peace' 5 and 'hybrid security governance' 6 are proposed to capture how domestic actors borrow selectively from international assistance 'packages', and where mixed or 'hybrid' orders combine elements of domestic and external governance. These approaches contribute to a broader understanding of domestic agency, and successfully rectify the 'weak state' or deicit perspectives. But they fail to capture, irst, the emergence of a more pragmatic approach to security assistance based less on norms and rules, and second, the empowerment of subnational actors enabled by global discourses on security practices.This article examines external actors' engagement in border control processes, and asks how donors reconigure the relationship between the external border and the state in cases of 'hybrid sovereignty'. This amounts to a reading of security assistance as a form of statebuilding, yet with one important diference from past iterations: whereas statebuilding as witnessed in its heyday in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Liberia and East Timor was founded on roughly coherent strategic concepts such as security sector reform (SSR), rule of law, institution-building and so forth, and whereas political commitment to these (supposedly) coordinated processes was considered a necessary condition, the current version of security assistance takes place without (much) formal domestic political involvement. Therefore, analyses of SSR according to a norm difusion approach have problems explaining the lack of explicit norms in contemporary security assistance. Moreover, technical approaches to procedural 'uptake' of speciic practices fail to recognize the inherently political nature of empowering subnational security actors. International security assistance-deined here as activities aiming to 'organize, train, equip, rebuild/build and advise foreign security forces and their supporting institutions from the tactical to ministerial levels' 7 -is typically initiated by individual donor countries, rather than taking place within a formally coordinated framework, and establishes direct and often informal links with subnational domestic security agencies. In this way, security assistance in general and border management in particular become depoliticized and decentralized, allowing each donor to pursue its own priorities and normativities. It is pragmatic and ad hoc. It follows nontransparent patterns of implementation, and it is directed by parallel strategic priorities rather than cohesive reform objectives. As a consequence, its efects are increasingly diicult to evaluate and analyse.Assemblage approaches help to deine the fuzzy linkages that exist. Following on from Saskia Sassen's work on how the dual processes of state disassembly and (global) reassembly create new forms of social interaction practices that reconigure distinctions between public and private, and between global and local, Abraham sen

This special issue explores norm diffusion, contestation and localisation in the contexts of political transition in general and post-war peacebuilding specifically. It engages with critical moments in which international diffusion endeavours meet local politics of norm contestation in societies undergoing post-war and/or post-authoritarian transitions. The 'third wave' of norm research offers an agency-based approach to the negotiation and contestation of the meaning of norms that is consistent with work in peacebuilding studies on the meeting between international norms and local realities in post-war contexts. By honing in on the 'normative powers' of local agents, their perspectives and capacities, and how these contribute to norm construction, the special issue provides theoretical and conceptual advances to capture these transition processes in the context of the Western Balkans.

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