Hybridity

Abstract

The concept of hybridity is central to this book. Our interest lies in the hybrid political, economic, and social orders that have emerged in the wake of liberal peace interventions in the post-Cold War period. The concept of hybridity, and an unpacking of the processes of hybridisation, allows us to do at least three things. Firstly, it enables us to develop a sophisticated critique of the liberal peace. Such a critique moves beyond two-dimensional notions of an all-powerful international community and weakened local actors who are bereft of the powers to resist, subvert, or negotiate the imposition of the liberal peace. The critique, assisted by the concept of hybridity, illustrates that the liberal peace — as a set of actors, norms, and intervention programmes — is not an all-powerful Leviathan that can unroll its liberal Commonwealth without hindrance from local power structures and norms, and from its own contradictions. Secondly, the concept of hybridity allows us to reappraise studies of local agency and indigenous norms that have erred towards a romanticisation of the local. There has been a tendency in some policy, journalist, and academic literature to romanticise all things local, traditional, and indigenous. An understanding of the hybrid nature of ideas, peoples, and structures allows us to question entire categories upon which much discussion of liberal internationalism and local resistance rests.

Neither fish nor flesh, nor good red herring.

John Heywood