Hybrid Polities and Indigenous Pluralities: Advanced Lessons in Statebuilding from Cambodia

Letter from the Editors: Taking the Hybridity Agenda Further

“…As Stuart Hall describes in his excellent essay, hybrid interactions constitute the character of social relations where all 'the creolisations and assimilations and syncretisms [are] negotiated' (Hall 1990: 234). Theoretically, this observation has been adapted to liberal intervention contexts and enables us to either apprehend the interplay between international and local practices, norms and institutions (Richmond and Mitchell 2012, 1;Mac Ginty 2010), or to transcend universalizing theories to include the plurality of social orders (Boege et al 2009; see also Roberts 2008). In this context, studies about hybrid orders have revealed insights on spaces of interventions (Heathershaw andLambach 2008, Charbonneau andSears 2014), moving away from the unhelpful binaries of 'local' vs 'international', 'bottom-up' vs 'top-down', 'modern' vs 'traditional', 'internal' vs 'external', 'Western' vs 'non-Western' (see Bliesemann de Guevara 2010).…”

From Hybridity to Standardization: Rethinking State-Making in Contexts of Fragility

“…Drawing on the concepts of neopatrimonialism (Erdmann and Engel 2007) and 'mixed polity' (Sklar 1999), and sharing significant similarities with the concepts of 'twilight institutions' (Lund 2006) and the 'negotiated state' (Menkhaus 2006/ 07), Böge et al (2008) present the concept of 'hybrid political orders' (HPOs). Their work is situated in a rich and burgeoning literature on 'hybridity' (Pieterse 2001;Roberts 2008;Richmond and Mitchell 2012;Egnell and Haldén 2013), which suggests that all 'composite forms of practice, norms and thinking that emerge from the interaction of different groups, worldviews and activity' (Mac Ginty and Sanghera 2012, 3) are marked by hybridity.…”

Rethinking the Conflict-Poverty Nexus: From Securitising Intervention to Resilience

“…Instead, the cause-and-effect model of intervention is seen to create problematic 'hybrid' political systems and fragile states with little connection to their societies (Roberts 2008;Mac Ginty 2010;Richmond & Mitchell 2012;Millar 2014). The imposition of institutional frameworks, which have little connection to society, is understood as failing, not only in not addressing causal processes leading to poverty and conflict but as making matters worse through undermining local capacities to manage the effects of problems (and thereby shifting problems elsewhere and leaving states and societies even more fragile or vulnerable).…”