Hybrid peace revisited: an opportunity for considering self-governance?

Abstract

Critical peacebuilding scholars have focused on the impact of the encounter between the ‘local’ and the ‘international’, framing the notion of ‘hybridity’ as a conceptual mirror to the reality of such encounter. This paper explores a dual aspect of hybridity to highlight a tension. Understood as a descriptor of contingent realities that emerge after the international–local encounter, hybridity requires acknowledging that peacebuilders can do little to shape the course of events. Yet, framed as a process that can enable the pursuit of empowering solutions embedded in plurality and relationality, hybridity encourages forms of interventionism that may perpetuate the binaries and exclusions usually associated to the liberal peace paradigm. The paper suggests that when hybridity is used to improve peacebuilding practice, an opportunity may be missed to open up this tension and analytically discuss options, including withdrawal which, whilst largely left out of the conceptual picture, may be relevant to calls for reclaiming the self-governance of the subjects of peacebuilding themselves.

Keywords:

• Hybridity
• hybrid peace
• peacebuilding
• local

Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank the editors and the anonymous reviewers, as well as Peter Finkenbusch and Nicolas Lemay-Hébert for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. Hehir and Robinson, State-Building; Newman, Paris, and Richmond, New Perspectives on Liberal Peacebuilding; Campbell, Chandler, and Sabaratnam, A Liberal Peace?

2. See Special Issues, Lidén, Mac Ginty, and Richmond, “Beyond Northern Epistempologies”; Millar, van der Lijn, and Verkoren, “Peacebuilding Plans and Local Reconfigurations.”

3. Autesserre, Peaceland; Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel, Spatialising Peace and Conflict; Boege, “Vying for Legitimacy”; Mac Ginty, International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance; Millar, An Ethnographic Approach to Peacebuilding; Richmond, Failed Statebuilding.

4. Mac Ginty, “Indigenous Peace-Making versus the Liberal Peace,” 140.

5. Millar, van der Lijn, and Verkoren, “Peacebuilding Plans and Local Reconfigurations.”

6. Lemay-Hébert, “State-Building from the Outside-In.”

7. Richmond, “Resistance and the Post-Liberal Peace.”

8. Sriram, “Post-Conflict Justice and Hybridity.”

9. Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace; Graef, Practicing Post-Liberal Peacebuilding.

10. Hughes, Öjendal, and Schierenbeck, “The Struggle versus the Song.”

11. Kraidi, Hybridity, or the Cultural Logic of Globalisation.

12. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 25.

13. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 64.

14. Prabhu, Hybridity, 6–15.

15. Yazdiha, “Conceptualising Hybridity,” 32.

16. During, “Postcolonialism and Globalisation,” 31.

17. During, “Postcolonialism and Globalisation,” 37.

18. Tadjbakhsh, “Conflicted Outcomes and Values,” 639.

19. Mukhopadhyay, “Warlords as Bureaucrats,” 9–10.

20. Kappler, Local Agency, 66–146; Lemay-Hébert, “The ‘Empty-Shell’ Approach.”

21. Taylor, “What Fit for the Liberal Peace”; Graef, Practicing Post-Liberal Peacebuilding, 83–6; Charbonneau, “War and Peace.”

22. Belloni, “Hybrid Peace Governance”; Boege et al., States Emerging; Graef, Practicing Post-Liberal Peacebuilding; Mac Ginty and Richmond, “The Fallacy of Constructing Hybrid Political Orders”; Peterson, “Conceptual Unpacking”; Richmond, “Pedagogy of Peacebuilding.”

23. Boege et al., “Building Peace and Political Community,” 606–9.

24. Autesserre, Peaceland.

25. Belloni, “Hybrid Peace Governance,” 22–7; Boege et al., “Building Peace and Political Community,” 606; Mac Ginty, “Hybrid Peace,” 392.

26. Björkdahl and Höglund, “Precarious Peacebuilding,” 296–7.

27. Mac Ginty and Richmond, “The Fallacy of Constructing Hybrid Political Orders,” 221.

28. Peterson, “Conceptual Unpacking,” 12.

29. Richmond and Mac Ginty, “Where Now for the Critique,” 184.

30. Richmond, “Pedagogy of Peacebuilding.”

31. Belloni, “Hybrid Peace Governance,” 23; Mac Ginty, International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance, 51–3.

32. Mac Ginty, “Hybrid Peace,” 397.

33. Richmond, “Pedagogy of Peacebuilding,” 115.

34. Richmond, “Dilemmas of a Hybrid Peace.”

35. Mac Ginty and Richmond, “The Fallacy of Constructing Hybrid Political Orders”; Millar, “Disaggregating Hybridity”; Wallis, Jeffery, and Kent, “Political Reconciliation.”

36. Mac Ginty, “Hybrid Reconstruction,” 208.

37. Richmond, “Dilemmas of a Hybrid Peace,” 51.

38. Richmond, “Dilemmas of a Hybrid Peace,” 51.

39. Richmond, “Dilemmas of a Hybrid Peace,” 62.

40. Donais, “Empowerment or Imposition?” 14.

41. Mac Ginty and Richmond, “The Fallacy of Constructing Hybrid Political Orders,” 233.

42. Mac Ginty and Williams, Conflict and Development, 80.

43. Richmond, “Dilemmas of a Hybrid Peace,” 63.

44. Visoka and Richmond, “After Liberal Peace?” 121.

45. Kaldor and Muro, “Religious and Nationalist Militant Groups.”

46. Wallis, Jeffery, and Kent, “Political Reconciliation.”

47. EP, “At Glance”; NATO, “Active Engagement, Modern Defence.”

48. See UNAMID webpage for details. https://unamid.unmissions.org/.

49. UN System Staff College, “Indigenous Peoples and Peacebuilding.”

50. McCandless and Tschirgi, “Hybridity and Policy Engagement,” 1.

51. de Coning, “From Peacebuilding to Sustaining Peace.”

52. Stamnes, “Values, Context and Hybridity,” 24.

53. Bargués-Pedreny, “From Promoting to De-Emphasising Ethnicity.”

54. Barbara, “Rethinking Neo-Liberal State Building”; Boege et al., “Building Peace and Political Community,” 612.

55. Mac Ginty and Richmond, “The Fallacy of Constructing Hybrid Political Orders,” 226.

56. Mac Ginty and Richmond, “The Fallacy of Constructing Hybrid Political Orders,” 226.

57. Donais, “Empowerment or Imposition?” 15.

58. Stamnes, “Values, Context and Hybridity,” 24.

59. Tadjbakhsh, “Introduction,” 7.

60. Randazzo, “Paradoxes of the Everyday”; Sabaratnam, “Avatars of Eurocentrism.”

61. Donais, “Empowerment or Imposition?” 14, emphasis added.

62. Randazzo, “Paradoxes of the Everyday.”

63. Mac Ginty, International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance, 2.

64. Peterson, “Conceptual Unpacking,” 17.

65. Mac Ginty and Richmond, “The Fallacy of Constructing Hybrid Political Orders”; Millar, “Disaggregating Hybridity”; Peterson, “Conceptual Unpacking”; Richmond, “Dilemmas of a Hybrid Peace”; Wallis, Jeffery, and Kent, “Political Reconciliation.”

66. Chandler and Reid, The Neoliberal Subject; Prabhu, Hybridity.

67. Moe, “Strange Wars of Liberal Peace,” 114–15.

68. Nakashima et al., Weathering Uncertainty; UN System Staff College, “Indigenous Peoples and Peacebuilding.”

69. Aoi, de Coning, and Thakur, Unintended Consequences; de Coning, “From Peacebuilding to Sustaining Peace,” 177–9.

70. Drawing on Deleuze, Delanda theorises a flat ontology – as opposed to a ‘hierarchical ontology’ – made of unique and singular individuals, which cannot be related to general types; Delanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, 47.

71. Finkenbusch, “Post-Liberal Peacebuilding,” 259.

72. Barkawi and Brighton, “Powers of War.”

73. Stamnes, “Values, Context and Hybridity,” 28.

74. Körppen, “Space Beyond the Liberal Peacebuilding,” 93, original emphasis.

75. See the discussions within science and technology studies, Munk and Abrahamsson, “Empiricists Interventions”; some of these studies present themselves as being able to compose a common world without reproducing the problems of liberal Modernity, Latour, Politics of Nature, 8.

76. Mac Ginty and Richmond, “The Fallacy of Constructing Hybrid Political Orders.”

77. Rutazibwa, “Studying Agaciro”; Sabaratnam, “Avatars of Eurocentrism.”

78. Charbonneau, “War and Peace,” 511.

79. Graef, Practicing Post-Liberal Peacebuilding, 3; Laffey and Nadarajah, “The Hybridity of Liberal Peace,” 406.

80. Björkdahl and Höglund, “Precarious Peacebuilding,” 294; Millar, “Disaggregating Hybridity”; Randazzo, “Paradoxes of the Everyday,” 1259.

81. Nadarajah and Rampton, “The Limits of Hybridity,” 60.

82. Richmond and Mac Ginty, “Where Now for the Critique.”

83. In some other cases, hybridity is used to develop more context sensitive and historically informed scholarly engagement with international interventions. See Nadarajah and Rampton, “The Limits of Hybridity”; Sabaratnam, “Avatars of Eurocentrism.”

84. Millar, “Disaggregating Hybridity.”

85. Millar, “Disaggregating Hybridity,” 5.

86. Millar, “Disaggregating Hybridity,” 10–11.

87. Wallis, Jeffery, and Kent, “Political Reconciliation.”

88. Wallis, Jeffery, and Kent, “Political Reconciliation,” 174.

89. Chesterman, “Ownership in Theory and in Practice,” 7.

90. Barnett, Paternalism beyond Borders.

91. Chandler, Bosnia; Cunliffe, “Sovereignty and the Politics of Responsibility”; Pupavac, “International Therapeutic Peace and Justice in Bosnia.”

92. Cunliffe, “Sovereignty and the Politics of Responsibility.”

93. Pupavac, “Resurrecting Prometheus,” 152.