Introduction
Hybridity has emerged recently as a key response in International Relations (IR) and peace studies to the crisis of liberal peace. As a universalising modality in the wider architecture of a globally expansive liberal order, liberal peace achieved an intensified pre-eminence in the 1990s and new millennium, even as its advance suffered critical setbacks. Amid the often fragile and illiberal outcomes of international peacebuilding, various resistances such as the post-9/11 transnational insurgency brought to fore the coercive character of liberal order making, exemplified by the Global War on Terror and interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is in this context that a supposedly novel and emancipatory turn to inter-connected hybrid, post-liberal, local, everyday and popular peacebuilding approaches has been ventured, claiming to eschew the orthodoxies and statist, territorial logic of mainstream liberal peacebuilding and instead locating the possibility of peace in the agency of the local and the everyday, and ‘hybrid’ formations of liberal (international) and non-liberal (local) institutions, practices and values.Footnote 1 However, claims to both novelty and a break with liberal peace orthodoxy are premature. Not only has the liberal peace itself long sought to engage with the local and other decentred or non-state forms as a deliberate transitional strategy of peace-, nation-, and state-building,Footnote 2 but, as an emergent critique notes, the hybrid peace approach reproduces the Eurocentrism, dualisms, and hierarchies inherent to liberal peace; neglects the import of economic and social structures by locating the barriers to peace at the cognitive or ideational level; and overlooks how liberal peace has become structured into the very normative order of the international.Footnote 3
The critique advanced in this article focuses on the motor of hybrid peace – hybridity itself. It argues that hybrid peace, emerging as an attempt to resolve a problem of difference and alterity specific to the context in which the crisis of liberal peacebuilding manifests, is a problem-solving tool for the encompassment and folding into global liberal order of cultural, political, and social orders perceived as radically different and obstructionist to its expansion. Deployed at the very point this expansion is beset by resistance and crisis, hybrid peace reproduces the liberal peace's logics of inclusion and exclusion, and through a reconfiguration of the international interface with resistant ‘local’ orders, intensifies the governmental and biopolitical reach of liberal peace for their containment, transformation, and assimilation.
Through a selective engagement with hybridity that neglects the multilectical character of hybridisation and the longue durée timeframe through which hybridity manifests, and instead concentrating on the contemporary dynamics in a presentist fashion, the hybrid peace approach fails to take seriously the historical co-constitution of the international, national, and local and the relations of power that connect these in both peace and conflict. Instead, despite numerous caveats, the deployment of hybridity as a modality of peace turns on and produces a romanticised positioning of the local/everyday as the antithesis of the international and an also problematic effacement of the national, thereby obscuring the role of hybridity, the local and the everyday in the reproduction of oppression, contestation, and violence, and how peace and conflict are not discrete phenomena but deeply interwoven in forms of political contestation and antagonism produced within overlapping and co-constituting liberal, nationalist, and other assemblages.
The article proceeds through five sections. The first sets out the context of crisis in liberal order making in which the turn to hybridity in International Relations (IR) and peace studies has emerged as a claimed critical and emancipatory response. The second examines the discursive recurrence of hybridity in the social sciences and identifies some immediate problems with its latest incarnation, hybrid peace. The third delineates and critiques core concepts and assumptions common to the post-liberal, hybrid and quotidian approach to peace, showing how it shares important commonalities with the liberal peace orthodoxy it defines itself against, including a liberal politics of inclusion and exclusion. The fourth section shows how the neat divisions between the local/everyday and the international/liberal inherent to hybridity-as-peace rests on a romanticised and at times orientalised reading of the local and everyday as spaces divorced from the national and expressive of the indigenous, authentic, and legitimate, a construction formed through the discourse of hybrid peace itself. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the implications of its arguments.
The turn to hybrid peace
The recent turn to hybridity in IR and peace studies comes at a specific juncture in the global liberal peace project: one of uncertainty for advocatesFootnote 4 and ‘crisis’, according to critics.Footnote 5 The past two decades have seen the ascendancy of an intensified West-led engagement in the global South through overlapping humanitarian, developmental, peacebuilding, and securitised frameworks, the overall thrust of which has been the containment and transformation of problematic states and social orders so that they conform to, or at least do not threaten, the requisites of markets, democracy, and rule of law.Footnote 6 This post-Cold War intensification of global liberalism's two centuries of engagement with its peripheriesFootnote 7 has generated a power/knowledge nexus, constituted by a network of aid donor and recipient states, UN agencies, international financial institutions, NGOs, and myriad academic and policy research centres, that aligns diverse interests, calculations, and practices with an ethical, if not moral, problem-solving mission to end the various conflagrations in the borderlands and interstices of a now explicitly globalising liberal order.Footnote 8 However, an array of problems, including exacerbated conflict dynamics, developmental failure, and localised and transnational resistances, some violent, has generated profound anxiety, if not crisis, for the liberal peace project, which has not abated despite rethinking and reformulating developmental, peacebuilding, and humanitarian programming, most obviously in the shift from the Washington to the post-Washington Consensus which supposedly prioritised local ‘ownership’ and donor-recipient ‘partnership’. This is not least as, at the same time, the Global War on Terror and interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere laid bare the violent, coercive, and militarised character of a cosmetically pacific liberal order – whether order is understood as decentred or US-driven.Footnote 9
The crisis manifests in the fields of International Relations and global politics in sharply polarised and dissonant perspectives not only about liberal peace but the wider architecture of globalisation as an academic and socio-political-economic project. For example, it has been read variously as the inherently violent character of liberal order itself,Footnote 10 a momentary but surmountable setback in securing US hegemony-as-soft power,Footnote 11 the hardwired failure of US imperial ambitions and contradictions in the globalisation project,Footnote 12 or a questioning of the normative and empirical frameworks of the globalisation thesis itself.Footnote 13 Inevitably, the most heated debates have been over peacebuilding itself.Footnote 14 On one side are the project's defenders who argue that despite the difficulties there is no alternative to liberal peace and call for a renewed commitment to its principles and aspirations and the refining of its implementation strategies.Footnote 15 On the other side are diverse critics who see the project as an articulation of imperialism in a new form of Western hegemony and neoliberal capitalist development.Footnote 16 These debates implicitly or explicitly advocate renewed focus on firmer statebuilding with differing emphasis on a more gradual transitional institutionalisation towards autonomy and/or on enhanced social welfare capacities.
Alongside these debates is a school of thought which, building on the work of earlier generations of peace scholars,Footnote 17 stresses the significance of the local and the everyday and criticises liberal peacebuilding as statist, Eurocentric, domineering, and top-down in its epistemological assumptions, practices and effects, but for whom peace can yet be achieved as a heterogeneous interface of global/international and local orders.Footnote 18 For this now growing scholarship, liberal peace can be transcended and its narrow ethnocentric boundaries, technocratic tendencies, and fixation with state and institution-building overcome to produce a more empathetic, responsive, culturally sensitive, and ultimately radical peace encompassing the local, indigenous, and quotidian experience, especially that of the subaltern categories, within conflict-affected spaces and societies.Footnote 19 It is in this approach, broadly defined, that hybridity, and the local and everyday, have become key vehicles for attempting this makeover of international peace intervention.
The post-liberal or hybrid peace approach defines the crisis of liberal peace, at base, as one of legitimacy.Footnote 20 International peacebuilding is characterised as coercive, ‘top-down’, technocratic, uncompromising, and blind to the local conditions in which it is pursued. Centred on imposing the Western model of the Weberian state on those unwilling or not ready to accept it, and for whom it is thus ‘alien’, liberal peacebuilding is held to favour the interests of local ‘elites’ and international interveners, rather than the majority who bear the weight of both conflict and liberal peace engagements. In this way, the latter are alienated from the state-in-formation, as they are alienated from the elites who manage it with and for international peacebuilders. This renders the liberal peace illegitimate and drives various resistances that make impossible its advance and sustainability. By contrast, hybrid peace – constituted by organic configurations fusing international and ‘local’ structures, practices, values, and identities – is more ‘inclusive’ and participatory, emerges ‘bottom up’ and is therefore more legitimate for its bearers, even as it departs in different ways from the elusive ideal of liberal peace. Rather than a homogenising liberal peace, peacebuilders are therefore urged to recognise the possibility of the ‘plurality of peace’,Footnote 21 each instance comprising a mutual accommodation of local and international institutions, practices and values, which is therefore legitimate in both contexts. In any case, the critique points out, hybrid configurations are the ‘reality’, even ‘inevitable’ outcomes, of liberal peace interventions, and the call is for these to be considered potential forms of, rather than obstacles to, generating peace.Footnote 22 In this way, hybridity becomes the motor of sustainable peace at and between local and international levels, as well as a modality for overcoming liberal peacebuilding's denial of autonomy to peripheral and local spaces and societies. (We examine below this posited contrast between liberal and hybrid peace, but note here how it is key to how the latter defines itself and its claims to ‘legitimacy’ and ‘emancipation’.) However, there are significant problems, considered next, with the articulation of hybridity both in terms of its lineage within broader fields of the humanities and social studies since the nineteenth century and its recent resurgence in IR and peace studies.
The limits of hybridity
Hybridity is most closely associated with postcolonial thought,Footnote 23 although it has a longer lineage in the humanities and social studies. In the nineteenth century, the concept derived from biological conceptions of race and anxieties of colonial and imperial societies faced with prospects of a plural world and miscegenation.Footnote 24 In the twentieth century, both race and hybridity discourses took a culturalist turnFootnote 25 and were divided between forms of organic essentialism and intentionalist constructivism, with the latter seeking to eschew fixed notions of identity such as race and ethnicity through a critical lens particularly associated with various strands of postcolonial studies.Footnote 26 ‘Hybrid peace’ is thus hybridity's latest incarnation, albeit one connected in varying degrees to a postcolonial approach. In its discursive recurrence hybridity not only encompasses a varying and dissonant vocabulary,Footnote 27 it also has been subject to persistent critique.Footnote 28 Key for our analysis is that the almost endemic character of hybridisation should make us circumspect about hybridity's deployment and usage.Footnote 29 The theoretical framework adopted here is sympathetic to this critique insofar as we argue that hybridisation, which we equate with miscegenation,Footnote 30 is a far more thoroughgoing, comprehensive, and relentless historical process than is often allowed, in part as the related concepts of difference and alterity on which hybridity is dependent are the very grounds that make inquiry and understanding in the social sciences and humanities possible, as any relation of understanding involves engagement or fusion with another rationality, tradition, text, person, etc.Footnote 31 Yet this is not to dismiss hybridity (after all, we are not denying it is at work) but instead to ask why is it, given the always already hybrid constitution of social existence, the focus on hybridity intensifies at particular historical junctures and in particular ways; what are the contexts, frameworks, aims, goals, and effects of the intermittent turn to hybridity, and specifically what is and is not included as hybrid? In short, what are the politics of invoking hybridity?Footnote 32
Hybrid peace approaches draw explicitly or implicitly on prominent theories in cultural and postcolonial studies that deploy hybridity, and related concepts such as diaspora, creolisation, metissage, mestizaje, etc.,Footnote 33 to processes of racial and cultural mixture. Exemplified by the works of Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, and Paul Gilroy amongst others,Footnote 34 these studies read hybridity as forms of ‘inbetweenness’ that break with, challenge, and transgress essentialist and binary ideas of identity, and destabilise the hierarchical and exclusionary relations that rest on and reproduce these. Emerging out of the fusing of two differentiated – and often hierarchically positioned – elements, hybridity is seen as constituting a ‘third space’ that is not only irreducible to its constitutive elements, but is creative, assertive, and productive of agency.Footnote 35 In this way hybridity is claimed to ‘reveal, or even provide, a politics of liberation for subaltern constituencies’.Footnote 36
However, this emancipatory claim has drawn intense criticisms (some of which presage the arguments advanced here).Footnote 37 A key problem is a depoliticising neglect of power. Floya Anthias argues that the privileging of (a particular notion of) culture obscures other constructions of difference and hierarchy, such as gender and class, and, relatedly, the overemphasis on transgressive dynamics ‘underplays alienation, exclusion, violence, and fundamentalism, particularly in situations of social asymmetry’.Footnote 38 Hybridity does not necessarily entail reciprocal exchange or the diminishing of cultural hegemonies, but is uneven and selective across and within subaltern groups.Footnote 39 The wider criticism is that by directing attention to localised interactions, as opposed to overarching structures, accounts of hybridity are disembodied from the totality – marked by material social and political inequalities – in which it is located, thereby tending to obscure the power relations and hierarchies constituting domineering orders such as capitalism and racism.Footnote 40 Other problems flow from the anti-essentialism linked to hybridity; the corollary of the celebrated unsettling of fixed readings of identity is the elevation of the hybrid over the non-hybrid, and transgression over social boundaries, that is, the generation of new hierarchies and boundaries (between the hybrid – open, tolerant, progressive – and the essentialist – parochial, provincial, reactionary).Footnote 41 The problem is well-demonstrated in Latin American contexts where nationhood is officially articulated, albeit unevenly, in terms of hybridity (mestizaje), thereby marginalising indigenous peoples' assertions of collective identity and political claims.Footnote 42 Consequently, while some critics, such as Katheryne Mitchell and Ella Shohat, acknowledge hybridity's potential for resistance and progressive agendas, but question whether it can be always equated with these, given how it is open to appropriation by reactionary forces and thus ‘the consecration of hegemony’,Footnote 43 more forceful critics argue ‘hybridity-talk’ is itself complicit in the reproduction of hierarchy and domination – John Hutnyk, for example, sees hybridity as a conceptual tool ‘providing an alibi for lack of attention to politics, in a project designed to manage the cultural consequences of colonisation and globalisation’.Footnote 44
As a supposedly novel approach to international peacebuilding that breaks with liberal peace orthodoxy and its universalising ambition, the hybrid peace approach envisages a plurality of ‘locally legitimate’ peace pursued through context specific and mutually accommodative interfacings of the international and the local. However, there are a number of immediate problems with this articulation of hybridity. To begin with, the conception of international order inherent to this approach is remarkably reminiscent of the age of empire. Not only did imperial order rest on a heterogeneous set of locally specific arrangements and contexts and differentiating hierarchies within its wider architecture, indirect rule was ‘a practice of government which worked through institutions that relied on what were thought to be indigenous customs and structures of authority’.Footnote 45 This was, or increasingly became, more than an administrative necessity; it reflected the inescapable dilemma inherent to rule ‘at a distance’, that is, between governing too much and not enough.Footnote 46 To be clear, we are certainly not equating the work of hybrid peace scholars with advocacy of a benevolent new imperialism.Footnote 47 Rather, in pointing to the similarities between how hybridity constituted the answer to problems of imperial rule and how it has emerged today as a response to the crisis of global liberal order, we are raising a question (explored in subsequent sections) as to what extent hybrid peace constitutes a ‘radical critique’ of liberal peacebuilding,Footnote 48 not least as hybridity, as conceived of here, has always been inherent to the heterogeneity of liberal rule.Footnote 49
Second, hybridity is not inherently emancipatory, but as discussed above, this very much depends on the historical and social context and, indeed, hybridity is perfectly given over to orders of mastery and domination, such as colonialism, capitalist accumulation, and majoritarian nationalism.Footnote 50 Hybrid peace scholars recognise this,Footnote 51 yet in advancing hybridity as an engine of peace, they claim a discernible distinction between hybridity-as-emancipation and hybridity-as-oppression.Footnote 52 As we show below this is not only questionable, but when offered, it represents a liberal politics of inclusion and exclusion. Third, and relatedly, the deployment of hybridity for peace turns on a delineation of the local and the international/global that is both EurocentricFootnote 53 and denies the deeper and more thoroughgoing hybridisation of the world consequent to two centuries of imperial expansion, decolonisation, and liberal order building. Despite regular caveats that hybridity is everywhere,Footnote 54 the approach nonetheless advances a set of analytical and conceptual binaries (liberal/illiberal, international/local, modernity/tradition, peace/conflict, coercion/resistance, etc.) through which hybridity is to be read and pursued for peace.Footnote 55 This is in striking contrast to postcolonial deployments of hybridity – for example, as ‘inbetweenness’ – that have sought to critique such taken-for-granted dichotomies and boundaries on which dominant accounts of social relations rest.Footnote 56 Thus, although there is occasional recognition of hybridity within the local, indigenous, and everyday, hybridity in a fuller sense is seen as yet incomplete and only to be achieved through international peace frameworks. In this way, hybridity is deployed ‘in shallow terms, as a domestic phenomenon referring to external relations with local communities deploying non-liberal forms of decision-making or conflict resolution’.Footnote 57 By way of illustrative examples, hybrid peace studies have included discussion of struggles for local customary justice, rights of indigenous communities, traditional kinship systems, religious authorities and networks, patronage systems with key examples including Gacaca courts in Rwanda, the Loya Jirga councils in Afghanistan, and the uma lulic ‘sacred house’ system in East Timor.Footnote 58 While hybrid peace scholars are not without sensitivity to how these emerge from or are transformed by their engagement with the international,Footnote 59 what is notable is such examples are always discussed with reference to levels of ‘indigeneity’, and thus authenticity, which become yardsticks for measuring the extent to which these remain pure and legitimate or sullied and compromised (‘bastardised’) by the extent of their engagement with the international.Footnote 60 An example is Roger Mac Ginty's account of Hezbollah as an international-local hybrid (in which ‘indigeneity’ is compromised) because of the Lebanese actor's relatively recent political support from Iran, rather than in terms of its very inception and constitution through historical processes of hybridisation.Footnote 61 Oliver P. Richmond coins the term ‘local-local’ to refer to the ‘deep civil society’ that is ‘not merely a veneer of internationally sponsored local actors and NGOs’ and which, whilst neglected by international peacebuilders, is key to genuine emancipation and peace.Footnote 62 Finally, hybridity-as-peace neglects the implications of hybridity as an open-ended and unpredictable process.Footnote 63 Taking seriously this sense of movement, of hybridisation, calls into question the idea of an inherently pacific configuration amid the ceaseless workings of power and hierarchy at and between local, national, and global levels.Footnote 64 Yet, as demonstrated below, this is neglected in the historical or categorical treatment of those constructs serving as exemplars of hybrid peace.
In the next two sections we engage with the hybrid peace approach in terms of its ontological and epistemological foundations, its claim to break from liberal peace orthodoxy, and its deployment of hybridity. The objective is not to prove the hybrid peace approach ‘won't work’, but rather to show that by representing the always already hybrid world as hybrid in specific ways, it does particular work in a context of globalising liberal order. Recalling Cox's adage that ‘theory is always for someone and for some purpose’,Footnote 65 and given that representations of the social world are productive and constitutive of it,Footnote 66 the question we explore is: what does the hybrid peace approach do?
Hybridity as a problem-solving tool
Our argument is that ‘hybrid peace’, emerging as the answer to a problem of difference and alterity specific to the context in which the crisis of liberal peacebuilding manifests, is a problem-solving tool for the encompassment and folding into global liberal order of cultural, political, and social orders perceived as radically different and recalcitrant to its expansion. We build our argument in two steps, first (in this section) showing how despite defining itself in contrast to liberal peace orthodoxy, the hybrid peace shares key assumptions, values and taxonomies with it; and, second, (in the next section) showing how in constructing the local and everyday as spaces of indigeneity and authenticity that are distinct from the international/global and in and from which peace can be built, the approach depoliticises and romanticises these in deeply consequential ways. This is not to deny the normative, even moral, imperatives that impel hybrid peace scholarship; however, as Doty points out,Footnote 67 what is important are the taken-for-granted assumptions and naturalised categories of knowledge embedded in and produced by the advance of Western power, and not the intentions and calculations of those who nonetheless bear some of the responsibility for this.
Hybridity for liberal peace
Although there are nuanced differences between individual scholars adopting the hybrid/post-liberal peace approach, there are important commonalities that define the field.Footnote 68 To begin with, they share a broadly rationalist critique of the liberal peace,Footnote 69 which they see as rooted in a narrow, biased set of interests, actors, institutions, and norms and therefore incapable of connecting effectively or empathetically with the local, indigenous, non-liberal ‘subjects’ and quotidian world that liberal peace seeks to transform, rather than engage with.Footnote 70 On the other side of this internationally-dominated order lies the ‘everyday’ as the set of actors, practices, and institutions that constitute familial, religious, cultural, communal, and locally associative life, a field disqualified by, but often stubbornly resistant to, liberal peace, alternately navigating, interrupting, or defying the aims of international peacebuilders through the tricks, ruses, and everyday practices that people deploy as a form of silent or clandestine everyday resistance.Footnote 71 As Meera Sabaratnam argues, this liberal/local distinction, turning on an underlying assumption of cultural difference, becomes ‘the central ontological fulcrum upon which the rest of the political and ethical problems sit’.Footnote 72 Consequently, a kind of hybridity is seen at work, but one characterised by a politics of aphasia or disjuncture between, on the one hand, the top-down, universalising, technocratic, legal-rational operation of a Western-dominated elite governmentality of liberal peace and, on the other, the everyday gemeinschaftlich cultural habitus of daily existence, affect, feeling, and oral traditions of the ‘local’, the ‘indigenous’, and/or the everyday.Footnote 73
Hybridity and the everyday therefore become at once both a descriptive assessment of the disjuncture at work in the global-local peace interface and a prescriptive call for the harnessing of neglected and disqualified spaces for communicative action or ‘agonism’ that make for a more effective, encompassing, and ‘emancipatory and empathetic form of peace’.Footnote 74 It is descriptive because hybridity is seen as the ‘inevitable outcome of the liberal peace and its contextual engagements’,Footnote 75 and prescriptive as hybridity is advanced as modality for an emancipatory project to demystify, deromanticise, uncover, and understand the ‘hidden’ subaltern script marginalised in mainstream liberal peace frameworks. However, in a powerful sense, the hybrid peace approach is in denial of its prescriptive nature. Even as it identifies and constructs the ‘local’, ‘local-local’, and the ‘everyday’ as spaces for peace, this is also offered as a descriptive account of actually existing ‘indigenous or locally more authentic’ traditions, customs, practices, and actors neglected and disqualified by the romanticised gaze of the international pursuing the ‘simulacra’ or ‘virtual’ apparatuses of liberal peace.Footnote 76 Yet this claim to descriptive neutrality, a veritable ‘view from nowhere’, is impossible to maintain. Apart from the difficulty in social thought of maintaining rigid distinctions between fact and value, any act of taxonomic ordering and categorisation involves interpretative value judgements. In the case of hybrid peace, these are ultimately liberal values; as elaborated below, the process of inclusion and exclusion in categorising for hybrid peace what is in the international and what is local/indigenous and/or everyday; the normative treatment of the uses of force; the descriptive excavation of local and quotidian spaces; and the self-declared empathetic and emancipatory framework of hybrid peace itself are all informed by ambitions of liberal social transformation.Footnote 77 Hybridity is, after all, advanced as a way for generating a meaningful ‘social contract’ and inclusive citizenship frameworks deemed lacking in post-conflict spacesFootnote 78 – a lack, moreover, attributed to liberal peacebuilding's rigid emphasis on the socially unresponsive ‘virtual state’ and/or the endurance of problematic national orders dominated by corrupt and predatory elites deracinated from the personal, community, tradition, culture, and everyday life.Footnote 79
The task, then, for international peacebuilders faced with persistent and recurrent resistance to liberal peace is to engage with and encompass these more ‘indigenous’ social forms within a more nuanced and intensified power/knowledge framework, rendering them knowable and amenable to international peacebuilding practices – albeit ones now emphasising ‘empathy’ and ‘local legitimacy’, whether the local and everyday form the basis for more effective statebuilding or an international-local peacebuilding ‘contract’.Footnote 80 As such, the everyday and the local are carved out by hybrid peace precisely so as to connect – ‘collapse the distance’ betweenFootnote 81 – the scholarly, developmental, and diplomatic engagements of the international directly with an indigenous, subaltern social strata of the local, thereby bypassing the imposed and empty/virtual statist frameworks mediated by problematic national elites. It is in this way, regardless of self-declared intentions, that hybrid peace, emerging at the moment of crisis for liberal peace, becomes the answer: it is hybridity for liberal peace. The core problem still is, after all, how to ‘make liberal states, institutionalism, and governance viable in everyday liberal and non-liberal contexts’,Footnote 82 and, to illustrate, not only is there a casual reinsertion, as yardsticks for peace, of concepts such as democracy, human rights, and rule of law that are core to liberal peace and at earlier points deemed marginal to post-liberal peace,Footnote 83 but the key purchase for a reformed international peacebuilding is ‘the “local liberalism” or forms of tolerance and pluralism [to] be found in many societies emerging from civil war and authoritarianism’ that are presently overlooked or misrecognised and rejected by liberal peacebuilders.Footnote 84 In this way, as Sabaratnam succinctly puts it, the hybrid peace is trapped in a ‘paradox of liberalism’ that ‘sees the liberal peace as oppressive but also the only true source of emancipation’.Footnote 85
As critics of the postcolonial school of hybridity had noted, part of the problem with the concept, despite its emancipatory intent, was a tendency to flatten out and even lose a clear sense of the coordinates of power relations within and between global, national, and local orders. A key implication of locating in ‘hidden’ local agency both resistance to liberal peace and the possibility of ‘alternative’ hybrid forms of peace/building is the neglect of economic and social structures and, more generally, ‘how the international weighs heavily on the local’.Footnote 86 To illustrate, amid the emphasis on the everyday, indigeneity, effect, ‘local legitimacy’ and so on, the hierarchical and penetrative order of globalising neoliberalism is lost. This is striking not only as this (focus on political economies inside post-conflict states) is precisely the subject of a well developed critique,Footnote 87 but, as Anjali Prabhu points out, ‘privileging what is hybrid in today's world cannot, even parenthetically, leave out the moment of capitalism in which such a view is offered’.Footnote 88 For example, as Charles R. Hale shows, the 1990s' shifts in Latin America from homogenising citizenship (mestizaje) frameworks to limited versions of multiculturalism (as responses to intensifying indigenous struggles) were deeply interwoven with the coeval rise of neoliberal reform, in that they were advanced by agents of global neoliberal governance precisely as precautionary and pre-emptive ceding of ‘carefully chosen ground in order to more effectively fend off more far-reaching demands, and, even more important, to pro-actively shape the terrain on which future negotiations of cultural rights takes place’.Footnote 89
Despite recognition of the globe-spanning institutionalisation of neoliberal order,Footnote 90 the hybrid peace critique is nonetheless directed at what is seen as the misguided or blind tendency of liberal peacebuilders to impose its frameworks of ‘small state’, marketization, and self-reliance on populations struggling to survive in conditions of underdevelopment and postwar humanitarian crisis, thereby generating resistance to the wider peacebuilding effort.Footnote 91 Yet, despite discussion of social democratic/welfarist state models, such prescriptions, as Belloni notes, are largely rejected as also complicit in the ‘top-down’ institution-centric logic of liberal peace.Footnote 92 What is foregrounded instead is the primacy of a ‘new’ social contract derived from local preferences, customs, traditions, and needs and/or the potential of customary and everyday forms of cooperation and care for the negotiated and consensual fashioning of social security, alongside temporary (‘transitional’) international provision of welfare for the most marginalised;Footnote 93 indeed, hybridity is sometimes even offered as potentially speeding up implementation and local acceptance of neoliberal frameworks.Footnote 94
As such, the hybrid peace approach, rather than breaking with global liberal order making, in fact represents an intensification of its governmental and biopolitical penetration into recalcitrant spaces. As Hale's analysis shows, this is not novel, but well practiced: in Latin America ‘neoliberal multiculturalism’, as he terms it, is ‘predicated not on destroying the indigenous community to remake the Indian as citizen, but rather, re-activating the community as effective agent in the reconstitution of the Indian citizen-subject’, one shorn of radicalism and foundational for neoliberal rule.Footnote 95 Moreover, this reconfiguration of global neoliberalism's interface with indigenous resistance, while seemingly empathetic, in fact represents the enacting anew of clearly articulated limits distinguishing acceptable and unacceptable demands and, more importantly, structures the space for cultural rights activism by defining the language of contestation, what forms of political action are appropriate and even what it means to be indigenous or marginalised.Footnote 96 As we show next, similar dynamics are at play in hybrid peace.
Break from orthodoxy?
To begin with, liberal peace, as a globe-spanning project of unending reform with an ambition on a massive scale (the wholesale transformation of conflicted spaces, from state institutions to the individual ‘citizen’ and everything in between), is not blind or indifferent to local cultures, traditions and practices, but, rather, ‘has always been virulently disruptive of them and aggressively related to them as much in moral as in economic and military terms’.Footnote 97 Liberal peace turns on liberal conceptions of the individual (a rational, interest-motivated, economic ego) and the requisite conditions for human progress. Peace, then, is equivalent to the individual (citizen) being able to attain her full potential through her maximised liberty, and this is guaranteed only within the framework of a robust, democratic, and market friendly state with a pluralist polity and cosmopolitan society. And yet those numerous deviations from liberal peace ideals that hybrid peace approaches identify as the ‘hybrid’ reality of international interventions, and claim as evidencing potential for accommodative peace, are not entirely unexpected consequences of ‘hidden’ local agency, but in fact often also constitute conscious and deliberate, if decidedly tactical, compromises by international interveners with an eye to eventual liberal transformation. As Rajiv Chandrasekaran's fine-grained study of Afghanistan shows, such compromises occurred daily in Washington, Kabul, and myriad localities where coalition troops, development agencies and corporations interact with local partners, conditions, difficulties and opportunities.Footnote 98 In a more systematic example, Elizabeth M. Bruch shows how in post-conflict Bosnia the international community sought to create ‘deliberately hybrid’ (in both structure and function) institutions and practices, as well as a ‘modern set of hybrid identities’ that would both meet international requisites and be domestically authentic.Footnote 99
What is contended here is that, while rejecting such ‘top-down’ strategies of liberal peacebuilding directed at the level of the state and the national in favour of an ostensibly empathetic and ‘agonistic’ engagement with the local and the everyday, hybrid peace approaches nonetheless deploy a similarly aggressive politics of inclusion and exclusion for peace. One immediate example is the normative treatment of violence (meaning, the use of force).Footnote 100 While hybrid peace envisages a more expansive/holistic conception of (‘human’) security than liberal peace's emphasis on strong state forces and institutions, both approaches rest implicitly or explicitly on the state's (restored) monopoly over the use of force and the rule of law, on the one hand, and ‘non-violent’ politics as the exclusive pathway to peace and emancipation, on the other.Footnote 101 Thus whilst hybrid peace may eschew liberal peace's state-centric discourses of ‘counter-terrorism/insurgency’ and ‘securitised-development’, there is no room in either approach for emancipation through ‘armed struggle/resistance’, ‘wars of national liberation’ or ‘revolutionary wars’.Footnote 102 As Bruno Charbonneau notes, the international/local distinction is integral to this normative categorisation that associates ‘violence’ with conflict (belligerents) whilst associating the violence of interveners, directed against the former, with peace (operations).Footnote 103 However, as he shows, violence and its representations co-constitute and transform legitimacy, identity, and agency, including redefining the very line between ‘local’ and ‘international’. Relatedly, and more broadly, both peace approaches are similarly antagonistic to identity-based political projects, characterised as forms of elite-driven ethnonationalism, separatism, fundamentalism, etc.Footnote 104 With armed and ‘ethnic’ conflict understood through depoliticising economistic frameworksFootnote 105 as instrumentally driven by the acquisitive and self-serving motives and opportunity structures of conflict and ethnic ‘entrepreneurs’ in contexts (again economistic) of poverty and underdevelopment,Footnote 106 the possibility of lasting (hybrid) peace is therefore to be found beyond these actors and projects, in forms of local and everyday civility, tolerance, cooperation, care, etc. marginalised by particularist mobilisers and liberal peacebuilders alike.Footnote 107
The key consequence here is the a priori disqualification of the conflict claims, actions, and state-centred goals of identity-based resistance movements, especially those using armed force, such that the political agency of, for instance, Kurds, Palestinians, Tamils, Kashmiris, Balochs, and any other groups seeking emancipation and self-determination is dismissed as illegitimate and inauthentic,Footnote 108 and the response to such ‘conflict’ dynamics is to eviscerate and reduce them to a depoliticised reading of, and operation upon, local/everyday ‘needs’ by international actors. Here too, despite emphasising affect, feeling, and oral traditions in the cultural habitus of daily existence, the hybrid peace approach adopts the same rationalist logics as liberal peacebuilding in foregrounding the potential of individual self-interest and ‘basic needs’ for generating social contractarian ties of welfare and/or disincentivising recourse to violence and conflict.Footnote 109 Moreover, as David Chandler argues, in locating the problem of elusive peace in hidden agency and intersubjective attachments (that is, ‘at the cognitive or ideational level’), hybrid peace approaches ‘reproduce the voluntarist and idealist underpinnings of liberal peace’.Footnote 110 Amid the emphasis on dialogue, cooperation, accommodation, exchange, etc. between individuals and groups in the contexts of the local and the everyday, religious, ethnic, and other identities become individualised attributes, rather than as representative and constitutive of social relations and orders spanning local, national, and international levels.Footnote 111 Relatedly, the hybrid peace approach's emphasis on mobilising ‘everyday civic engagement’ to build peace at the grass roots is not different to liberal peace approach's, here via frameworks of ‘civil society’, reconciliation, mediated interaction, etc.Footnote 112 Similarly the former's emphasis on ‘local ownership’ and everyday capacities and modalities as alternatives to state institutions in constituting social ‘resilience’ is entirely in line with the latter's emphasis on private sector-led development, self-help, entrepreneurship, and so on.Footnote 113 As discussed below, these are all ways of governing/fostering life for liberal social order by ‘responsibilising’Footnote 114 individuals and groups in their own wellbeing and emancipation.Footnote 115 Consequently, another commonality is how the appropriate local agents for internationally assisted peacebuilding are identified, that is, those amenable to the dialogue, cooperation, tolerance, and accommodation and non-violence that makes possible ethnic and religious coexistence and ‘locally negotiated’ peace, that, at the same time, can undermine the non-pacific and illiberal projects and designs of problematic ‘elites’ and conflict/ethnic entrepreneurs.Footnote 116 In other words, the principles, categories, and calculations that liberal peace operationalises at the state/national level (though these are in practice implemented in dispersed localities) are inherent to hybrid peace, here in the contexts of the local and the everyday, albeit with added scepticism towards international-sponsored local agents deemed unrepresentative of the authentic/indigenous ‘local-local’.Footnote 117
In these ways, hybrid and liberal peace approaches discount the politics of liberal order's peripheries through similar logics of inclusion and exclusion, and while the former is seemingly more accepting of non-liberal actors, practices, and politics, its limits are also to be found in a liberal register. We develop this next through a critique of how hybrid peace carves out the local and everyday as constructs for peace.
Depoliticising and romanticising the local
What is striking about how hybridity, the everyday and the indigenous are conceptualised in reconfigured interfacing between these social orders and global/international order making is first, a neglect of the wider, multilectical character of hybridisation and, second, the presentist or short temporal frame adopted. Despite occasional acknowledgement of the wider and longue durée processes of hybridisation,Footnote 118 there is nonetheless a tendency to neglect the hybridisation of earlier periods (including colonial ones) and instead focus on interactions in contemporary contexts of conflict and peacebuilding, and even where the significance of past hybridisation is acknowledged, to neglect its productive effects.Footnote 119 For instance, Kristine Höglund and Camilla Orjuela in discussing the ‘international/domestic nexus’ inherent to ‘hybrid peace governance’ and ‘illiberal peacebuilding’ in Sri Lanka focus exclusively on actors and institutions at work in the postwar context since 2009, thereby neglecting the historical and productive miscegenation of the international and the local, liberalism, and nationalism (see below).Footnote 120 In discussing political orders in the former Yugoslavia, Mac Ginty seeks to ‘pay particular attention to the socialist era and its attempts to “manage” the national question’ and to locate contemporary peacebuilding within the ‘much longer historical process of state formation and reformation’,Footnote 121 yet he neglects the extent to which socialism and nationalism, including supra-national (Yugoslav) and ethno-regional variants, were profoundly interwoven in the post-World War II period.Footnote 122 Socialism and nationalism, in this as in many contexts (for example, Vietnam),Footnote 123 were not mutually exclusive but historically co-constituted within these discourses and interactions with geo-strategic contexts and sets of founding memories.Footnote 124
What is left out therefore is precisely that which postcolonial and subaltern studies scholars emphasise as key to understanding political, social, and cultural orders and dynamics of conflict in colonial and postcolonial societies; namely, the interconnections and mutual constitution that occur between them, particularly from the point at which colonial order seeks a more penetrative, albeit uneven, transformation of social order through state practices.Footnote 125 In Sri Lanka, for example, the layered co-constitution since the nineteenth century of evolving liberal and nationalist power assemblages has coevally re/produced a majoritarian governmental nexus tying together (a very modern) state, territory and population as a Sinhala-Buddhist geo-body encompassing politics, economy, society, and culture and hierarchical frontiers of inclusion and exclusion, and which the international community has, until very recently, celebrated and extensively engaged with as a promising, if yet incomplete, multiethnic liberal democracy with effective institutions and a market economy.Footnote 126 Colonial and international (for example, donor and I/NGO) practices pursuing liberal social transformation through frameworks of development, economy, security, and ethnic harmony have been always deeply interwoven with – both encompassing and being encompassed by – nationalist and racialised processes of state-building, demographic reengineering, securitised-development, and counter-insurgency.Footnote 127 Yet, the miscegenation of liberal and nationalist assemblages and practices in re/producing a majoritarian state and social order (in which Sinhala-Buddhists are located at the apex and Tamils, Muslims and others lower down), and the protracted and violent crisis consequent to Tamil resistance, are denied by presentist readings of places like Sri Lanka that categorise ethnic strife, armed conflict, and authoritarianism (that is, ‘illiberalism’) as endogenous, and international engagements for liberal peace, such as the 2002–6 Norwegian-led peace process, as exogenous.
Despite criticism of liberal peace orthodoxy for such reductive categorisations, these reappear through the hybrid peace's own inclusions and exclusions, as discussed above, and what is consistently posited as the basis for building peace, once these have done their work, is another binary schema that is ultimately reproductive of romanticised orderings of a fallen yet universalising modern power of the international, on the one hand, and a particular, prelapsarian, depoliticised world of the cultural, the traditional, and the everyday devoid of ideology, on the other.Footnote 128 Thus, despite occasional acknowledgement of the potential for the local to be illiberal and even oppressive,Footnote 129 for the most part, hybridity-for-peace treats the local as a wellspring of neglected/overlooked indigenous cultural forms of progressive interaction, civility, and cooperation, and ideologically unmediated demands and needs that together provide the grounds for generating an emancipatory social contract.Footnote 130
This is problematic in several ways. For example, it neglects the extent to which nationalism, liberalism and other (for example, Islamic) governmental orders are reproduced through disseminated identificatory assemblages that work in and across social strata and at local as well as national, transnational, and international levels.Footnote 131 In contrast to rationalist accounts of nationalisms as elite-led projects ‘from above’, the wider penetration and diffusion of nationalist subjectification and conduct are such that these are also powerfully reproduced by subaltern groups through social tendrils working across state and society, from elite to subaltern and peripheral spaces.Footnote 132 Nationalist dynamics are not restricted to elite contestation, but, through processes of diffusion, also emerge and circulate within peripheral locales and everyday spaces, turning these into spaces of domination, discipline, resistance, and hegemonic struggle.Footnote 133 In the Sri Lankan case, the diffusion of Sinhala nationalist governmentality through a century of interwoven international and state discourses and practice (for example, ‘national development’) has not stabilised social order, but produced both intra-group and subaltern-elite contestation and, on the other hand, resistance by Tamils and Muslims navigating a territorialised and hierarchical majoritarian social complex.Footnote 134 Thus, the local is a key site where, quite apart from at national and state levels (for example, through law and policy), the latter are confronted in everyday life by exclusion, racism, discipline, and violence, and thus in which emerge the dissipated resistances that make possible and cohere in (counter) nationalist political mobilisation and militancy – which also manifest through interwoven assemblages spanning the local, national, transnational, and international.Footnote 135
Such dynamics are entirely lost in the depiction of the local as a non-elite, subaltern space of supposedly inherent, as opposed to socially constructed, indigeneity – by which we mean how nationalist and other governmentalities circulating in the local and the everyday work through and are productive of conceptions of ‘indigeneity’, ‘local legitimacy’, and ‘authenticity’.Footnote 136 In Sri Lanka, for example, contestations over indigeneity itself are foundational to the protracted and violent crisis, given how indigeneity is both derived from and marshalled into claims to either a naturalised ancient and territorially integral island space for the protection and fostering of Sinhala Buddhist life, and by which Tamils and Muslims are recent and threatening interlopers from homelands elsewhere (for example, India), or, conversely, to equally naturalised historical homelands in the island's Northeast,Footnote 137 contestations deeply interwoven with international/state discursive practices related to sovereignty, territorial integrity, devolution, power-sharing, etc. Moreover, neither are the cultural and the ‘traditional’ separate from the political or the state; as Bruce Kapferer notes, ‘nationalism fetishizes culture’.Footnote 138 For example, not only did founding texts of Sinhala nationalist mythology drafted by Buddhist monks draw substantive content from ‘localised folk traditions’, but such ‘folk knowledge’ itself is reproduced through continuous dissemination (including through school and popular texts) as part of a ‘nationalist enterprise’,Footnote 139 and state sponsorship has been key to revitalising ‘declining rural traditions’, encouraging Buddhist worship (as an expression of Sinhala identity) and popularising as sites of pilgrimage ‘rediscovered’ archaeological sites linked to nationalist myths.Footnote 140 Moreover, such dynamics are inseparable from the international – for example, the colonial-era advent of print capitalism in turning folk knowledge into ‘common knowledge’ and British historiography's validation of Sinhala nationalist narratives, or, in the 1980s, UNESCO's recognition of state-designated ‘Sacred Cities’ (Anuradhapura and Kandy) and ‘Ancient Cities’ (Polonnaruwa and Sigiriya) as world heritage sites.
Yet, hybrid peace's ontological bases serve to efface the significance of the state and the national (and, for that matter, the international) from a number of contexts in the global South, particularly their role in the reproduction of a potent territorialised nexus of people, state, and nationalist identity, and its workings as a set of apparatuses recycling socially hegemonic and diffuse conceptions of this nexus. Instead, as noted above, discussion of the state is sometimes absent and at other times the state is reduced to a Westphalian metanarrative advanced by international peacebuilders and their local elite allies and at best to a ‘placebo’ or ‘simulacra’ created by international statebuilding.Footnote 141 Yet as nationalism scholars and critics of postcolonial works on hybridity have discussed, there is a significant seam of desire for ‘modernization and nationalism in the Third World’ which still propels in many contexts, local and national, ideological conceptions of and desires for statehood,Footnote 142 a desire driven by the enduring legacy of historical (colonial and postcolonial) dynamics, global and local disparities, and the territorial framework venerated by international state-builders. Integral to these dynamics and the desire for the form of the state they reproduce is the often fraught relationship between majority and minority, subaltern and elite, centre and peripheral social strata that manifest in struggles spanning local, national, transnational, and international levels.
In sum, the hybrid peace approach's neat divisions between the local/everyday and the international/liberal deny the extent to which the disciplinary, the governmental and the biopolitical have inexorably, if unevenly, invested international, national and local orders over the longue durée. Nationalist, liberal, and other political rationalities operate not only through elite or state practices, but circulate and diffuse through myriad everyday and cultural practices to permeate and colonise the local, and at the same time, ‘boomerang’ from there to ‘governmentalise’ state and international (for example, donor and NGO) practices. Moreover, hybridity and hybridisation are not restricted to orders of peace but are also immanent in the dynamics of conflict and nationalist struggle, which proliferate in everyday spaces and locales where national, international, and transnational relations of power clash and yet co-constitute one another.
The point is not that hybrid peace scholars are oblivious to such dynamics, but that the approach nonetheless turns on categorising and constructing (aspects of) the local and everyday as sufficiently outside, or beyond the reach of, the governmental and the biopolitical as to constitute an autonomous space for both resistance to hierarchy, exclusion, and repression and global-local engagement for peace. This denies the penetrative potency of interwoven international-national-local configurations of power and identity-formation; ignores the salience and force within the everyday and ‘local’ of identity-based aspirations to, and contestations over, nationhood, statehood, and modernisation; and places untenable weight on everyday interaction, dialogue, cooperation, etc. to generate resistance to these. As such, this is a very partial, romanticised, and prescriptive account of the ‘local-local’ that simultaneously makes a case for (reconfigured) international peace interventions, thus offering the biggest clue to the normative teleological aims of hybrid peace as a problem-solving tool for a liberal order in crisis.
Conclusion
What we have argued is that hybrid peace is less a radical critique of liberal peace than a ‘variation on a governmental theme’, to borrow Hindess' turn of phrase,Footnote 143 in that hybrid peace constitutes a specific programmatic response (international-local hybridity) to a specific problematisation (legitimacy) of the various resistances frustrating expansion of global liberal governmentality.Footnote 144 Yet it is precisely at this point that a sense of what will be eventually assembled from drawing together supposedly distinct pieces remains unclear.Footnote 145 The state and territorial order is, on the surface at least, jettisoned in favour of, in one key proposal, an ‘international-local peacebuilding contract’.Footnote 146 However, first, this signifies the re-entry of the liberal peace's frameworks and strategic complexes into the supposedly isolated and unmediated spheres of the ‘local’ and everyday. Proposed as the appropriate levels, as opposed to the state and the national, in which the foundations of global stability (as a plurality of hybrid peace) should be enacted and secured, these provide the ‘fields of visibility’ by which the capacities and conduct reproductive of liberal order may yet, and more effectively, be identified and fostered or, conversely, those that are problematic be marginalised and undermined. In that sense, the greater emphasis on empathy, legitimacy, and emancipation in a reconfigured international-local interface also represents an intensified ‘responsibilisation’ of the subaltern and the marginalised in securing their own liberation, and it is not coincidental that the turn to hybridity in peacebuilding scholarship and praxis comes amid the crisis-induced reduction or even withdrawal of international assemblages and ambitions in several parts of the periphery.Footnote 147 Second, despite all the emphasis on the local and against the state in hybrid peace, the ‘bottom up’ forging of a ‘locally legitimate’ social contract is still the basis for producing the stable state-society relations and territorial state order on which liberal order rests. Moreover, hybridity as a modality for peace is tied to a (liberal) politics of inclusion and exclusion that categorises those to be emancipated and those from whom, a perspective and practice that all-too-often leaves intact and even enables oppressive social hierarchies and orders. What is key here is that in directing attention away from the state and toward the local and everyday, and yet retaining the ideal end of ‘one state, one nation, one citizen’ it shares with liberal peace, the hybrid peace blinds itself to the grounding in these spaces of the internationalised territorialised nexus of people, state and nationalist identity, and its role in the reproduction of oppression, resistance, and violence.
In these ways, and echoing earlier criticisms of hybridity, the hybrid peace is perfectly given over to the ‘consecration of hegemony’. The example of Rwanda's Gacaca courts is a case in point; Phil Clark's fine-grained analysis shows how a ‘traditional’ (but in fact always externally influenced) form of community-based justice was appropriated, adapted, and strategically deployed by the state and international donors, for purposes it was never envisaged – accountability for mass atrocities, as an integral part of a twenty-first-century project of state- and disciplinary nation-building.Footnote 148 Everyday modalities (courtyard courts, truth telling, community-selected judges, etc.) were adapted (state training for judges, issuance of formal laws, etc.) and institutionalised into a system, which was trialled, refined, and then rolled out countrywide. This explicitly ‘hybrid’ organisation of ‘traditional’ justice, predicated on mass participation (which many Rwandans describe as a duty to the government, or ‘doing the government's work’), emerged as the answer to very modern problems of state capacity (for example, massive overcrowding of prisons) and national identity construction: the official narrative governing contemporary Gacaca attributes the 1994 genocide to the disruption by ‘outsiders’ (including past Hutu leaders) of a claimed past Rwandan ‘unity’ and ‘values’ that popular participation in Gacaca is to rebuild.
Given that the turn to hybridity, the local and the everyday in peace studies flows from a normative impulse to respond to disastrous consequences of persistently failing international peace interventions, the critique advanced above begs the question as to what might constitute a genuinely ‘critical’ response? Although we do not have easy answers to this challenge, and none that are universally applicable, a starting point for a more self-reflexive approach might be the problems, common to liberal peace and hybrid peace, with how agency, identity, the state, and violence are read. Any normative, let alone critical, perspective begins with conceptions of social and political justice that inform its emancipatory ambition. However, rather than deriving from a universal, liberal-humanist abstraction, we would argue these must emerge out of the specific contexts of historically co-constituted oppression and resistance; in other words, it is with struggle, rather than peace, that critical analysis must begin. Relatedly, as recent critical works argue, a will to emancipation necessarily entails an agonistic mode of engagement.Footnote 149 What is therefore advocated here is a historically informed and context sensitive scholarly engagement that focuses on, and is prepared to explicitly position itself within, the interwoven and often violent dynamics of domination and resistance. Liberal and hybrid peace approaches do, of course, ‘take sides’, but in applying a liberal register to questions of agency, identity, and peace, they serve to undermine resistance and reinforce domination by dismissing as antithetical to peace forms of organisation and popular mobilisation through which subaltern agency often manifests, and by limiting tolerance for difference to ambitions of cosmopolitan state and social order.
However, an emancipatory approach, as postcolonial scholars have argued,Footnote 150 necessitates, first, creating space for activism, which does not mean either more ‘civil society’ or the fragmented possibilities of ‘local-local’ and ‘everyday’ interaction, but engaging seriously with those forms of political organisation and mobilisation that resistance generates, often against the odds.Footnote 151 This is not to deny that self-determination, Islamic and revolutionary movements, for example, can be also oppressive and otherwise problematic, but key to the recurrence of the crisis of liberal order, we would argue, is the a priori disqualification (of the salience for ‘peace’) of such actors, their claims and their projects, alongside the forbearance and support routinely extended to the states they oppose. Relatedly, a critical response entails greater focus on, and not a turn away from, interwoven state and international practices, and their treatment not as ‘above’ or exogenous to the reproduction of domination, resistance, and struggle, but, rather, as historically and deeply integral to these. Third, it necessitates an engagement with identity that includes a preparedness to embrace what has been awkwardly labelled ‘strategic essentialism’,Footnote 152 wherein identity-oriented politics and projects are not simply dismissed in pursuit of cosmopolitan dreams of total fluidity. Recognising the always hybrid character of social existence does not mean, as Hall points out, ‘that because essentialism has been deconstructed theoretically, therefore it has been displaced politically’.Footnote 153 The danger of emphasising collective identity is, of course, that of ‘re-othering’, but as Simone Drichel argues, this is a risk that has to be taken because what is needed to overturn the hierarchy encoded in the self/other binary, ‘in the first instance at least, is an intervention on the very level of the binary, that is, on the level of collective, not individual, identity’.Footnote 154 Moreover, the possibility of emancipation rests not on dismantling identity and refashioning it for civic order, whether by more effective state-building or through local-local dialogue and a ‘new social contract’, but by treating identity as powerfully co-constituted by the interwoven dynamics of hegemony and counter-hegemony, oppression, and resistance. In sum, it is only by incorporating the full range of levels and forms of power and identity, and how these are historically co-constituted across and through these levels, that a sensitive, contextualised and critical reading is possible of how the crisis of liberal peace reproduces itself.
