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.
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, ...
