is both its strength and arguably its most significant conceptual weakness. This is because for some it remains impossible to ignore the implication of the original existence of pure forms. A critical approach to hybridity addresses this contradiction by following Peterson’s suggestion of insisting on the need for being explicit and guarded about the units of analysis chosen.⁷ This includes acknowledging the need for a nuanced temporal approach and the value of investigating how and why categories are made and whose interests are served by the making and breaking of boundaries.

This introduction provides a brief summary of the use of the concept of hybridity across various disciplines. It then discusses how hybridity can continue to be of conceptual value, provided that it is approached in a critical and reflexive way. Our approach draws upon Mieke Bal’s suggestion that, when analysing concepts in an interdisciplinary context, it is more useful to think about the work they do or can do, rather than what they mean.⁸

Hybridity across disciplines

Our initial interest in this project was triggered by the growing prominence of hybridity in literatures across multiple disciplines. Rather than amounting to a theory, hybridity has been used in a looser way in these fields, as a concept, metaphor, heuristic, or analytical device. For the purposes of this introduction we do not delve into the question of the differences that others see between such categories of analytical tool – or even whether there are useful differences to be made.

While, as discussed above, renewed interest in the concept in recent years occurred initially in the critical peacebuilding literature, the idea of hybridity has featured in many other disciplinary conversations, albeit sometimes using different terms. Legal anthropologists, for instance, have long been interested in questions of legal pluralism, and the ways in which different conceptions and practices of legality ‘clash, mingle, hybridize and interact with one another’ particularly in colonial and post-colonial settings characterised – as they generally are – by high levels of normative pluralism.⁹ Addressing the growing institutional complexity associated with contemporary globalisation, regulatory theory has also progressively moved away from narrow and linear conceptions of power and authority, introducing and developing concepts of networked governance, transnational legal orders, and meta regulation.¹⁰ Similarly, human rights scholars have had to confront the complex realities of normative pluralism in an increasingly interconnected and mobile world, including the tenacity and instrumentalisation of traditional, customary, and religious beliefs in many places. One response has been to engage with anthropological concepts such as ‘vernacularisation’ in addressing the challenges of translating ‘global’ norms into socially diverse, mutable, and contested local contexts.¹¹

The concept of hybridity has also appeared in development studies, often as recognition of the significant role of informal institutions and practices in the everyday lives of most citizens in the global South. This has included a particular focus on the role of non-state actors and institutions in areas like policing, justice, and security.¹² Development theorists and practitioners have questioned more broadly the privileging of institutional form over function irrespective of local context; a predisposition that continues to inform most processes of institutional transfer in international development practice.¹³ In this vein, the 2011 World Development Report on Conflict, Security, and Development acknowledges that in societies with weak state agencies where many citizens live according to local community norms administered by informal institutions, it might be necessary for international actors to move away from unilinear forms of institutional transfer based on ‘best practice’ to more problem-oriented approaches based on ‘best fit’.¹⁴ This may require drawing, for example, on ‘[c]ombinations of state, private sector, faith-based, traditional, and community structures for service delivery’.¹⁵ A growing appreciation of the significant role of local actors and institutions in actively mediating international interventions – as facilitated by the hybridity lens – is also reflected in the ‘local turn’ in peacebuilding scholarship.¹⁶

Despite these areas of convergence, there has been little dialogue across disciplines about their respective usages of the concept and, consequently, there are different meanings of hybridity evident in various disciplines and areas of policy engagement. This poses a challenge to finding an analytical approach that will enable a meaningful interdisciplinary dialogue about hybridity.

In grappling with these diverse usages and inflections, we have found Mieke Bal’s idea of ‘travelling concepts’ particularly useful. As Bal suggests, concepts are not fixed, but dynamic. They ‘travel – between disciplines, between individual scholars, between historical periods, and between geographically dispersed academic communities’.¹⁷ As they do so, ‘their meaning, reach, and operational value differ’,¹⁸ and misunderstandings in communication often occur. To avoid the latter, she argues that these ‘processes of differing need to be assessed before, during and after each “trip”’.¹⁹ Bal proposes a methodological approach that is grounded in an open re-examination of concepts – and a recognition of their dynamic nature – with the aim of facilitating dialogue between disciplines. As she puts it, ‘explicit, clear, and defined, [concepts] can help to articulate an understanding, convey an interpretation, check an imagination run wild, or enable a discussion, on the basis of common terms and in the awareness of absences and exclusions’.²⁰ This can be done by getting agreement ‘on the basic rules of the game: if you use a concept at all, you use it in a particular way so that you can meaningfully disagree on content’.²¹

These observations resonate with our own engagement with hybridity. By following Bal’s advice to think of hybridity as a concept, rather than a univocal term, we are able to recognise and engage with its ‘dynamic’ nature. That is, rather than focusing on what hybridity ‘may mean, we gain insight into what it can do’.²²

Towards a critical approach to hybridity

While recognising that hybridity has been extensively critiqued, we nonetheless suggest that the concept continues to have considerable potential as an analytical tool in a range of different contexts, provided it is used critically. Drawing on the contributions in this collection, we now set out eight pathways that critical hybridity scholars may wish to follow in order to mitigate and overcome the shortcomings identified by critics.

Attending to the operations of power

The prevalence, but also the limited visibility, of power dynamics within and between a wide range of actors engaged in peacebuilding, state-building, and development is a key concern for critical scholars thinking and writing about hybridity. Critiques have long focused on the ways in which the concept can serve to mask underlying injustices and power differentials between international and local actors, as well as within each of these categories. This can be done through romanticising and homogenising the ‘local’ and downplaying significant power differentials in specific local contexts based on gender, age, ethnic, religious, or other divisions. Similar tendencies are evident where non-local actors are treated as an undifferentiated bloc.

A critical approach to hybridity starts from the position that there is nothing intrinsically good or bad about hybridity. Processes of hybridisation are ongoing, universal, and inevitably involve ‘contestation, competing interests and changing socio-economic circumstances’.²³ What is key is that questions are asked about who, or what, stands to benefit – or lose – from a particular invocation or utilisation of the hybridity concept, or from a particular hybrid process, interaction, or arrangement. In other words, at its heart, a critical approach to hybridity calls for its re-politicisation. It requires specific attention to the underlying power dynamics that animate hybridisation and shape its outcomes, whether arising from political, economic, or other forms of asymmetry and contestation. It also calls for scholars and practitioners to drill below amorphous categories such as ‘communities’ and interrogate power dynamics at a range of different scales, paying particular attention to generational, ethnic, class, religious, and gendered divides.

Power is a theme that runs through many of the articles in this collection. Contributors explore its diverse dimensions in terms of individuals, structures, and gender. This entails examining how power operates at different scales and how different hybrid configurations can both reinforce pre-existing power relations and create new ones. Several contributions examine the workings of power in the context of external peacebuildng and state-building interventions, exploring the interactions between international interveners and ‘local’ populations, as well as the power dynamics that play out between – and within – the myriad ‘local’ groups in these settings. For example, in the larger context of the United States-led intervention in Afghanistan, Susanne Shmeidl and Nick Miszak focus on the frictions and contestation flowing from the encounter between the proponents of a liberal peacebuilding agenda and the customary decision-making mechanisms and ‘strongmen’ who effectively exercised power at ‘local’ levels.²⁴ In his piece, Peter Albrecht examines the dynamics of power in the context of police reform in Sierra Leone and, specifically, the interactions between government actors in the post-colonial state and chiefs that took place in relation to a major UK Government-supported programme.²⁵ In their contribution, Nicole George and Lia Kent investigate the gendered power dynamics that have been produced the context of peacebuilding interventions in Bougainville and Timor-Leste.²⁶

Other contributions explore the workings of power in relation to the dynamics of state formation and in the context of post-colonial societies. For example, Matthew Allen and Sinclair Dinnen focus on the scaler dynamics that animate struggles over natural resources in Solomon Islands and Bougainville in the context of highly contested processes of post-colonial state formation.²⁷ In her contribution, Helene Kyed considers power in the context of the ‘everyday’ constitution of authority in post-colonial Mozambique and, specifically, how local state officials and chiefs claim and enact authority in relation to each other.²⁸

The work of categories and boundaries

Related to the previous point is the importance of asking questions about the ‘work’ that is done by the exercise of making categories, and particularly who makes them and why. Asking such questions from a range of different perspectives provides a helpful way of investigating questions of power, authority, and legitimacy.

Articles in this collection indicate that actors operating within various spheres often use categories deliberately and strategically, even when there is obvious cross-pollination occurring between those categories. For example, chiefs in Vanuatu often utilise ‘custom’ as a way of strengthening their claims to a right to regulate certain types of conduct in communities, such as the behaviour of women as discussed in Miranda Forsyth’s contribution.²⁹

Related to the question of category construction is that of how the boundaries between different entities are drawn, crossed, and redrawn. Peter Albrecht’s and Helene Kyed’s contributions provide insights into the ‘productive tension’ that exists between ‘hybridization and boundary-making’. Kyed examines how the boundaries between state/society, modern/tradition, and public/private are constantly redrawn, actively contested and informed by relations of power.³⁰ Her focus is on how people in a certain locality define the boundaries between ‘state’ and ‘tradition’ and how these classifications are used to assert authority, and regulate social life.³¹ Ongoing processes of hybridisation defy the assumed ‘naturalness’ of these boundaries and, in turn, contribute to the enactment of new boundaries. The result, as she suggests, can be the emergence of new governing practices and forms of authority.

Resonating with Kyed’s insights, Albrecht explores the dynamics of ‘separation’ and ‘positive accommodation’ that continue to take place between state institutions and traditional leaders, and the extent to which these entities ‘mutually constitute’ one another through a case study of the politics of police reform in Sierra Leone. On the one hand, he suggests that there is no clear line of separation between these state institutions and chiefs in the political structure of the post-colonial state of Sierra Leone. On the other hand, these entities are distinguishable by the fact that they can draw upon different types of authority from a variety of sources. As a result; ‘connections and sameness as well as contestation and difference come into play when it comes to interaction between individuals embodying state representatives and traditional leaders’.³² Kyed and Albrecht’s insights reinforce the need for critical scholars to identify and explore the tensions created by hybridity and boundary-making processes.

Attending to place, temporality, and scale

A critical approach to hybridity requires acknowledgement that all institutions, frameworks and legal and normative orders develop in particular geographic and temporal contexts and are informed by their respective histories. Place and time are integral to the description, analysis, and normative positioning of many key contemporary issues, including conflict, peacebuilding, and development. Many indigenous cultures acknowledge the centrality of time and place at the beginning of every meeting, establishing the relationship of everyone present to their place and their people, past and present, as the starting point for engagement. Yet, issues of time and place are often seriously neglected by scholars, policy-makers, and practitioners in the Global North.

In relation to questions of temporality, many analyses of hybridity tend to be ‘history blind’, both in terms of failing to use history to inform analyses of present day developments in conflict-affected societies, and in the sense of failing to recognise that hybridity does not describe a novel situation or state of affairs. Instead, interactions and varying degrees of mutual transformation have been occurring within and between different ways of organising socio-political life in the longue duree.³³The neglect of questions of time and place can lead to a range of theoretical and practical problems: unrealistic timeframes for reform projects; overlooking essential connections between people and place; and ignoring the extent to which historical inequalities and grievances, including colonial violence, continue to result in a lack of distributive justice. The growing scholarship on the regulation of traditional knowledge also illustrates the way in which the short-term, single-generation approach of Western intellectual property laws simply does not make sense in the framework of many indigenous cultures that acknowledge rights across generations and knowledge as going backwards and forwards through time.³⁴

An analysis of scale is also critical to understanding the dynamics and configurations of hybridity. Assumptions about the centrality of the nation-state as the normal way of organising social and political life remain deeply embedded in disciplines like international relations, political science, and law, as well as in the practice of international development. While many still tend to think in terms of fixed territorial, administrative, legal, and institutional boundaries, the lived reality of contemporary globalisation is much less static. This is exemplified by the profound changes in political economy associated with transnational extractive industries in many parts of the Global South.³⁵ Another example is the networks linking local and international NGOs and aid agencies engaged on issues like human rights, public health, and women’s empowerment. Such considerations require us to question how we might nuance our analysis of hybridity to navigate between these interconnected scales, recognising the complex linkages, relationships and frictions that exist between local, national, and transnational institutions, actors and discourses in any given setting.

In their contribution to this collection, Allen and Dinnen combine the socio-spatial lenses of scale and territory in their analysis of the political economy of natural resource extraction in the neighbouring post-conflict and post-colonial entities of Bougainville and Solomon Islands in the western Pacific.³⁶ Their analysis demonstrates that territoriality and the politics of scale can provide critical insights into the contentious and frequently violent politics that have attended the advent and rapid growth of extractive capitalism in many parts of the Global South. While critical of hybridity’s crude spatial ontology, Allen and Dinnen also recognise its heuristic potential for providing ‘thick description’ of the complex interactions involved in these spatialised political economic struggles and processes that play out across local, provincial, national, and transnational scales.³⁷

Beyond prescriptive versus descriptive approaches

One of the most contested dimensions of the hybridity concept is the debate over its ‘descriptive’ usage, on the one hand, and its ‘prescriptive’ or ‘instrumental’ usage, on the other. As Geroid Millar has argued in the context of peacebuilding, while those who deploy the concept of hybridity descriptively seek merely to ‘illustrate the mixing of international and local institutions, practices, rituals and concepts’, its prescriptive usage implies that ‘international actors can plan and administer hybridity to foster predictable social experiences in post-conflict states’.³⁸ Prescriptive accounts explore how hybridity can be purposefully designed into peacebuilding and governance projects, including justice and security interventions. There is often a suggestion that institutional development and reform needs to be adapted to fit distinct local contexts. For example, some argue that the customary norms, values and informal institutions found in many post-colonial societies need to be recognised and, where appropriate, incorporated into new structures designed to promote peace, stability, and development.³⁹ Advocates for prescriptive approaches argue that, while it is a necessary starting point, merely using hybridity to describe how things are can miss opportunities to engage in practical attempts to mitigate or overcome power imbalances and inequalities underlying particular hybrid configurations and their outcomes.⁴⁰

Yet, others warn that prescriptive hybridity can give licence to intrusive and ambitious forms of intervention, including those that serve broader and contentious political, economic, or, even, military agendas. Mention has already been made of the historical role of indirect rule as an instrument of colonial domination, while contemporary military interventions in places like Afghanistan and Iraq have sought to adopt prescriptive hybridity in counter-insurgency strategies, igniting debate about the ethics of such engagements.⁴¹ Other scholars remain sceptical on more pragmatic grounds and question the underlying assumption ‘that administering hybrid institutions will foster predictable peace-promoting experiences’.⁴² This scepticism is reflected in Susanne Schmeidl and Nick Miszak’s contribution to this collection, which discusses the uneven outcomes of the US Special Forces’s efforts to develop the Afghan Local Police (ALP). They demonstrate that this strategy led to different outcomes in three different provinces: in Uruzgan, the ALP became a ‘mercenary army’ to US Special forces, in Achin it became a ‘strong-man militia’, while in Dur Baba it became a more promising community defence mechanism. What mattered in each case, the authors suggest, was the ‘relative strength of rules-based mechanisms for power and resource-sharing’, which were fractured in Uruzgan and Achin but relatively intact in Dur Baba.⁴³ Their conclusions suggest that attempts to ‘engineer’ hybrid security mechanisms ‘need to be grounded in a thorough understanding of the local context and the diverse groups within it’.⁴⁴

We would suggest that a critical approach to hybridity needs to move beyond the tendency to dismiss all forms of prescriptive hybridity as inherently problematic. Rather, the key issue relates to the power dynamics underlying particular hybrid arrangements and how these play out in practice. A prescriptive approach to hybridity, which is sensitised to the underlying power differentials and political dynamics, can potentially assist those seeking to bring about positive change or reform in areas like governance, justice, and security. Indeed, it is this potential which has generated such interest in the concept among development practitioners, policy-makers, civil society organisations, and donor agencies. It is also important to avoid the assumption – implicit in many critiques of prescriptive hybridity – that it is only international or state-level actors that attempt to create hybrid arrangements. Hybrid experimentation and deliberation can also occur at the most local levels as a way of solving local problems, as borne out in the fieldwork of several of the contributors to this collection.⁴⁵ These issues are explored further in Forsyth’s article on the use of hybridity to inform law reform in contexts of legal pluralism, with particular reference to reforms directed towards gender-based violence.

Recognising different world views/ontologies

A critical approach to hybridity calls for greater awareness of, and sensitivity to, the multiple ontological frameworks that are often at play in contexts of development, peacebuilding, and justice reform. There is a need to develop tools to engage more equitably with and between systems, institutions and individuals operating on the basis of differing principles, values, and world-views, while also recognising that there is likely to be much co-constitution between them. The dangers of not recognising different world-views are explored in Wallis and Richmond’s contribution to this collection. Wallis and Richmond argue that liberal peacebuilding is based on ‘ontological individualism’; that is, ‘the ontological assumption that individual humans are the sole, unique and ultimate constituents of social reality’.⁴⁶ While liberal peacebuilding recognises that individuals are ‘autonomous, rational and self-maximising’ and seek to ‘create institutions norms and laws which respect that autonomy’,⁴⁷ local populations in conflict-affected societies may operate with different ontological assumptions, stressing, for instance, ideas of relatedness. Local understandings of what constitutes social justice, peace, or emancipation may also differ from the assumptions embodied in the liberal peacebuilding paradigm. For Wallis and Richmond, there is a need for peacebuilders to recognise ‘subaltern positionality’ and adopt peacebuilding approaches that are more reflexive, dynamic and flexible.⁴⁸

A failure to recognise different ontological frameworks can lead to the kind of misunderstandings that Volker Boege highlights in relation to the hybridised peace process in Bougainville.⁴⁹ Boege, while deconstructing homogenising conceptions of the ‘local’ and the ‘international’, shows how differences in understandings of ‘peace’ emerged between ‘international’ actors working for foreign development agencies, NGOs and United Nations programmes, and Bougainvilleans. Specifically, he shows that many issues seen by Bougainvilleans as essential to peace were regarded as ‘soft’ (or irrelevant) by international actors. For example, for many Bougainvilleans peace cannot be conceptualised without taking into account ‘God, the spirits of the ancestors and the unborn, the holy bushes and trees and the totem animals of the clans, who are embedded in networks that transcend the culture-nature divide and the human-nonhuman divide’.⁵⁰ Many internationals actors, however, found it difficult to engage with the spiritual domain. While to some extent local agency worked to transform the liberal peace agenda in Bougainville according to local norms and interests, the power of ‘internationals’ to set the paradigm within which peace was understood continued unabated.⁵¹

Awareness of processes and relationships

Much of the hybridity literature has been dominated by a focus on institutional structures and entities but a critical approach to hybridity also looks beyond them to consider the processes and relationships between different actors and institutions. It has been observed that hybridity involves processes of ‘social negotiation, co-option, resistance, domination, assimilation and co-existence’.⁵² However, there has been relatively little focus on the conditions under which these processes can and do occur, and how they affect the forms of hybrid relationships that emerge. It is useful to pay close attention to processes and relationships in hybrid contexts, being aware that they can constantly shift, and that different actors draw on, and combine, a range of different discursive and cultural resources and sources of legitimacy in diverse ways, at different times.⁵³

A focus on relationships rather than fixed entities allows a recognition of the fluid and negotiated nature of hybridised arrangements, and the ways in which these are maintained or re-configured through the interaction of different actors with different degrees of power. It also points to the importance of creating space for the acceptance, respect for and discussion of difference, rather than trying to override it. These themes are picked up in Anne Brown’s contribution, which specifically calls for the need for a greater orientation to ‘dialogue’ in hybridity. She suggests that there has been an emphasis on ‘arrival at and management of an achieved hybridity’ rather than long-term dialogue and engagement.⁵⁴ Brown’s dialogic conception of hybridity shows that scholars and practitioners need to start from an acknowledgement that knowledge is partial, and that engagement with others is difficult, complex, and often involves divergent logics of collective well-being. From this starting point, hybridity as dialogue is not only about the generation of ‘practical responses to concrete problems’, but also about ‘cultivating habits and networks of listening and exchange’.⁵⁵ Because of its focus on dialogue rather than outcome, and its implicit suggestion that scholars and practitioners should ‘relax the need to control outcomes’, the ‘hybridity as dialogue approach’ poses profound challenges to the international development model, which is premised on demands for standardisation, professionalisation, efficiency, and short-term term outputs.⁵⁶

Gender

Although gender is in one respect a sub-set of power relations, it is also much broader and its marginalisation (outside of feminist scholarship) means that it demands specific attention. A critical approach to hybridity requires that gender is considered in at least two different ways. First, questions need to be asked about how gender affects and is affected by hybrid projects, arrangements and structures. How, for instance, do women and men experience and engage with and imagine hybrid arrangements differently? Which agents are in a position to influence decision-making on hybridised arrangements? What forms of social order are legitimated within particular hybridised environments and who does this benefit?

The work of feminist scholars is increasingly shedding light on these questions, showing that gender dynamics and inequalities can both influence and be reconfigured by hybrid arrangements.⁵⁷ While hybrid arrangements can be emancipatory, they can also generate new forms of violence. Nicole George’s work suggests, for instance, that the interplay between ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ sites of authority may generate its own gendered exclusions.⁵⁸ George and Kent’s contribution to this collection similarly focuses on the impacts of the interplay between formal and informal authority structures, and of global and local discourses, for women. It focuses on how, in Timor-Leste and Bougainville, these dynamics have shaped public discussion of women’s roles and experiences in the aftermath of conflict and have reinforced the degree to which some experiences (namely of sexual violence) cannot be spoken about.⁵⁹

A critical hybridity approach also requires asking a second, deeper, set of questions about how notions of hybridity themselves contain gendered presuppositions. For instance, Hilary Charlesworth has argued that many of the binaries that give force to the debates in the fields of peace-building, state-building, and international law have a gendered dimension in that they draw power from understandings of femininity and masculinity. For example, in the peacebuilding literature, ‘the liberal state depends on images of rationality, detachment, order and objectivity, while failed states are presented as chaotic, porous, disordered and subjective’.⁶⁰ It is, thus, necessary to go beyond the question of ‘where are the women in this analysis’ to more deeply hidden gendered constructs that influence both problem framing and also imagined future possibilities.⁶¹

Hybridity methodology

The question of what types of methods scholars use to study hybridity is linked to issues of positionality, ethics, and power, but also opens up a further set of questions specific to the enterprise of academic scholarship. One of these is how might we engage meaningfully in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary knowledge production. As many contributors to this collection demonstrate, one way of doing this is to combine a variety of methodologies, such as ethnographic or participatory methods with textual analysis. Another set of issues relates to the kinds of linkages and partnerships that are necessary to fit in with the ethos of critical hybridity espoused here. There is a need to actively seek out non-academic voices and different types of knowledge, such as discussed in Anne Brown’s contribution. Doing this effectively requires investigating the existence and operation of power differentials within the research space, and also requires scholars to reflect on their own ontological and epistemological assumptions, their own positionality, and the extent to which they act as voices of power and knowledge in particular contexts.⁶²

An essential aspect of ‘doing’ critical hybridity is going beyond a short-term ‘project’ mentality and engaging in sustained and respectful dialogue about particular problems in specific contexts. Decolonising methodologies⁶³ are critical to the hybrid scholarship enterprise. While significant differentials between researchers and research subjects cannot be simply ‘overcome’ in any straightforward way, acknowledging and reflecting on their existence provides a starting point from which researchers might seek to build more respectful relationships with those whose lives are the subject of research.

Respectful partnerships between scholars from the global North and academics and policy-makers in the global South, are also important in travelling with critical hybridity. We are nonetheless cognisant of the very real structural barriers that exist in the academic world to the types of collaborations and linkages we would ideally like to have, and which have impacted upon the nature of the contributions to this collection. These barriers, which include ‘publish or perish’ pressures, limited budgets for conferences, monolingualism, and limited timeframes, conspire against developing long-term and meaningful relationships between scholars in the global North and the global South. It is critical for us to consciously open the debate about these issues and share strategies for overcoming such obstacles.

Conclusion

This introductory article has sought to function as something of a traveller’s guide to the concept of hybridity, while also noting that hybridity itself is, in Mieke Bal’s words, a travelling concept. Specifically, we have sought to examine what scholars from a range of disciplines might gain from exploring the concept of hybridity in their own work. Our challenge has been to demonstrate the multiple ways to embrace the benefits of hybridity, while also navigating some of the potentially dangerous and problematic areas. This pathway, which we have termed ‘critical hybridity’, identifies eight approaches that are likely to lead ‘travellers with hybridity’ away from dangerous rocks and towards a more reflexive and nuanced engagement with the concept. These approaches are apparent in different ways in the rich, multidisciplinary, contributions to this collection.

Notes on contributors

Miranda Forsyth is a associate professor in the School of Regulation and Global Governance at the Australian National University. Her most recent book is Weaving Intellectual Property in Small Island Developing States (2015, Intersentia).

Lia Kent is a fellow in the School of Regulation and Global Governance at the Australian National University. She is the author of The Dynamics of Transitional Justice: International Models and Local Realities in East Timor (Routledge 2012).

Sinclair Dinnen is a associate professor in the Department of Pacific Affairs in the Coral Bell School of Asia and Pacific Affairs at the Australian National University. His most recent book (co-edited with Matthew Allen) is State-building and State Formation in the Western Pacific – Solomon Islands in Transition? (Routledge 2016).

Joanne Wallis is a senior lecturer in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre in the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs at the Australian National University. Her most recent book is Pacific Power? Australia’s Strategy in the Pacific Islands (Melbourne University Press 2017).

Srinjoy Bose is european union COFUND (Marie Sklowodska-Curie Action) fellow at the School of Government & International Affairs, Durham University. He is co-editor of Afghanistan-Challenges and Prospects (Routledge, 2017) and co-guest editor of the journal special issue Elections and the State: Critical Perspectives on Democracy Promotion in Afghanistan (Conflict, Security, and Development, 2016).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This work was supported by the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs and the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University (ANU).

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs and the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University (ANU) for their generous financial support, which enabled us to organise a series of seminars and an international workshop on the theme of Hybridity: History, Power and Scale at the ANU in 2015.

Notes

1. Nadarajah and Rampton, “The limits of Hybridity”, 49, 50; Boege et al., “On Hybrid Political Orders and Emerging States”.

2. Bjorkdahl and Hoglund, “Precarious Peacebuilding”.

3. Brown, “Security, Development”, 155.

4. Rumsey, “The Articulation”.

5. Albrecht and Wiuff Moe, “The Simultaneity”, 5.

6. Peterson, “A Conceptual Unpacking”, 12.

7. Ibid., 14.

8. Bal, Travelling Concepts, 11. We are grateful to Hilary Charlesworth for her suggestion that we engage with Bal’s work.

9. Merry, “Anthropology and International Law”, 103.

10. Drahos, Regulatory Theory.

11. Merry, “Anthropology and International Law”.

12. Baker, Security in Post-conflict Africa; Luckham and Kirk, “Understanding Security”.

13. Andrews, The Limits of Institutional Reform.

14. World Bank, World Development Report 2011.

15. Ibid., 106.

16. Paffenholz, “Unpacking the Local Turn”.

17. Bal, Travelling Concepts, 24.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid., 23.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid., 11.

23. Kyed, “Introduction to the Special Issue”, 17.

24. Shmeidl and Miszak, “The Afghan Local Police”.

25. Albrecht, “Separation and Positive Accommodation”.

26. George and Kent, “Sexual Violence”.

27. Dinnen and Allen, “Is the Hybrid Turn”.

28. Kyed, “Hybridity and Boundary-making”.

29. Forsyth, “Using the Concept of Hybridity”.

30. Kyed, “Hybridity and Boundary-making”.

31. Ibid.

32. Albrecht, “Separation and Positive Accommodation”, 24.

33. Laffey and Nadaraja. “The Hybridity”.

34. Forsyth and Farran, Weaving Intellectual Property.

35. Bebbington et al., “Contention and Ambiguity”.

36. Allen and Dinnen, “Is the ‘Hybrid Turn’”.

37. Ibid., 4.

38. Millar, “Disaggregating Hybridity”, 501.

39. Clements et al., “Statebuilding Reconsidered”.

40. Pieterse, Ethnicities and Global Multiculture.

41. Forte, “The Human Terrain System”.

42. Millar, “Disaggregating Hybridity”, 502.

43. Schmeidl and Miszak, “The Afghan Local Police”, 11.

44. Ibid., 12.

45. Dinnen and Allen, “State Absence”; Forsyth, “Using the Concept”.

46. Wallis and Richmond, “From Constructivist”, 6.

47. Ibid., 9.

48. Ibid., 8, 9.

49. Boege, “Hybridisation of Peacebuilding”.

50. Ibid.

51. Ibid.

52. Mac Ginty and Richmond, “The Fallacy”, 221.

53. This focus on process is also consistent with the growing critique of institutional form over function in development studies and the increasing embrace – rhetorically, at any rate – of a problem-driven focus in development engagements. Andrews, The Limits of Institutional Reform.

54. Brown, “Hybridity and Dialogue”, 9.

55. Ibid., 13.

56. Ibid.

57. see for example McLeod, “A Feminist Approach”.

58. George, “Policing ‘Conjugal Order’”; see also Bjorkdahl and Selimovic, “Gendering Agency”, 167.

59. George and Kent, “Sexual Violence”.

60. Charlesworth, “Concluding Remarks”.

61. Ibid.

62. Connell, “Southern Theory”.

63. Tuhiwai Smith, “Decolonizing Methodologies”.