Anna Nolan

Building Peace and Political Community in Hybrid Political Orders

Peacebuilding supports the emergence of stable political community in states and regions struggling with a legacy of violent conflict. This then raises the question of what political community might mean in the state in question. International peacebuilding operations have answered that question in terms of the promotion of conventional state-building along the lines of the Western Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) model as the best path out of post-conflict state fragility and towards sustainable development and peace. This article argues for peacebuilding beyond notions of the liberal peace and constructions of the liberal state. Rather than thinking in terms of fragile states, it might be theoretically and practically more fruitful to think in terms of hybrid political orders, drawing on the resilience embedded in the communal life of societies within so-called fragile regions of the global South. This re-conceptualization opens new options for peacebuilding and for state formation as building political community.

Challenging Statebuilding as Peacebuilding — Working with Hybrid Political Orders to Build Peace

Since the end of the Cold War, agencies responsible for international peacebuilding operations have explicitly linked the restoration of security, development and peace to statebuilding and governance. The medium of the state, and in particular the liberal democratic, free market state, has been understood as providing the fundamental framework for the achievement of stability, sustainable conflict management, and development.’ By contrast, ‘state failure’ and ‘state fragility’ have been identified as establishing and entrenching conditions for violent conflict and widespread impoverishment within, but also beyond, the borders of the state in question. The topic of fragile states gained particular prominence when it was framed in the context of the security discourse of the industrialised states of the Global North following the terrorist attacks of 2001 and the ‘war on terror’. Fragile states came to be seen ‘through the dominant lens of Western security interests’, and through this lens they appear as breeding grounds and safe havens for terrorism and hence as a matter of international security — which is, above all, the security of the industrialised states.2 Thus fragile states are represented in much of the peacebuilding and development policy-related community as ‘the crux of today’s development challenge and an increasing source of potential threats to global security’, with USAID, for example, identifying ‘no more urgent matter’.3