The simultaneity of authority in hybrid orders

Abstract

This article adds to current debates on hybridity by shifting attention from interactions between entities to the enactment of authority. The notion of hybridity has helped move debates on peace and state-building beyond a normative focus on failure and fragility. However, it also remains a contested and evolving concept. This article aims to theorise further the process of hybridisation. By introducing the concept of simultaneity of discourse and practice it explores the process through which seemingly contradictory sources of authority are played out at the same time in order-making to constitute political order. The processes of enactment suggest a model for reading dialogically concepts such as bureaucracy, autochthony, kinship and legislation, exploring how they are co-constituted in spaces of discourse and practice. Inherent to these spaces is a perpetual tension of difference and affinity. It is the dynamism of this tension that defines the hybrid order's quality of simultaneity.

Hybridisation of Peacebuilding at the Local–International Interface: The Bougainville Case

“…34 The 'hybrid turn' in the world of actual politics is open in both directions: it can potentially lead to more emancipatory peacebuilding practices beyond the liberal peace approach (as the best case), or to a refinement of counterinsurgency strategies (as the worst case) as Afghanistan, for example, shows. 35 Although the latter trend gives reason for serious concern, the good news is that hybrid political orders, hybrid security governance and hybrid peace cannot be instrumentally designed, crafted or constructed. Any endeavours of internationals will always be nothing but (more or less benign or malign) elements in a complex and fluid web of relationships and interactions in a much broader mix of processes of peace formation and the emergence of political community.…”

Hybridity and Friction in Organizational Politics: New Perspectives on the African Security Regime Complex

“…Along these lines, the hybridity concept has been applied in critical peace-and intervention studies as a lens which allows moving beyond neat institutionalist or universalizing accounts of intervention as well as transcending the related juxtapositions of 'state' vs. 'non-state', 'local' vs. 'international', 'formal' vs. 'informal', 'external' vs. 'internal' etc. Instead, the outlook of hybridity 'make(s) the blending of these spheres the explicit focus' of analysis (Moe 2011, 149; see also Albrecht and Moe 2015). It thereby also brings into view the productive powers of contextual practices and interactions, as well as the 'hybrid forms of (…) politics' (Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013, 778) which tend to result from such interactions.…”

Autochthony and insecure land tenure: the spatiality of ethnicized hybridity in the periphery of post-conflict Bukavu, DRC

“…Examples of this kind of work can also be found with Bayart, 26 Schatzberg, 27 and Albrecht and Moe. 28 In this paper we trace the workings and (spatial) effects of the inflammatory, but equally flexible discourse of autochthony in justifying claims when securing land through a variety of dynamic institutions and loosely constructed governance arrangements.…”