Hybridity in Peacebuilding and Development: A Critical and Reflexive Approach

The concept of hybridity highlights complex processes of interaction and transformation between different institutional and social forms, and normative systems. It has been used in numerous ways to generate important analytical and methodological insights into peacebuilding and development. Its most recent application in the social sciences has also attracted powerful critiques that have highlighted its limitations and challenged its continuing usage.

This book examines whether the value of hybridity as a concept can continue to be harnessed, and how its shortcomings might be mitigated or overcome. It does so in an interdisciplinary way, as hybridity has been used as a benchmark across multiple disciplines and areas of practical engagement over the past decade – including peacebuilding, state-building, justice reform, security, development studies, anthropology, and economics. This book encourages 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. The authors conclude that there is continued value in the concept of hybridity, but argue that this value can only be realised if the concept is engaged with in a reflexive and critical way.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the online journal Third World Thematics.

Lia Kent is a Fellow in the School of Regulation and Global Governance at The Australian National University. Her research is concerned with questions of peacebuilding, transitional justice, memory and reconciliation, with a geographic focus on Timor-Leste and Aceh.

Miranda Forsyth is an Associate Professor in the School of Regulation and Global Governance at The Australian National University. She formerly lectured in criminal law at the University of the South Pacific. Her research focuses on the possibilities and challenges of the interoperation of state and non-state justice and regulatory systems.

Sinclair Dinnen is an Associate Professor with the Department of Pacific Affairs at The Australian National University. He has a background in socio-legal studies and criminology. His research examines issues of regulatory pluralism, security governance, and politics and state formation in postcolonial societies, with a particular focus on the independent Melanesian countries in the southwest Pacific.

Joanne Wallis is a Senior Lecturer in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, at The Australian National University. Her research focuses on peacebuilding and security in the Pacific islands, with a special focus on Timor-Leste and Bougainville, Papua New Guinea.

Srinjoy Bose is a Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He was formerly European Union COFUND (Marie Sklodowska-Curie Action) Fellow in the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University, UK. His research is at the intersection of peace/security/conflict and development.