Gearoid Millar

Disaggregating hybridity Why hybrid institutions do not produce predictable experiences of peace

The term ‘hybrid’ has been widely incorporated into recent peacebuilding scholarship to describe an array of peacebuilding endeavors, including hybrid peacekeeping missions, hybrid criminal tribunals, hybrid governance, and the hybrid peace. However, while widely deployed, hybridity itself is under-theorized and variably applied by scholars. Major concerns arise, therefore, concerning the concept’s usefulness for peacebuilding theory, policy, and practice. Most problematically, while some scholars use hybridity descriptively to illustrate the mixing of international and local institutions, practices, rituals, and concepts, many today deploy hybridity prescriptively, implying that international actors can plan and administer hybridity to foster predictable social experiences in complex post-conflict states. This latter literature, therefore, assumes predictable relationships between the administration of hybrid institutions – of law, of governance, or of economics, for example – and the provision of peace-promoting local experiences of those institutions – experiences of justice, authority, empowerment, etc. This article argues that these assumptions are flawed and illustrates how a disaggregated theory of hybridity can avoid such errors. This theory distinguishes between four levels of hybridity – institutional, practical, ritual, and conceptual – characterized by their variable amenability to purposeful administration. The article illustrates how prescriptive approaches that assume direct and predictable relationships between institutions and experiences fail to recognize that concepts underpin local understandings and experiences of the world and, therefore, play a mediating role between institutions and experiences. Using examples from Sierra Leone, the article shows that while concepts are always hybrid, conceptual hybridity is inherently resistant to planned administration. As a result, internationally planned and administered hybrid institutions will not result in predictable experiences and may even result in negative or conflict-promoting experiences. The article illustrates the dangers of assuming any predictable relationships between the four levels of hybridity, and, therefore, between the administration of institutional hybrids and the predictable provision of positive local experiences.

Local experiences of liberal peace Marketization and emergent conflict dynamics in Sierra Leone

Over the past 20 years scholars have repeatedly highlighted the complex relationship between conflict, peace and economics. It is today accepted that economic factors at the global, regional, national and local levels can promote conflict in various ways and that economic factors are therefore central in establishing a sustainable post-conflict peace. However, while the scholarly literature includes much nuance regarding the precise nature of these complex relationships, practices of peacebuilding are often far less nuanced. Instead there is a tendency to pin the hopes of fragile post-conflict states on establishing a liberalized and supposedly peace-promoting economy and a worrying absence of grounded assessments of the impacts of such policies. This article argues that the resulting lack of clarity regarding the local impacts of such peacebuilding mechanisms contributes to continued unwarranted enthusiasm for marketization among policymakers and practitioners. This issue is addressed directly by exploring the destabilizing and potentially conflict-inducing impacts of one foreign direct investment (FDI) project in rural Sierra Leone. The dominance of liberal approaches to economic policy within peacebuilding has recently combined with a surge in large-scale FDI projects, often labelled as ‘land-grabs’, which can be interpreted as a direct embodiment of the liberal peace paradigm. While the liberal peace assumes that such projects will help by paying taxes, rebuilding state capacity and employing idle young males, the article illustrates that among local populations such projects can be experienced as deeply disruptive and potentially conflict-promoting. It therefore describes four specific mechanisms by which the project in this setting endangers Sierra Leone’s still precarious transition to peace. The article concludes with recommendations for peacebuilding theorists, policy advocates and practitioners trying to navigate the difficult waters of post-conflict peacebuilding by way of large-scale FDI and marketization in general.

Investing in peace: foreign direct investment as economic restoration in Sierra Leone?

In peace-building and transitional justice literature economic restoration is considered central to sustainable peace in post-conflict societies. However, it is also widely recognised that many post-conflict states cannot afford mechanisms to provide restoration. Not only are many such states poor to begin with, but violent conflict further degrades their economic capacity. As a result, in their need to provide jobs, generate tax revenues, spur development and promote sustainable peace, many post-conflict states turn to alternative processes of economic restoration. This paper examines the potential for foreign direct investment (FDI) to serve as one alternative means by which to provide economic restoration in post-conflict states. Presenting findings from six months of fieldwork evaluating one such project in rural Sierra Leone, the paper describes how local people experience such projects and explores whether employment and land-lease payments can provide experiences of economic restoration so far unforthcoming from the state.

Performative memory and re-victimization: Truth-telling and provocation in Sierra Leone

In transitional justice and peacebuilding literature, the presentation of traumatic memory is thought to be predictably socially generative of healing, reconciliation, and justice. In rural Sierra Leone, however, the truth-telling performances of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission were commonly experienced as provocative and as providing “no good thing.” This article explains this phenomenon by demonstrating how truth-telling in this case generated particular social expectations and perceptions of the self as victim among those who performed traumatic memory. However, because the process required no one to perform the reciprocal role of patron in this context, where reciprocal relationships of patron and client are the social norm, the process was unpredictably socially generative. The socially generative nature of performative memory led to dissatisfaction with the performance of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Recognizing that performances of memory are also performative provides new purchase on the potentially negative implications of truth-telling in complex patrimonial systems.

Expectations and Experiences of Peacebuilding in Sierra Leone: Parallel Peacebuilding Processes and Compound Friction

This article investigates local experiences of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Sierra Leone and explains how these experiences were influenced by the parallel administration of many peacebuilding processes. Using qualitative data it shows how the goals and procedures of these various processes overlapped and interacted in the imaginations of local people, generated unpredicted expectations, and eventually led to negative experiences of the Commissions work. I describe how Tsings idea of ‘friction’ can helpfully explain local experiences of peacebuilding and the new concept of ‘compound friction’ is introduced as a tool for understanding the local impacts of parallel peacebuilding processes.

Ethnographic Peace Research: The Underappreciated Benefits of Long-term Fieldwork

ABSTRACT While Peace Studies has always incorporated different research methodologies, large-N quantitative methods and state-level findings have dominated the literature and had most influence on policy and practice. Today, however, the limitations of peace interventions are commonly identified with the institutional, state-centric, and technocratic approaches associated with such limited understandings and their resultant policies. This paper argues, therefore, that the inability of these methods to examine local experiences of conflict, transition, and peace in diverse sociocultural settings contributes to inadequate policy formation and, thus, to problematic interventions. Indeed, the recent ‘local turn’ and its focus on the everyday, resistance, hybridity, and friction demands research that can better interpret local experiences of conflict, transition, and peace and, thereby, discover more locally salient practice. While this paper argues that an Ethnographic Peace Research (EPR) agenda must be central to such efforts, it also argues against applying the ethnographic label to work that is more suitably described as qualitative (site visits, interviews, focus groups, etc.). The paper argues that long-term fieldwork and close engagement with the subjects of peacebuilding must be required within any EPR agenda. The underappreciated benefits of such fieldwork are illustrated with examples from research in northern Sierra Leone.

Introduction: The Key Strengths of Ethnographic Peace Research

This volume is about understanding experiences of conflict, of peace, and of transitions between the two. It argues that a forceful Ethnographic Peace Research (EPR) agenda can provide the necessary empirical focus for progressing the local turn in peace studies. The Introduction discusses the weakness of the local turn, as well as its complementarity with other streams of literature in anthropology, conflict transformation, and feminist international relations. It then presents five key strengths of EPR as evidenced in the contributions to the volume and describes how these are mutually constitutive. The Introduction concludes by noting also the interdisciplinary tensions to which an EPR agenda gives rise, but notes that this must be seen as a constructive tension that will spur creative interdisciplinary thinking and solutions.

Conclusion: The Constructive Tension of Interdisciplinary Endeavours

This chapter seeks to bring together the diverse lessons provided throughout the volume. The chapter first returns to the five key strengths of the Ethnographic Peace Research (EPR) approach as described in the Introduction to describe how they are related and to what extent they are facilitative elements, required elements, or potentials of an EPR approach. A preliminary definition of EPR is then provided based on these distinctions. The chapter then progresses to address an interdisciplinary tension which became clear over the course of editing this volume, which evidences the challenges of interdisciplinary work, and which highlights the difficulties faced in the effort to consolidate a robust EPR agenda. The chapter concludes, however, by noting the need to see this as a generative tension and something to build on. The process of developing a new approach to Peace Research which can forward the local turn will not be simple, but it is required.

Engaging Ethnographic Peace Research: Exploring an Approach

ABSTRACT As has been thoroughly rehearsed in the literature, the failures of the liberal peace model of post-conflict intervention have given rise to a ‘local turn’ in peace research. This in turn has refocused attention away from the motivations and practices of international actors towards local ownership and ‘buy-in’, and the importance of culture, context, and ‘the Everyday’. There is a mismatch, however, between the methodological skills among peace researchers today, and the new imperative to explore local and everyday understandings, perceptions, and experiences of conflict, transition, and peace. For this reason a number of scholars have recently emphasized the importance of incorporating ethnographic methods and an anthropological imagination into peace research. However, at this point, and as evidenced in the contributions to this special issue, there are many challenges to such incorporation which must be acknowledge and addressed if the ethnographic approach is to fulfil its early promise to add empirical substance to the local turn. The contributing authors each address different challenges to conducting Ethnographic Peace Research (EPR) in post-conflict contexts and, as this introduction argues, they evidence clearly the variety of questions yet to be answered while suggesting different ways ethnographic approaches can be incorporated into peace research.