M. Anne Brown

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.

Peacebuilding and Political Hybridity in East Timor

Peacebuilding works toward the restoration or reconstitution of political community, in the most fundamental and inclusive sense, in the face of a legacy or the ongoing reality of violent conflict. The need for re/building exists not only at the level of state institutions (despite their importance), but across the gamut of social and political relationships, particularly including the level of ‘‘everyday life’’—of people’s access to livelihood and security, of the basic sociopolitical dynamics that shape everyday interactions, and of the trust that underpins community. Indeed, the need for re/building—and the sources of political community—exist at all the dimensions at which we live our lives, collectively and individually, including our relationships with sources of collective (and in some important respects individual) meaning, value, and order.

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

Peaceful community development in Vanuatu: A reflection on the Vanuatu kastom governance partnership

Vanuatu is undergoing intense, often confusing processes of change as people struggle with the interactions of customary and ‘introduced’ governance norms and of subsistence and market economic dynamics. A partnership between the Malvatumauri Council of Chiefs, the Australian Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies and AusAID has emerged to provide a context for customary and other community leaders to discuss and work with some of these pressures of change. This briefing provides a short overview of some of the issues and observations that have emerged over the first few years of the partnership and examines the implications of bringing peacebuilding or conflict resolution approaches into community development.

Hybridity and dialogue – approaches to the hybrid turn

Abstract One of the hybrid turn’s key contributions to debate in the fields of peacebuilding, state formation and international development is its approach to difference in post-colonial states. Observing difference and enmeshment is not new; it is in response to the standardising drive of statebuilding that it has critical significance. Rather than seeking to assimilate or eliminate difference, the hybrid turn enables approaching it as the field from which the political community of the state is crafted. This does not mean devising hybrid institutions, but supporting mutual recognition and dialogue as fundamental to political community in deeply heterogeneous states. Three different uses of hybridity are identified according to their capacity to enable forms of dialogue and mutual recognition.