Volker Boege

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

Peacebuilding and State Formation in Post‐Conflict Bougainville

For almost ten years (1989 to 1998), Bougainville was the theater of a large-scale violent conflict. This island in the South Pacific, with an area of about 9,000 square kilometers (approximately the size of Cyprus) and 200,000 inhabitants, geographically belongs to the Solomon Islands archipelago. Politically, however, it is part of the state of Papua New Guinea (PNG). Over the last few years, Bougainville has gone through a comprehensive process of post-conflict peacebuilding. In fact, Bougainville presents one of the rare success stories of peace-building in today’s world, and it looks like it has a good chance of becoming one of the equally rare success stories of state-building.

Vying for legitimacy in post-conflict situations: the Bougainville case

This article addresses the co-existence, interface and mutual permeation of different types of legitimacy and the ensuing hybridisation of legitimacy in fragile post-conflict situations, drawing on the case of post-conflict peacebuilding and state formation on the South Pacific island of Bougainville (Papua New Guinea). Taking Max Webers three ideal types of legitimate authority – rational-legal, traditional and charismatic – as starting points, it is shown how legitimacy is constantly re-negotiated and re-structured, and the legitimacy of all actors – as well as the legitimacy of the overall governance configuration – is hybridised. Accordingly, it is argued that international support for peacebuilding has to transcend the comfort zone of liberal understandings of rational-legal legitimacy and constructively engage with hybridised legitimacy. The article mainly draws on fieldwork conducted on Bougainville in the context of a research project on legitimacy issues in post-conflict fragile situations.

Hybrid Forms of Peace and Order on a South Sea Island

For almost 10 years (1989–1998) the South Pacific island of Bougainville was the theatre of a large-scale violent conflict, and over the last 12 years Bougainville has undergone a comprehensive process of largely successful post-conflict peacebuilding and (re-)construction of political order. In the process, international liberal notions of peace and state-building colluded with local understandings of shaping a peaceful and orderly community, which resulted in a hybridization of peacebuilding and in a distinct Bougainvillean variety of ‘peace’ and ‘state’. Although some international engagement was – and continues to be – instrumental for peacebuilding and state formation, these processes are mainly steered through local agency. In this chapter I am going to highlight some features of the international–local interface in the Bougainville peacebuilding process, highlighting the significance of hybridization, ‘the everyday’ and ‘the locale’. The focus will be on local kastom (the culture of the locale) and kastom ways of conflict transformation. For local agency is grounded in kastom as everyday practice. In their exchanges with the external forces of liberal peacebuilding and state-building, the local actors found strength by reference to kastom. This chapter is based on fieldwork conducted in Bougainville in 2007 and 2008,1 which explored the attitudes and activities of actors from the realms of state, international organizations, civil society and the customary sphere with regard to peacebuilding and state formation.2 In the course of the fieldwork, I was based in Buka and Arawa, the

The rambutan, the chopper and the broken spear: peacebuilding on Bougainville as a cross-cultural exchange

ABSTRACT The article explores the local-international peacebuilding interactions which contributed to the success of peace formation in Bougainville (Papua New Guinea). This exploration is guided by a cultural-relational approach to understanding peace processes, with internationally supported peacebuilding conceptualised as a relational exercise in working with and across cultural difference. The focus is on everyday interactions in the local context, addressing issues such as: building relationships and trust, reconciliation and spirituality, and different understandings of gender-relations. The Bougainville case shows that peacebuilding is fundamentally relational, a multifaceted and complex cross-cultural international-local exchange. The stories told by locals and internationals prove to be a rich resource for understanding how internationally supported peacebuilding plays out in local everyday life. It is these stories that allow us to capture the relationality of peacebuilding, and they are constitutive elements of this relationality.

Peace in the Pacific: Grounded in Local Custom, Adapting to Change

The Pacific region is huge and highly diverse — linguistically, culturally and otherwise. Outsiders think of it as a massive expanse of water scattered with small isolated islands that are vulnerable and far apart (and, from a metropolitan perspective, ‘far away’). By contrast, an insiders’ view of Oceania is one of a ‘sea of islands’, focusing on the bonds and linkages that the ocean has provided between the island societies for time immemorial.1 In today’s international system, the region is divided into ‘nation’-states, most of them very small by international standards. The Pacific has the greatest concentration of micro-states worldwide. With approximately seven million inhabitants, Papua New Guinea (PNG) is by far the country with the biggest population. Altogether, no more than ten million people live in the region.