Building Peace in the Absence of States: Challenging the Discourse on State Failure, edited by Martina Fischer and Beatrix Austin, Berghof Handbook Dialogue 8, 2009, Berlin: Berghof Research Centre. (Online at www.berghof-foundation.org) (original) (raw)
Building Peace in the Absence of States: Challenging the Discourse on State Failure
2009
The Dialogue Series is an offshoot of the Berghof Handbook for Conflict Transformation. Each topic in the series is chosen because it is particularly relevant to societies in conflict and the practice of conflict transformation, and because it raises important issues at the present time. In each Dialogue, practitioners and scholars critically engage and debate in light of their experience. Typically, a Dialogue includes one lead article from key experts, and several commentaries from practitioners and others. Rather than presenting a single analysis, these practitioner-scholar encounters stimulate debate, integrating different perspectives, challenging prevailing views and comparing research findings with experiences and insights on the ground. Importantly, Dialogues, as works of broad relevance, are distributed in print version as well as online. We invite readers to respond to the papers (as to all articles). Interesting and original contributions can be added to the web version of the Dialogue.
Dilemmas of Peace Building- The role of hybridity in building legitimate states
2018
Recently, the concept of liberal peace-building has been heavily contested with regards to its rather imperfect record in terms of achieving sustained peace in post-conflict environments, with even its advocates conceding that its repercussions have been disappointing (Paris, 2010). Whereas the 1990’s first saw a rapid increase for the approval of the liberal state concept culminating in a ‘unipolar‘ world — with limited fear of international conflict (Fukuyama, 1992), this exuberance has recently been followed by a wave of stark criticism over the liberal mechanisms and instruments that are being deployed in practice. The US-led interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan are often mentioned as a turning point in the debate where an effort by the ‘coalition of the willing and able‘, was perceived as a means to introduce neoliberal norms and values. This ’coalition‘ still resembles the leading donors behind peace-building missions around the world (De Coning, 2018). In the Agenda for Peace (UN: 1992) Secretary General Boutros Boutros Ghali termed the concept of peace-building as an ‘action to identify and support structures which will tend to strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid a relapse into conflict‘, with the aim of transforming the causes of conflict into foundations of sustainable peace (Campell and Peterson in McGinty, 2013). The reasons for conflict and fragility was not seldom brought in conjunction with poor governance, weak institutions, lack of accountability, and ineffective political processes (Menocal, 2009). Thus, peace-building missions consequently focused more on the aim of liberating and emancipating citizens from oppressive states and societies (Campell and Peterson in McGinty, 2013). As the debate unfolded, a liberal-lead consensus emerged that a minimally functioning state is indispensable to maintain peace, while acknowledging that there are no viable alternatives than institutionalise peace through functioning institutions, if it was to be sustained in the way the UN had envisioned (Paris, 2010; Menocal, 2009). Hence, the prevailing Zeitgeist of the 1990’s and early 2000’s reflected a strategy of pursuing peace through economic and political liberalisation of the host state and consolidating such reforms institutionally (Paris, 2010). The 2001 UN report ‘No Exit without Strategy‘, subsequently came up with three main objectives to address former deficiencies of peace missions in Rwanda, Liberia and Cambodia. One of them, namely the ‚strengthening of political institutions‘ became known under the term of ’state-building‘ (UN Document S/2001/394) and lead the UNDP to develop an approach called ’state-building for peace‘ which came about with plenty of criticism in the field (Menocal, 2010). Even though both concepts have a similar aim as to strengthen the relationship between state and society, as well as to make state institutions more inclusive and responsive to societies’ needs for building peace, there are potential tensions and contradictions between the two, which will not necessarily reinforce each other (Haider and Strachan, 2014). These contradictions and tensions can consequently lead to unanticipated dilemmas and paradoxes, that impede the efforts of the international donor community and shall be the subject of this analysis. These paradoxes will be examined and, if at all, they can be overcome for a more legitimate outcome as to make peace-building endeavours more sustainable over the long-run. Thereupon, it is investigated whether alternative approaches such as informal or parallel structures of governance can inform the debate. In particular, it will examined whether such informal 2 structures can make more convincing claims to the different perceptions of legitimacy bestowed by citizens and international donors, as informal institutions and practices can often prove to be remarkably resilient in post-conflict settings (Menocal, 2010). Here, the term of hybrid systems of governance is introduced and how such rather informal modes of governance may allow for more a organic process of building up state-society relations. To this end, Somaliland shall serve as an exemplary case that has successfully maintained relative order and stability with hybrid governance systems. This analysis shall be guided by the following research question: How can a hybrid form of governance inform the daunting concept of liberal state-building and more specifically the question of legitimacy? The data used for the analytical part of the paper relies mainly on primary and secondary sources for qualitative research. Primary sources such as UN or OECD documents are used to curtail the objectives of liberal peace building. Secondary sources are taken for the assessment of contradictions and tensions within the concept of liberal peace.
Hybrid peace revisited: an opportunity for considering self-governance?
Third World Quarterly, 2018
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.
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.
Hybridity in peacebuilding and development: a critical approach
Third World Thematics: a TWQ Journal, 2018
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.
Dilemmas of a Hybrid Peace: Negative or Positive?
Hybrid forms of peace represent a juxtaposition between international norms and interests and local forms of agency and identity. A first stage may be tense forms of hybrid politics that maintain structural violence, fail to resolve the contradictions between local and international norms, and reflect the outsourcing of colonial style rule. This could be characterised as, or lead to, a negative form of hybrid peace. A positive form of hybrid peace would have the advantage of having resolved such contradictions through active rather than passive everyday agency. This article examines this range of dilemmas surrounding debates about hybrid peace.
Peacebuilding: the Shift towards a Hybrid Peace Approach
Jurnal Global & Strategis, 2018
This paper examines the transformation within the practice and concept ofcontemporary peacebuilding. Peacebuilding, practically and conceptually, hasbeen dominated by the liberal peace paradigm. In this case, theinstitutionalising of its core ideas such as democratisation, human rights, therule of law, and liberal market system to the post-conflict states and to a socalled ‘fragile/failed states’ aiming at bringing peace and security has failed to create a comprehensive and sustainable peace on the ground as exemplified in Nicaragua, Haiti, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and other post-war states. Scholars focused on the issue of peacebuilding have engaged to a new approach that challenge the domination of the liberal paradigm through the accommodation and appreciation upon the ‘local’ and thus create spaces for the interaction between the liberal and the ‘local’ within forms of ‘hybrid peace’ or ‘hybrid peacebuilding’
Hybridity in Peacebuilding and Development: A Critical and Reflexive Approach
Routledge eBooks, 2018
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.
Disaggregated Hybridity: Why Hybrid Institutions do not Produce Predictable Experiences of Peace
Journal of Peace Research, 2014
The term ‘hybrid’ has been widely incorporated into recent peacebuilding scholarship to describe an array of peacebuilding endeavors; including hybrid peacekeeping missions, hybrid criminal tribunals, hybrid governance, and the hybrid peace. However, while widely deployed, hybridity itself is under-theorized and variably applied by scholars. Major concerns arise, therefore, concerning the concept’s usefulness for peacebuilding theory, policy and practice. Most problematically, while some scholars use hybridity descriptively to illustrate the mixing of international and local institutions, practices, rituals, and concepts, many today deploy hybridity prescriptively, implying that international actors can plan and administer hybridity to foster predictable social experiences in complex post-conflict states. This latter literature, therefore, assumes predictable relationships between the administration of hybrid institutions – of law, of governance, or of economics, for example – and the provision of peace promoting local experiences of those institutions; experiences of justice, authority, empowerment, etc. This article argues that these assumptions are flawed and illustrates how a disaggregated theory of hybridity can avoid such errors. This theory distinguishes between four levels of hybridity – institutional, practical, ritual, and conceptual – characterized by their variable amenability to purposeful administration. The article illustrates how prescriptive approaches that assume direct and predictable relationships between institutions and experiences fail to recognize that concepts underpin local understandings and experiences of the world and, therefore, play a mediating role between institutions and experiences. Using examples from Sierra Leone, the article shows that while concepts are always hybrid, conceptual hybridity is inherently resistant to planned administration. As a result, internationally planned and administered hybrid institutions will not result in predictable experiences and may even result in negative or conflict promoting experiences. The paper illustrates the dangers of assuming any predictable relationships between the four levels of hybridity, and, therefore, between the administration of institutional hybrids and the predictable provision of positive local experiences.
This article reviews the recent academic and policy interest in hybridity and hybrid political orders in relation to peacebuilding. It is sceptical of the ability of international actors to manufacture with precision hybrid political orders, and argues that the shallow instrumentalization of hybridity is based on a misunderstanding of the concept. The article engages in conceptual-scoping in thinking through the emancipatory potential of hybridity. It differentiates between artificial and locally legitimate hybrid outcomes, and places the ‘hybrid turn' in the literature in the context of the continued evolution of the liberal peace as it struggles to come to terms with crises of access and legitimacy.
Hybridity on the Ground in Peacebuilding and Development: Critical Conversations
Hybridity on the Ground in Peacebuilding and Development: Critical Conversations, 2018
Hybridity on the Ground in Peacebuilding and Development engages with the possibilities and pitfalls of the increasingly popular notion of hybridity. The hybridity concept has been embraced by scholars and practitioners in response to the social and institutional complexities of peacebuilding and development practice. In particular, the concept appears well-suited to making sense of the mutually constitutive outcomes of processes of interaction between diverse norms, institutions, actors and discourses in the context of contemporary peacebuilding and development engagements. At the same time, it has been criticised from a variety of perspectives for overlooking critical questions of history, power and scale. The authors in this interdisciplinary collection draw on their in‑depth knowledge of peacebuilding and development contexts in different parts of Asia, the Pacific and Africa to examine the messy and dynamic realities of hybridity ‘on the ground’. By critically exploring the power dynamics, and the diverse actors, ideas, practices and sites that shape hybrid peacebuilding and development across time and space, this book offers fresh insights to hybridity debates that will be of interest to both scholars and practitioners.
Everyday Struggles for a Hybrid Peace
In Oliver P. Richmond and Audra Mitchell (eds), Hybrid Forms of Peace: From the Everyday Agency to Post-Liberal Peace (Palgrave MacMillan) , pp. 293-309, 2012
Peacebuilding missions in all parts of the world – driven largely by western and liberal-democratic values – frequently clash with the needs, aspirations and actual lives of the people affected by conflict. These clashes have been left under-examined and all too often unaddressed by a policy making community preoccupied with the grand architecture of liberal peacebuilding and the often abstract principles they embody: the creation of a post-conflict order through security, market economics, rule of law and democratisation. The authors of this volume have successfully managed to contrast these state-based approaches with the complex circumstances that make up the substance of conflict and peacebuilding “on the ground,” from Northern Ireland to Timor Leste and from Cambodia to Liberia. While being careful not to idealize the local, which is often imbued with vested interests, the authors also show convincingly how localized agency can have the potential to produce hybrid peacebuilding arrangements that might revive at least some aspects of the ideals that once drove the liberal peace: respect for local autonomy, human rights, welfare and, in a more general sense, a search for the good life. The purpose of this concluding chapter is to offer a selective conceptual engagement with some of the most pressing issues the chapters have brought to the fore. I focus, in particular, on how the hybrid political environment in which peacebuilding takes place highlights both the importance of everyday struggles and, from a scholarly perspective, the difficulty of conceptualizing how these struggles can be imbued with agency: that is, how we can understand the exact impact they have on post-conflict reconstruction.
Hybridity has emerged recently as a key response in IR and peace studies to the crisis of liberal peace. Attributing the failures of liberal peacebuilding to a lack of legitimacy deriving from uncompromising efforts to impose a rigid market democratic state model on diverse populations emerging from conflict, the hybrid peace approach locates the possibility of a 'radical', post-liberal and emancipatory peace in the agency of the local and the everyday and 'hybrid' formations of international/liberal and local/non-liberal institutions, practices and values. However, this article argues, hybrid peace, emerging as an attempt to resolve a problem of difference and alterity specific to the context in which the crisis of liberal peacebuilding manifests, is a problem-solving tool for the encompassment and folding into globalising liberal order of cultural, political and social orders perceived as radically different and obstructionist to its expansion. Deployed at the very point this expansion is beset by resistance and crisis, hybrid peace reproduces the liberal peace's logics of inclusion and exclusion, and through a reconfiguration of the international interface with resistant 'local' orders, intensifies the governmental and biopolitical reach of liberal peace for their containment, transformation and assimilation.
The limits of hybridity and the crisis of liberal peace
Review of International Studies, 2014
Hybridity has emerged recently as a key response in International Relations and peace studies to the crisis of liberal peace. Attributing the failures of liberal peacebuilding to a lack of legitimacy deriving from uncompromising efforts to impose a rigid market democratic state model on diverse populations emerging from conflict, the hybrid peace approach locates the possibility of a ‘radical’, post-liberal, and emancipatory peace in the agency of the local and the everyday and ‘hybrid’ formations of international/liberal and local/non-liberal institutions, practices, and values. However, this article argues, hybrid peace, emerging as an attempt to resolve a problem of difference and alterity specific to the context in which the crisis of liberal peacebuilding manifests, is a problem-solving tool for the encompassment and folding into globalising liberal order of cultural, political, and social orders perceived as radically different and obstructionist to its expansion. Deployed at ...