Louise Wiuff Moe

The simultaneity of authority in hybrid orders

This article adds to current debates on hybridity by shifting attention from interactions between entities to the enactment of authority. The notion of hybridity has helped move debates on peace and state-building beyond a normative focus on failure and fragility. However, it also remains a contested and evolving concept. This article aims to theorise further the process of hybridisation. By introducing the concept of simultaneity of discourse and practice it explores the process through which seemingly contradictory sources of authority are played out at the same time in order-making to constitute political order. The processes of enactment suggest a model for reading dialogically concepts such as bureaucracy, autochthony, kinship and legislation, exploring how they are co-constituted in spaces of discourse and practice. Inherent to these spaces is a perpetual tension of difference and affinity. It is the dynamism of this tension that defines the hybrid orders quality of simultaneity.

Hybrid and ‘Everyday’ Political Ordering: Constructing and Contesting Legitimacy in Somaliland

A number of recent post-colonial liberal peace critiques have moved beyond the counter-positioning of ‘liberal/Western’ versus ‘communal/non-Western’ peace and political order. Instead, they draw attention to the interstices – the processes of contestation, repulsion and accommodation – between these approaches. Some argue that the most promising, if contentious, forms of political ordering and peace building take place exactly in a hybrid of state-based and liberal practices, and local customs and ‘everyday’ life in post-conflict settings. Through a case-study of Somaliland, this article examines the potentials and limits of such a hybrid approach to advancing peace and political order. The analysis in particular engages with the largely uncharted issue of how political legitimacy is constructed or undermined, in the context of post-conflict hybrid political orders. Somaliland’s reconstruction process was characterised by very low international intervention when compared to other so-called ‘fragile states’ and post-conflict settings. The article looks at how political institutions and structures of governance were constituted from within Somaliland through local agencies and formation of alliances, which cut across the dichotomies of ‘state/non-state’ and ‘liberal/traditional’ forms of governance and legitimacy. It illustrates the advantages, as well as some of the challenges, of this process of political ordering and hybridization, where the domestic sphere was allowed to be constitutive for the creation of legitimacy. Examining a small-scale international-local initiative of peace dialogues and community policing in Somaliland, the article also discusses how international support may engage with ‘everyday’ strategies of self-securing, and deliberately ‘facilitate’ hybridity in the context of conflict management and justice. The analysis offers an empirical anchoring of the concepts of ‘hybridity’ and the ‘everyday’, but also demonstrates how the case of Somaliland speaks more broadly to post-colonial liberal peace critiques and the call for new approaches to peace and political order.A number of recent post-colonial liberal peace critiques have moved beyond the counter-positioning of ‘liberal/Western’ versus ‘communal/non-Western’ peace and political order. Instead, they draw attention to the interstices – the processes of contestation, repulsion and accommodation – between these approaches. Some argue that the most promising, if contentious, forms of political ordering and peace building take place exactly in a hybrid of state-based and liberal practices, and local customs and ‘everyday’ life in post-conflict settings.Through a case-study of Somaliland, this article examines the potentials and limits of such a hybrid approach to advancing peace and political order. The analysis in particular engages with the largely uncharted issue of how political legitimacy is constructed or undermined, in the context of post-conflict hybrid political orders. Somaliland’s reconstruction process was characterised by very low international intervention when compared to other so-called ‘fragile states...

The strange wars of liberal peace: hybridity, complexity and the governing rationalities of counterinsurgency in Somalia

Abstract This article examines the contemporary interconnections between the politics of peacebuilding and the politics of counterinsurgent warfare in Somalia. Differing from much of the existing critical literature on Somalia that emphasises problems associated with top-down orthodox stabilisation approaches, this article explores the trajectories of counterinsurgent warfare that places ‘the local’ at the centre of intervention and work on logics of ‘small footprints’, hybridity and complexity. Here, it is no longer primarily the state and its institutions but the population and the everyday of ‘the local’, in and of itself, which constitutes the key object for counterinsurgency interventions, and as such the new main battle space in which insurgencies are to be defeated. In the context of these human-centred approaches to overcoming ‘subversion’, the means and ends of peacebuilding and those of ‘everyday warfare’ are becoming increasingly blurred.

Custom, contestation and co-operation: peace and justice promotion in Somaliland

This article explores alternatives to prevailing state-centric and legalistic approaches to supporting local security and access to justice. It does so through a case study of an initiative developed by an international NGO in partnership with a group of traditional authorities in Somaliland. The initiative aimed at enhancing local security and access to justice, drawing on customary conflict resolution mechanisms and everyday strategies of self-securing. At the same time, the initiative was shaped by international input and liberal notions of human rights and human security. This approach entailed a renegotiation of both local ordering and international discourse. Drawing on our fieldwork, we examine the initiative as it has evolved since 2003, and discuss what it suggests in terms of prospects for international support to ‘non-state’ actors. In particular, the article draws attention to the potential of working with everyday local practices to enable social change rather than focusing narrowly on reforming legal systems (whether state or customary).

Counterinsurgency, knowledge production and the traveling of coercive Realpolitik between Colombia and Somalia:

Counterinsurgency witnessed a powerful revival in our post-9/11 world. With its focus on the control of territory, populations and seemingly less kinetic hearts and minds campaigns—as well as a good dose of liberal humanitarianism—contemporary counterinsurgency has become the dominant form of the Western military interventionism. While most of the associated debates focus on the potentials and pitfalls of Western counterinsurgency approaches, the role of South-South cooperation in the making of ‘Global Counterinsurgency’, and the related emerging geopolitical convergences of interest between Western and non-Western elites in counterinsurgency, has received little attention. In focusing on counterinsurgency-related forms of knowledge production, and by analyzing the role of transnational military knowledge entrepreneurs promoting a form of coercive Realpolitik that supports ‘locally owned’ elite-driven counterinsurgency efforts in the field of South-South military cooperation between Colombia and Somalia, this article addresses this void. We show that conventional North/South divides no longer capture the realities of counterinsurgent warfare going global and call for a de-centering of the study of military interventions that is sensitive to how knowledge production in regards to ‘Global South’ contexts not only makes them legible, and thereby more governable, but also how this knowledge production informs ongoing reconfiguration of interventions themselves.

Introduction: Complexity, Resilience and the ‘Local Turn’ in Counterinsurgency

This chapter offers a detailed discussion of existing approaches to contemporary counter-insurgency, highlighting emerging discursive and practical shifts in counter-insurgency-related intervention rationales that move contemporary counter-insurgency toward logics of reflexive adaptation, complexity and resilience. In introducing and contextualizing these shifts in empirical and conceptual terms, we demonstrate how the increasing emphasis on the everyday, ‘the local’ and ‘the social’ as the key sites and objects of interventionary counter-insurgency contribute to a deepening convergence between liberal peace building, humanitarianism and counter-insurgent warfare that stand at the center of what we refer to as the ‘local turn’ in counter-insurgent warfare.

Counterinsurgent Warfare and the Decentering of Sovereignty in Somalia

Focusing on the southern lower Juba region of Somalia, the chapter analyses the order-making effects of counter-insurgent warfare ‘turning local’, and the ensuing reconfigurations of political power and sovereignty. In this textbook example of ‘state fragility’, counter-insurgency approaches have, the chapter argues, started to adapt by ‘decentering sovereignty’, by enlisting and producing local ‘non-state’ actors and decentered ‘counter-insurgent polities’ with new coercive means. This is articulated through a legitimation discourse of ‘bottom-up government’, and offers opportunities for local and regional actors seeking influence through new international and transnational counter-insurgency alliances. The chapter shows that the resulting order-making effects, far from reflecting more locally inclusive forms of security, are configured around the reproduction of relations of force and contribute to a further militarization of the social.

Hybridity and simultaneity in the Global South

The concepts of hybridity and hybrid political orders have gained considerable momentum in peace and conflict studies (Boege et al. 2009a, 2009b, 2009c; Clements et al. 2007; Mac Ginty 2011; Richmond 2010, 2011; Roberts 2011). These concepts form part of a growing critique of the fragile state discourse through which the modern state is contrasted with traditional or non-state modes of political ordering in the Global South. As such, hybrid political orders propose an alternative lens that aims to move beyond normative notions of fragility and failure and beyond dichotomous thinking that articulates states and non-states as discrete and independent actors and institutions. Instead, the concepts of hybridity and hybrid political orders offer starting points for comprehending the processes at work between diverse and competing authority structures, sets of rules, logics of order and claims to power that co-exist, overlap, interact and intertwine. The uneasy blending of these spheres is the explicit focus of the hybridity lens (Boege et al. 2009a, 2009b, 2009c; Mac Ginty 2010, 2011; Richmond 2010, 2011). While the concept of hybrid orders has gained traction, its analytical utility remains contested. It has been criticized for reproducing the very binaries that it seeks to overcome, as it relies on analytical categories that represent the hybrid order as an amalgamation of state-based liberal order and local order (or state and non-state).