Hybrid Peace: Ethnographies of War

Abstract

This article reviews recent ethnographies of war that shed light on interconnected states of security at home, international military interventions, and hybrid or rhizomic warfare doctrines. I suggest the notion of hybrid peace to explore global implications of these ethnographic perspectives and to ask what it means to inhabit spaces that are constituted by such hybrid warfare. I argue for the usefulness of Schmitt's “nomos of the earth” and his theory of the partisan to conceptualize this condition and bring together different approaches to warfare.

Introduction: On the politics of waiting

“…In this line of critical thought, Nikolai Ssorin‐Chaikov (2018) calls attention to the need to rethink sovereignty in the new global context of ‘hybrid wars’. This term refers to a ‘mixture of conventional and irregular tactics, state and nonstate military actors, legal and illegality’ (Ssorin‐Chaikov 2018: 252).…”

“…In this line of critical thought, Nikolai Ssorin‐Chaikov (2018) calls attention to the need to rethink sovereignty in the new global context of ‘hybrid wars’. This term refers to a ‘mixture of conventional and irregular tactics, state and nonstate military actors, legal and illegality’ (Ssorin‐Chaikov 2018: 252). He explains that this global trend of warfare turns interstate military conflicts into proxy wars, civil wars and counterinsurgency operations that never reach full closure.…”

“…Our contributions study the relationship between sovereignty and temporality through practices of waiting. We emphasise an acute need to show how waiting as a spatial, temporal and affective practice can be studied to shed light on the contemporary forms of warfare that transform the interstate conflicts into proxy wars, civil wars and counterinsurgency operations (Ssorin‐Chaikov 2018: 252), and/or ‘violent peace’ (Visweswaran 2013: 12; Biner 2020: xi) processes fraught with decades of peace talks and its failures. In conflict‐ridden environments in which political practices are held under extreme surveillance, the distinctions between war and peace, ordinary and exception are continuously blurred.…”

“…Turkey’s neoliberal and growing authoritarian regime provides a complicated ground on which to unfold the multi‐layered relationships constitutive of the sovereign power of the state and political subjectivity of the subjects, whether they are citizens or refugees. In a broader context, waiting experiences in the conflict zones of Turkey exemplify new forms of dispersed practices and performances of sovereign states that reproduce and transform themselves within the political contingency of the ‘hybrid wars’ (Ssorin‐Chaikov 2018: 252) and refugee crisis in Europe and the Middle East.…”

Enclaving: Spatial detachment as an aesthetics of imagination in an urban sub-Saharan African context

“…Although not oblivious to the global construction of fortified enclaves (Caldeira, 1999; Schuermans, 2016) and the increasingly militarised and securitised urban orders (Buxton and Hayes, 2016; Glück, 2017; Ssorin-Chaikov, 2018), we agree with both Morton’s and Heer’s thorough analysis of the cases of Johannesburg and Maputo that there is a particular intensity, motility and incompleteness to the circulation of enclaving as an aesthetics of imagination in the sub-Saharan African region – perhaps also reflective of the particularities of wider southern urbanism (see e.g. Kuldova and Varghese, 2017; Simone and Pieterse, 2017).…”