The concept of hybridity is increasingly employed as an analytical tool to explore the varieties and outcomes of externally led interventions, and in some cases is portrayed as a desirable political project that could stimulate alternative and counter hegemonic programming. This article critically explores this trend in peace and development studies by examining some of the tenets and critiques of the concept of hybridity with the aim of furthering its development as a useful conceptual tool. It also explores the underlying normative implications and rhetoric that underpin some of the work on hybridity in these fields. In doing so, it offers a set of queries that could be used to explore practices, impacts and potential alternatives in peace and development programming.
Strengthening the 'Rule of Law' (RoL) has emerged as a key requirement in the reconstruction of conflict-affected states. No longer simply a philosophical ideal, RoL now exists as a tangible set of policies created and implemented by international actors, to which conflict-affected states are expected to conform. Masked in the neutral, apolitical rhetoric of blind and objective justice, RoL programming is in fact a political tool within the larger liberal peacebuilding project. Its employment as such mutes its potential contribution to constructing a positive peace as it often creates new socio-political tensions and distorts accountability structures. An analysis of reforms in Kosovo under the United Nations administration illustrates the potential for liberal RoL reforms to increase insecurity in the short term and threaten the sustainability of peacebuilding reforms in the long term. Instrumental use of RoL programming thus provides further evidence of weaknesses and contradictions within the politicised liberal peacebuilding project, necessitating reconsideration of its role in post-conflict transformations.
The human security agenda, as currently operationalized by the majority of powerful states and institutions, exhibits a distinct liberal character, simultaneously contributing to and legitimizing the dominant liberal peacebuilding approach. As such, there has been a crowding out of alternative conceptions of human security, including those which focus on emancipation. This latter approach to human security offers a more transformative vision through its focus on issues such as hegemony, power, and freedom. Paths to such forms of human security have yet to materialize, largely due to the characteristics of a liberal-internationalist approach which has narrowed the political space in which challenges to the status quo can be imagined and realized. In its failure to allow for a genuine plurality of voices and in its insistence on creating false consensus, liberal peacebuilding blocks the emancipatory promise of a genuine shift from state to human security. A potential starting point for imagining alternatives to liberal peacebuilding and thus the creation of emancipatory forms of human security is to consider the role and possibilities for agonistic modes of politics and peacebuilding. Transforming inevitable differences that are part of human society into agonistic relationships-where differences exist and are negotiated among adversaries (as opposed to enemies)-opens up the political space required to challenge dominant liberal approaches to human security and enables a shift toward the emancipatory model.To negate the political does not make it disappear, it only leads to bewilderment in the face of its manifestations and to impotence in dealing with them (Mouffe 1993:140)
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