International efforts to promote peace and democratic institutions frequently clash with different understandings of the meaning and implications of these terms. International and domestic actors enter into a bargaining relationship whereby each actor attempts to promote its own values, norms, and practices. The end result is a condition of hybrid peace governance, in which contrary elements exist alongside each other in a context where violence, actual or potential, continues to play an important role.
This article demonstrates that hybrid peace governance takes many shapes.
Key findings:
- There are many types of hybridity along the continuum between an ideal type liberal state and illiberal institutions, norms, and practices. At one end there is the Westphalian state, which, unfairly, often is used as a yardstick to assess progress in war-to-democracy transitions. At the other end there is the illiberal, often authoritarian, repressive state. In between there is a wide array of hybrid conditions, ranging from the formal inclusion of warlords into state institutions, to the influence of informal and traditional institutions and actors, to instances where the state may possess formally democratic elements such as periodic elections, but is actually “captured” by narrow, illegal, and even violent groups.
- Various kinds of hybrid governance may take place in situations spanning from war to peace. By combining two dimensions illiberal/liberal and war/peace we obtain a simple matrix with four categories. The first category is liberal peace governance in the form of the Westphalian state, which combines peace, liberal norms, and democratic institutions. The second category is a situation of peace, which could be described as a truce combined with predominantly illiberal norms, institutions, and practices. Thirdly, is the divided state where more or less liberal institutions coexist with various degrees of violence and finally a situation where peacebuilding has resulted in the coexistence of illiberal and liberal norms, institutions, and actors in a warlike context.
- Hybridity exists before the deployment of an international peacebuilding mission and is shaped by decades of international-local interaction. Hybridity can be reinforced by international involvement. Divisions within the international arena contribute to sustaining hybridity at the local level. Hybridity is manifested in the dual use of formal and informal, legal and illegal means to gain influence. This is true not only among many local actors, but also among international ones engaged in the host state. As a result, international peacebuilding strategy has frequently undermined the liberal state and the peace and has resulted in different forms of hybrid peace governance. It is possible that such hybrid peace governance situations may ultimately reinforce patriarchal, feudal, sexist, and violent political and social systems.
- Hybrid condition may also contain significant opportunities to make peace processes more stable and to provide domestic institutions with the kind of locally rooted legitimacy that liberal peacebuilding has been unable to impart. The concept of hybrid peace governance is more than a simple repackaging of the failures and limitations of liberal peacebuilding. Rather, hybridity suggests the potential to more firmly ground peace processes in the domestic reality of conflict areas. For international actors, this implies the necessity to develop greater context sensitivity and to move away from the idea of a single model of the state rooted in the Westphalian tradition.
