Peter Albrecht

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.

An uneasy marriage: non-state actors and police reform

This article looks at the inclusion of non-state actors in security sector reform (SSR) programming, specifically when efforts are made to strengthen local-level security through police reform. It explores how the role of non-state actors has been conceptualised vis-à-vis the role of states as providers of security and justice in fragile state settings. It is argued that even though the central role of non-state actors in SSR in general and policing in particular has increasingly been acknowledged, the imperative of state building, which continues to structure SSR, makes non-state actors as providers of security at the local level an uneasy bedfellow. Based on experiences around police reform in sub-Saharan Africa, Sierra Leone in particular, the article illustrates how key personnel and advisers in police programming are aware of the importance to engage communities and develop context-specific programmes, but fall back on state-centric approaches. As will be outlined, there are many reasons for this, including the political context in which SSR is undertaken, pressure to achieve results and the like.

State-building through security sector reform: the UK intervention in Sierra Leone

UK support to the reconstruction of the Sierra Leonean state has been widely held up as an example of successful state-building with the development of basic capacity and trust in public institutions, particularly security. This article examines security sector reform (SSR) in Sierra Leone, how Sierra Leone affected SSR and what implications that has for international interventions. Despite being hailed as a success, the sustainability of a state-building effort driven by concepts of the liberal state, a polity form that never existed in Sierra Leone, is in question. Unrealistic expectations of progress driven by planning imperatives of development agencies remain a key issue and obstacle to sustainability.

The Chiefs of Community Policing in Rural Sierra Leone

This paper argues that when police reform in Sierra Leone was instituted to consolidate a state system after the countrys civil war ended in 2002, it reproduced a hybrid order instead that is embodied by Sierra Leones primary local leaders: paramount and lesser chiefs. In this sense, policing has a distinctly political quality to it because those who enforce order also define what order is and determine access to resources. The hybrid authority of Sierra Leones chiefs emanates from multiple state-based and localised sources simultaneously and comes into play as policing takes place and police reform moves forward. This argument is substantiated by an ethnographic exploration of how and with what implications community policing has been introduced in Peyima, a small town in Kono District, and focuses on one of its primary institutional expressions, Local Policing Partnership Boards.

Sierra Leone's Post-Conflict Peacekeepers

An ever-growing demand for troops to serve in ever-more complex environments has led to enhanced interest in the incentives and constraints facing newcomers to peacekeeping. Increasingly, these include post-war states from the global South. Peter Albrecht and Cathy Haenlein examine the recent record of Sierra Leone and the factors affecting its patterns of contribution to peace-support operations. In doing so, they stress the need for a full understanding of the specific experiences of conflict and recovery – and the relevance of national identity, financial capacity and domestic crises – in the calculations of states emerging from civil war.

Fragmented Peacekeeping: The African Union in Somalia

From uncertain beginnings, the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) has grown, over almost ten years, into the regional organisations largest peace-support operation. Bolstered by a multilayered mission architecture through which the UN and bilateral donors provide financial, logistical and technical support, it has achieved important gains against the jihadi Islamist organisation Al-Shabaab. The apparent viability of these partnerships has seen AMISOM hailed as a successful model of collaboration between regional and international structures. Peter Albrecht and Cathy Haenlein examine a less-studied dimension of this model, namely the intersection of these arrangements with the structural fragmentation that has increasingly come to define the mission.

Secrets, strangers, and order-making in rural Sierra Leone

ABSTRACT This paper explores the Poro, a male secret society in rural Sierra Leone, and how it conditions access to security and justice. It critiques dichotomies between state and non-state and substantiates the networked quality of order-making as dispersed among a multitude of actors who intertwine disparate rationalities and registers of authority. The secret nature of the Poro, the ‘sons of the soil’, and the ‘stranger’ are explored as central figures. Poro membership is essential to the production of social and physical boundaries between insiders and outsiders of a community. By conditioning access to local positions of power and decision-making about how resources are to be distributed, the Poro also conditions access to security and justice. The networked quality of order-making becomes particularly noticeable when the police engages in Poro affairs, which accentuates the multitude of registers of authorities that are combined and assembled as the Poro and the police interact.

Hybridisation in a Case of Diamond Theft in Rural Sierra Leone

ABSTRACT Drawing on cultural studies, the concept of hybridity has emerged in peace and conflict studies as an important critique of the fragile failed/state discourse, and the binaries whereby the modern state is often contrasted with traditional or non-state actors. The concept is also challenged for reproducing the very binaries that it seeks to overcome and lacking analytical vigour. The paper addresses these critiques by exploring a case of diamond theft in rural Sierra Leone. It suggests an analytical shift from interaction between state institutions (police) and non-state authorities (traditional leaders) to focusing on processes of hybridisation through the enactment and performativity of authority. This is an analytical move from preconceived cultural and political entities to the subject and the simultaneous quality of how he or she assembles and projects authority. It is in the subject’s strategies and practices at the micro level that we clearly see how hybridisation processes occur.

Separation and positive accommodation: police reform in Sierra Leone

Abstract This paper addresses an important critique of hybridity as it has been applied in peace and security studies. On the one hand, it has assumed separation and otherness, because of its point of departure in understanding what occurs in the meeting between international and national (or local) actors in peacebuilding processes. At the same time, there is a danger of overemphasising positive accommodation, while not detailing what processes of hybridisation entail in practice. By exploring police reform in Sierra Leone, the paper shows the inherent tension that characterises hybridisation, and how positive accommodation as well as separation occurs simultaneously.

The Hybrid Authority of Sierra Leone's Chiefs

Abstract: On the basis of a historical and ethnographic analysis, this article shows how the concept of hybridity can be used analytically to explore the emergence of paramount and lesser chiefs in Sierra Leone and their role as figures of authority at the local level and in national politics. At the same time, it critiques the ahistorical applications of the concept that are prevalent in peace and conflict studies. The article offers insight into the processes of hybridization that chiefs constitute, and are constituted by, as they draw on multiple sources of authority, including what one scholar calls their “extremely localized” sense of belonging, as well as the legislation of a centrally governed bureaucracy. Résumé: Sur la base d’une analyse historique et ethnographique, cet article montre comment le concept de l’ “hybridité” peut être utilisé analytiquement pour explorer l’émergence des chefs suprême et inférieurs en Sierra Leone ainsi que leur rôle comme figures d’autorité localement et dans la politique nationale. En même temps, il critique les applications historiques du concept qui est répandue dans les études sur la paix et la polémologie. L’article offre un aperçu du processus d’hybridation dont ils sont principalement constitués, en s’appuyant sur des sources multiples et autoritaires, y compris ce qu’un spécialiste appelle leur sentiment “extrêmement localisée” d’appartenance, ainsi que la législation d’une bureaucratie centralisée gouvernée.