Kevin P. Clements

Hybrid Political Orders, Not Fragile States

The concept of state fragility that has gained prominence within the development and security agenda focuses very much on deficiencies and shortcomings of governance in so-called fragile states. In contrast, the concept of hybrid political order takes a more positive outlook by focusing on the strength and resilience of sociopolitical formations that are present on the ground, that work, and that provide public goods for people and communities.

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

Towards Conflict Transformation and a Just Peace

Peace, justice, truth and compassion are central to most utopian and religious visions. For example, the concepts of Paradise and Nirvana both have strong connotations of justice, harmony, non-violence and union. These aspirations are religious ways of saying that most people in most communities and cultures, confronted with choices between order and chaos, peace and war, harmony and disharmony, structural stability and instability, equality and inequality, inclusion and exclusion, justice and injustice, tolerance and intolerance or abundance and poverty will wherever possible choose the former over the latter. There is a good justification for this as well. Stephen Jay Gould (2001), for example, states: Good and kind people outnumber all others by thousands to one. The tragedy of human history lies in the enormous potential for destruction in rare acts of evil not in the high frequency of evil people. Complex systems can only be built step-by-step, whereas destruction requires but an instant. Thus in what I like to call the Great Asymmetry, every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by 10,000 acts of kindness, too often unnoted and invisible as the “ordinary” efforts of a vast majority.

Internal Dynamics and External Interventions

Over the past few years, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) members, bilateral, and multilateral development agencies have seen ‘‘fragile states’’ as a, if not the, major challenge to sustainable development and security. After 2001, many development agencies viewed violent conflict largely as the result of the incapacity of state systems to control such violence. It was also noted that inadequate states were themselves an important structural source of such violence. Fragile states, therefore, came to be seen as a major contributing factor to an inability of developing countries to develop or to provide basic social services and protection to citizens. Such states were also seen as a major challenge to social cohesion and integration associated with the development of ‘‘bad neighborhoods’’ and a variety of other negative consequences for citizens, communities, and neighboring states. In terms of the development and peacebuilding agenda, therefore, fragile states were and are seen as major contributors to instability and underdevelopment. The assumption is that where such states exist, it will be impossible to make any meaningful progress toward peace or, more pressingly, the millennium development goals.

On bridging the gap: the relevance of theory to the practice of conflict resolution

It is often claimed that policy makers and scholars inhabit different worlds and have little for each other. We challenge this perception and claim that there is a strong symbiotic relationship between the two. This relationship is particularly strong in the field of conflict where policy makers may be in desperate need of guidelines, advice and analysis on how to transform complex conflict situations into more peaceful ones. We suggest that policy makers may think in terms of macro and micro-level theories and ideas if they wish to embrace better strategies of conflict resolution.

Security in the New Millennium: A Debate in the South Pacific on Peace and Security: Alternative Formulations in the Post Cold War Era

During the Cold War, Pacific security issues were focused on the external security concerns of the larger nations that border the Pacific Ocean rather than on the small island states and territories themselves. The island populations have been characterized more often as passive victims of external international relations1 than as the main actors in securing their region. There is, however, a growing literature focusing on security issues within the Pacific states and territories themselves.2 This literature addresses regional concerns from political, economic, environmental, health, and social to military and law and order issues (Henderson 2005: 9; Lawson 2003: 7).

The Citizens for Rowling Campaign: An Insider's View

This article examines the origins and development of one controversial campaign effort to assist the re-election of Mr Bill Rowling (Labour) as Prime Minister of New Zealand. The objectives, tactics, and strategy of the campaign are discussed, and then the campaign is described and analysed. It concludes that the campaign:

Trust, Identity and Conflict in Northeast Asia – Barriers to Positive Relationships

This introductory chapter introduces readers to the Northeast Asian region and asks why economic integration, which has generated peace and stability for the last twenty-five years, seems unable to contain growing incompatibilities between China, Japan and the Republic of Korea. The central argument is that economic ties, while important, cannot negate unresolved painful memories and war histories nor generate sustainable reconciliation or deal effectively with negative stereotypes and prejudice between the leaders and peoples of all three countries. To do this requires much closer attention to the development of satisfiers of popular and national identity needs, alongside bilateral and regional de-escalatory dynamics, which will enable states and peoples in the region to think in terms of future-oriented integrative relationships capable of dealing with painful history in order to create a peaceful present and future.

Global security: confronting challenges to universal peace

The challenge of peace is complex and intractable. Much depends on the meaning of the concept and the definition of the term. And in that respect much depends on whether a diplomatic-legal or a sociopolitical approach is adopted. to international peace and security’ has arisen, and respond according to its best judgement. It is this concept, a ‘threat to peace’, that has provided the means for considerable self-empowerment by the council over the past quarter century. The concept of global security has become an established term to use in the 21st century. In one sense it is an update on the mid-20th century concept of ‘international security’, because it acknowledges that, while military capacity remains essentially with the nation state, the sources of conflict and the key to peace and security in the contemporary age draw from insights pertinent to the emerging global community. Yet this insight was, in fact, also enshrined in the UN Charter in a concept that is scarcely recognised. Article 1.2 requires member states to take ‘appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace’. The concept of universal peace is entirely different from that of ‘international peace and security’ in chapter 7. Universal peace does not encompass military force; it evokes work of a sociopolitical nature. The diplomatic-legal approach is enshrined in the United Nations Charter of 1945. The primary goal of the United Nations is to protect future generations from the scourge of war. The charter bestows on the Security Council the primary responsibility for maintaining, or restoring, international peace and security. The means by which this is to be attained rests, by convention, on the doctrine of collective security. Article 39 empowers the council to determine whether there has been an act of aggression or a breach of the peace, and in such cases the council may authorise the use of armed force, by one member state or collectively by a group, to restore international peace and security. The same article also empowers the council to determine whether a ‘threat