Hybrid peace governance: its emergence and significance.

Belloni, Roberto

In hybrid peace governance, liberal and illiberal norms, institutions, and actors exist alongside each other, interact, and even clash. Such a political, economic, and social order is a far cry from the liberal idea of peace based on legitimate and accountable democratic institutions, the rule of law, human rights, free media, market economy, and an open civil society. This article accounts for the emergence of hybrid peace governance and develops a typology based on the war/peace and liberal/illiberal spectra. Furthermore, it discusses the implications of hybridity and, in particular, whether it can avoid the pitfalls of top-down liberal peacebuilding and provide new opportunities for a more sustainable, locally engrained version of peace. Keywords: peacebuilding, governance, hybridity.

It has become commonplace to state that liberal peacebuilding in war-torn states has, by and large, failed. (1) Rather than creating liberal and democratic political, economic, and social orders, liberal peacebuilding has led, time and again, to a situation characterized by the presence of political and social institutions that are only superficially democratic, accountable, and effective and are perceived as illegitimate, constraining, and unsuccessful by those experiencing them. The policies of both international and domestic actors have converged toward a situation that projects only the appearance of change while leaving largely intact all preexisting political, economic, and social conditions. Rather than establishing a liberal and democratic peace, intervention has led to a hybrid condition wherein liberal and illiberal, democratic and undemocratic elements coexist while the absence of a full-scale war resembles a truce more than a substantive version of peace. (2)

In this article, I address both the reasons for this outcome and the question of whether a condition of hybridity can open up opportunities for alternative, locally sustainable, political, economic, and social orders. More specifically, I address two main questions. First, how does hybrid peace governance come about? Is it an inevitable outcome or the result of the timing and type of involvement of external actors? Second, is hybridity simply the reflection of the failure of liberal peacebuilding, as understood by international actors, or the gateway to more sustainable, everyday, and locally engrained forms of peace? In other words, what is the significance of hybridity in understanding peace operations and, possibly, in supporting long-term peace and stability? To answer these questions, the article is structured as follows. First I discuss the concept of hybrid peace governance and propose a simple typology of this notion focused on the hybridity of state institutions in war-torn areas. Second, I identify and critically assess four major recent approaches in the literature accounting for the emergence of hybrid peace governance. Underlying these four approaches is the idea that the process of interaction between international and domestic actors in conflict areas accounts for an outcome that is less than ideal from a liberal peacebuilding point of view. Finally, I evaluate the possibility that hybrid notions of peace can provide a positive contribution to the peacebuilding.

Hybrid Peace Governance

In hybrid peace governance, liberal elements coexist, and sometimes clash. with illiberal norms and practices. Formally liberal institutions are challenged by assertive international policies as well as by patron-client networks, corruption, and criminal networks. A formal economy develops alongside informal and often illegal economic practices, while local civil society organizations grow numerically, but often fail to be recognized by citizens as representative of their interests and needs and are challenged by traditional societal structures and authorities. Different levels of violence may also persist despite the signing of a peace agreement. Boege et al. refer to this situation as a "hybrid political order" wherein different power claims and logics of order overlap and intertwine. (3) This condition has also been described as a "local-liberal hybrid"; (4) as "the assimilation of orthodox peacebuilding and neopatrimony"; (5) and as one of "institutional multiplicity" (6) wherein different sets of rules of the game, often at odds with one another, coexist in the same territory.

In this article, I adopt the concept of hybrid peace governance in order to describe the hybrid condition prevailing in conflict areas. Hybrid refers to a state of affairs in which liberal and illiberal norms, institutions, and actors coexist. International peacebuilding is grounded on Western liberal ideas, in particular, on the promotion of political and economic liberalization (although, as shown below, these ideas are often compromised in practice). The liberal peace model emerged slowly in the 1980s as a result of the process of democratization in several developing countries. By the early 1990s, it appeared that the Western liberal conception of democracy had become the only legitimate model of government. The United Nations initially applied this notion (relatively) successfully to Namibia, El Salvador, and Nicaragua and later made it a lasting template for intervention, even despite outright failures in the 1990s in Angola and Rwanda. (7) While the liberal peacebuilding model works from a relatively standardized blueprint that can be typified, local actors, norms, and institutions are much more varied. They can be liberal, illiberal, or a combination of both and involve a wide range of actors, including warlords, local chiefs, community groups, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

Needless to say, Western and local political and social forces are empirically difficult to separate. Despite the commonplace attempt by nationalist movements to rediscover an indigenous knowledge--history and identity un-contaminated by imperialism or Orientalism--access to such an original position is hardly possible. (8) Rather, hybridity can be considered as the ongoing condition of all human cultures. (9) Put another way, each social, cultural, and political structure is the result of prior hybridization and cannot be considered as a pure point of departure. (10) Countries currently experiencing a peace process have been integrated into the world political system and global economy for decades. For their part, external agents may also adapt to local practices, even when they remain dominant vis-a-vis local actors. Moreover, even if it were possible to clearly differentiate between the two, the truism that not everything Western is necessarily liberal while not everything local is illiberal must be kept in mind.

In sum, the "local" is neither monolithic nor necessarily incompatible with liberal norms. To think otherwise is to endorse a dubious neocolonial perspective that is arguably at the root of many peacebuilding failures. Likewise, the "international" is similarly diverse in terms of its composition, the peace strategies it adopts, and the goals it attempts to achieve. The rise of Brazil, Russia, India, and China (the BRIC states) and their growing involvement in conflict areas adds a new layer of complexity (see Hoglund and Orjuela in this issue). For their part. Western liberal states that have traditionally played a leading role in peacebuilding operations frequently adopt and implement illiberal, coercive, and undemocratic strategies. Despite their stated commitment to creating liberal and democratic institutions, and notwithstanding international technocrats' self-perception of their liberal identity. Western interveners have frequently sacrificed liberal norms. In Bosnia, for example, the high representative of the international community has been accused of behaving like a "European Raj," deploying the methods of the British in India in the nineteenth century. According to David Chandler, cases such as the Bosnian one suggest that peacebuilding has entered a postliberal phase in the sense that, rather than hybridizing with local realities, it has led to the strengthening of the supervisory and disciplinary dimensions of the external governance agenda at the expense of the domestic capacity to mobilize and enjoy political rights. (11)

With these important caveats in mind, Western actors have generally supported the development of liberal and democratic institutions and norms even when, paradoxically, they have employed illiberal means while local actors have frequently resisted this international intrusion, finding Western norms and practices inappropriate to the local context or potentially dangerous for local powerholders. The debate over hybridity, despite the conceptual limitations inherent in the term, reveals the gap between the international and the local. The very existence of difficulties in the implementation of the internationally led peacebuilding agenda testifies to the existence of a gap between the international and the local.

While "hybrid" refers to the coexistence and interaction of the international and the local, of liberal and illiberal norms, institutions, and actors, "peace governance" points to the activity of governing this condition in the subsystems of the state: security, legal, political, economic, and social. Many actors, including national, regional, and local authorities, as well as nonstate groups and international institutions, are part of this peace governance system. This system should not be seen as a stable package that includes a mix of liberal and illiberal elements adapting to each other. (12) Rather, hybridity is best understood as a condition of tension and even antagonism between the different actors involved, some of whom (particularly in rural areas) may even wish to subtract themselves from the very idea of governance embodied in the State. (13) It is precisely this antagonism that may open up unexpected opportunities in addressing context-specific peacebuilding issues. It is a testimony to the limits of the power and influence of international actors and norms that local ways of doing things, both at the elite and mass level, may predominate, as they are more in tune with domestic expectations and needs than the various components of liberal peacebuilding.

A Typology of Hybrid Peace Governance

Hybrid peace governance is increasingly recognized as an important reality of war-torn states, involving political institutions, individuals, and society at large. While the mainstream literature tends to consider this situation as an obstacle to overcome in the process of establishing purer forms of liberal democratic states, empirically there are examples of how a condition of hybrid peace governance presents important advantages vis-a-vis the ideal-typical version of liberal peacebuilding. In countries where peace operations have been deployed, the outcome has been less than satisfactory when judged through the lens of the liberal framework. For example, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where formally democratic arrangements are in place and where statebuilding has been pursued through the promotion of liberal democracy, the process has, at best, been painfully slow and, at worst, a failure. (14) By contrast in Tanzania, Uganda, and Rwanda, where statebuilding was implemented through limited competitive politics and by including customary, nonliberal rule systems in the formal statebuilding process. local institutions have attained a considerable degree of stability and domestic legitimacy. (15) Likewise, in the South Pacific the reliance on indigenous sources of state capability has provided local institutions with "grounded legitimacy" (16) In a range of other similar cases, indigenous institutions and norms are said to provide "informal legitimacy" (17) and, through it, stability and peace. Crucially, hybrid orders are thought to be "better able to tap into local knowledge, to mobilize citizens and to generate legitimacy" (18) than Weberian/Westphalian governance arrangements. Overall, the hybridization of formally liberal and democratic institutions through the presence and influence of traditional, customary forms of governance has provided a degree of integration and stability in uncertain times.

While hybrid peace governance may present some important advantages (discussed further below), it remains disputed whether a particular kind of hybridity is especially conducive to positive outcomes. Conceptually, at least three major forms of hybrid peace governance can be identified along the liberal-illiberal axis. (19) First, informal, traditional, and illiberal norms and practices may influence the working of formal democratic institutions. Customary traditions seep into rule systems adopted by the state. Perhaps the most visible example of this kind of hybridity involves the use of public office to distribute privileges to family, friends, and supporters. Some African politicians are singled out as making extensive use of such patron-client networks. (20) In some cases, such as that of Uganda, the state itself has encouraged the revival of chiefdoms and kingdoms in order to provide local actors with avenues for accessing state resources and, thus, to incorporate them into the president's patronage system. (21) In other cases, such as rural Afghanistan, jirgas and shuras (local decisionmaking councils) may actually be a replacement of the state whose reach outside the capital city is virtually nonexistent. At the societal level, this type of hybridity may take the form of informal economic practices influencing the formal economy. For example, corruption and the gray economy may distort the working of market economies, hampering the efficient production and allocation of goods and services, but they may also provide indispensable tools to ensure the livelihood of a poverty-stricken population.

Second, traditional nonstate actors may be formally integrated into formal state structures. While the first type discussed above involves the informal interaction between traditional and illiberal norms and practices and formal state structures, this second type refers to the formal inclusion of local institutions within the state apparatus. The institutionalization of the Guurti (Council of Chiefs) as the second chamber of the Somaliland polity is the most well-known example. (22) In Bougainville, one of the peacebuilding successes in the South Pacific, the new constitution combines elements of a Weberian/Westphalian political structure with customary governance, including councils of elders and customary law. In Vanuatu, the Malvatumauri (National Council of Chiefs) has been institutionalized. In other contexts, a similar process of hybridization of local institutions is ongoing. In the Solomon Islands, a mixed international and local constitutional commission is evaluating reforms aimed at producing a custom-based constitution. (23) In Afghanistan, the constitution recognizes the loyajirga (Grand Council) as the "highest manifestation of the will of the people of Afghanistan" and invests it with the task of deciding on issues related to the state's independence, national sovereignty, and territorial integrity (Article 111). Additionally, in the judicial field, informal institutions may be included within formal structures. In 2001 in Rwanda, the gacaca (a traditional dispute-resolution mechanism working on a combination of customary and statutory law) became pan of the state's means of justice delivery, and in 2003 it became anchored in the constitution (Article 153), As the cases of both the loya jirga and the gacaca confirm, the revival and institutionalization of indigenous structures and institutions may occur under the sponsorship of international peacebuilders who have approved of and funded these initiatives to such an extent that they can still be considered indigenous practices in only a limited sense. (24)

A particular form of hybridity involves the inclusion of international, not local, nonstate actors within domestic institutions. Through their work, international actors attempt to introduce liberal rule systems into war-torn states. In Bosnia, international experts have been appointed to some key local institutions (the Constitutional Court, the Central Bank, and the Commission on Real Property Claims) in order to provide more efficient and transparent policymaking. (25) In addition, mixed or hybrid courts in Sierra Leone. Cambodia, Timor-Lcste, and Kosovo involve international legal experts. (26) At the civil society level, similar hybrid arrangements are in place to favor the development and strengthening of local NGOs along liberal, democratic lines. Since 1999, for example, the Ziviler Friedensdienst (German Civil Peace Service) has appointed European experts to partner organizations in conflict contexts to support project implementation and capacity building of local actors. (27) This innovative civil society building approach serves as a model to other European countries, such as Norway, that aim to create similar institutions.

Third, liberal state institutions may be dominated by violent nonstate actors and institutions. At times, these actors may even be asked to join the government in order to ensure more stability. The participation of warlords in government in post-Taliban Afghanistan offers a good example. In extreme cases, the state might even be "captured" by these kinds of players. Powerful self-interested actors can gain control over slate institutions to exploit them to their own advantage and to the detriment of entire societies. While variants of this phenomenon can occur in transitional contexts unaffected by conflict, state capture in war areas typically involves the takeover of state institutions by criminal networks and warring factions, frequently linked to ethnically or communally based alliances, and results in the "criminalization of the state." (28) Although instances of criminal states are found primarily in the African context, other regions have experienced similar situations. Postwar Kosovo, for example, is increasingly identified in the international press as "Europe's Mafia state," especially since a Council of Europe report, released in December 2010, accused the prime minister of being "the head of a mafia-like Albanian group responsible for smuggling weapons, drugs and human organs through Eastern Europe." (29)

The extent to which these different kinds of hybridity affect both the short- and long-term prospects for peace and stability is a complex issue. Without speculating on how hybridity might evolve, two potentially positive aspects can be highlighted. First, while liberal peacebuilding has often resulted in the democratic election of nonliberal elites linked to violent conflict, hybrid peace governance may open up room for the representation of other segments of society. When traditional bodies are included in the state structure, other local elites can have a say in politics. In addition, the inclusion of other non-state actors, such as local NGOs and community groups, also has the potential of giving representation to important and often neglected segments of the population such as women and grassroots movements. Second, traditional decisionmaking methods are frequently perceived as more legitimate by the local population than the liberal majority rule (usually tempered in conflict areas by group guarantees). Large meetings aimed at consensus building may form a part of deliberative decisionmaking in a hybrid peace governance situation. Traditional leaders, such as chiefs in many African states, are frequently perceived by the population as preferable and more legitimate authorities than elected politicians and bureaucrats. (30)

The Emergence of Hybrid Peace Governance

Several explanations have been put forward as to why internationally led liberal peacebuilding has often resulted in hybrid peace governance. For some, the development of local political, economic, and social institutions mirrors specific conditions and lived experiences and takes place over a long period of time. From this perspective, hybridity is a reflection of the broader problems of state formation, which may involve international actors but ultimately is the outcome of an indigenous process. (31) Other scholars stress the importance of the timing and type of involvement of external actors in explaining the emergence of hybrid peace governance. For analytical purposes, these scholars can be grouped into four main approaches or literatures: game theory; path-dependence theory; the literature on incentives; and the literature on international peacebuilding strategies, in particular, the critique of the international focus on building state institutions at the expense of meeting a population's needs.

Game Theory

Using game theory, Michael N. Barnett and Christoph Zurcher suggest that the emergence of a condition of hybridity (although the authors themselves do not refer to it by that name) is due to the interaction between international and domestic actors with different interests and agendas. Despite international actors' stated intention of adopting elements of liberal peacebuilding in the political, economic, and social spheres, in the process of peace implementation they are actually willing to compromise this goal in order to reconcile the presence of contradictory imperatives. Barnett and Zurcher's use of a "peacebuilding game" demonstrates that the most likely outcome of liberal interventionism is "compromised peacebuilding"--a situation wherein international actors merely transfer the formal procedures of the liberal democratic state, but leave largely unreformed the deeper, often informal institutional and normative frameworks. (32) While the peacebuilding game is useful for illustrating how the process of interaction between international and local actors leads peace-builders to reduce their expectations, its assumptions are problematic. As with most rational choice work, this kind of theorizing tends to be decontextualized. In game theory, "context" is frequently seen as a synonym for thick description and, thus, as an obstacle to establishing claims that should apply across a wide range of circumstances.

As Barnett and Zurcher's model suggests, actors are supposed to have similar interests and agendas, and their actions similar effects, in widely different settings. However, as the examples of specific war-torn slates like Iraq, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Democratic Republic of Congo confirm, different national sectors frequently hold a wide range of interests and affiliations--be they ethnic, tribal, clan, and so on. Generalizations aimed at explaining the emergence of compromised peacebuilding (or, in the jargon adopted in this issue, hybrid peace governance) are difficult to sustain in light of these different contexts. Despite this limitation, however, the peacebuilding game provides an insightful explanation of how the interaction between international and local agents makes hybrid arrangements possible. In particular, the peacebuilding game usefully underscores the changing nature of international involvement -- implicitly suggesting how liberal actors may become themselves hybridized through their interaction with nonliberal ones. During periods of intervention, international interveners adjust their objectives to (real or perceived) local realities and might even develop a vested interest in stability without reform, which from a liberal peacebuilding perspective amounts to a fiasco. Admittedly, compromised peacebuilding may be too complacent in accepting a lower quality peace for those individuals and groups living in conflict areas and. thus, serves as an apology for the failures of liberal peacebuilding. However, for Barnett and Zurcher. this outcome ultimately is not so negative since it may lead to the creation of local political mechanisms able to "compel individuals to consult, deliberate and negotiate with one another as they decide what they consider to be the good life" (33)

Path-dependence Theory

While game theory runs the risk of overlooking differences in the search for generalizations, path-dependence theory focuses on understanding the details of each specific case. Path dependency is commonly described as a dynamic process generating self-reinforcing outcomes. Not only can such a process produce more than one outcome, it can also be disrupted and, thus, set on a different course at a relatively early stage. Crucially, however, once a particular path is established, a self-reinforcing dynamic generally makes reversals difficult. As a result, as Paul Pierson puts it, "political alternatives that were once quite plausible may become irretrievably lost." (34) Critical junctures set a particular situation in motion while, at the same time, foreclosing other options, thus suggesting a degree of irreversibility. If a particular situation moves down a self-reinforcing path (even one considered suboptimal), reversal is unlikely because obstacles to change become built into political institutions. (35) In this framework, beginnings are thought to be extremely important because they are set to decisively shape later developments. Moreover, the order of particular events may also impact decisively on the eventual outcome.

Path-dependence theory provides an important contribution to the understanding of the emergence of hybrid peace governance and the extent to which external intervention may influence particular outcomes. First, the logic of path dependency raises the question of whether critical junctures can be identified and manipulated in order to induce the creation or consolidation of a particular desired outcome. (36) This question is especially relevant with regard to early constitutional choices in war-torn states and the extent to which these choices can lock in a positive, self-reinforcing process of institution building. Second, the path-dependence literature stresses the importance of placing any particular situation in some sort of clear temporal context. (37) The thick study of war-torn states can highlight limits and possibilities in the process of exporting liberal peace. Unfortunately, from the point of view of liberal peacebuilding, such studies frequently reveal that contemporary peacebuilding takes place under generally unfavorable conditions, making the transposition of liberal norms and institutional frameworks difficult to achieve. (38)

Third, the focus on the importance of timing and sequences of particular events or processes resonates well with wider debates in the peacebuilding literature. International actors face a number of dilemmas in the intervention process, ones that cannot be easily avoided or overcome. (39) Rather, those dilemmas involve difficult choices between different priorities, each choice opening a new opportunity while foreclosing another option. For example, if international actors pursue an overly intrusive policy, they may achieve short-term success, but will likely undermine the local ownership of the peace process as in the case of Bosnia's European Raj mentioned above. By contrast, if they rely too heavily on local initiatives, progress may be slow and international involvement difficult to sustain over time. Likewise, the decision on the timing of the first postwar elections presents peacebuilders with a dilemma. A point of dispute remains about whether elections should be held early on in order to legitimate the new political order arising from the ashes of war or whether they should be postponed in order to create better conditions for democracy to take hold. In practice, a particular choice between different options may set in motion a self-reinforcing mechanism, as highlighted by the path-dependence literature. In Iraq, for example, the early dismissal of the Iraqi Army is widely considered to be a key reason for persisting levels of insecurity in that country. More broadly, the wrong timing and sequencing of a particular policy may contribute decisively to the emergence of a hybrid condition that may appear rather stable but around which violence lurks as liberal norms, institutions, and actors struggle to affirm themselves.

International Incentives

In addition to game theory and path-dependence theory, a third strand of the literature attempts to account for the emergence of hybrid peace governance by highlighting international actors" use of incentives and disincentives in their interaction with local actors. By deploying rewards for collaboration across ethnic, national, and societal divisions and punishments for activities against the implementation of a liberal peace, international actors may support the development of domestic, self-enforcing reciprocity and patterns of bargaining among groups. (40) Crucially, this strategy is more likely to be effective if exercised with a degree of coherence. However, the multiplication of policy objectives by external agents, as well as the proliferation of decisionmaking bodies in the international system, frequently combine to generate strategy gridlock. Understanding the domestic requirements of peacebuilding--and the related issue of which policy tools are most appropriate--is rarely the priority of external actors. (41) In this situation, local actors are commonly able to resist, ignore, or adapt to liberal peacebuilding initiatives. For Roger Mac Ginty, the interplay of these international and local elements and strategies explains the emergence of hybrid versions of peace governance: involving the compliance and incentivizing powers of liberal peace agents as well as the ability of local actors to resist, ignore, or adapt to the liberal peace and to maintain alternative forms of peacemaking. (42)

The incentive/disincentive literature provides interesting insights into understanding hybrid peace governance. First, along the lines of path-dependence theory, it draws attention to the need to base international strategies on a careful, detailed assessment of the decisionmaking processes of domestic leaders as well as on a good understanding of the wider sociopolitical context in which intervention takes place. The lack of this kind of assessment explains how external strategies may fail to respond to the local parties' motivational structures. Second, the actions of local actors suggest that the power of external agents to coerce or incentivize local compliance to liberal peacebuilding should not be overestimated. Local actors have considerable agency in shaping the domestic environment and in responding to international initiatives. It is precisely through this process of resistance to external pressures, understood as positive and creative energy rather than simply a response to subjection, that local agents hybridize peace. (43) Yet, although the peacebuilders' difficulty of ensuring conformity to their demands testifies to the local ability to manipulate and shape the mechanics of intervention, this subversion of international objectives rarely leads to a fundamental reassessment of peacebuilding priorities.

Critical Theory

A fourth and final, major approach developed in the literature in order to explain the emergence of hybrid peace governance highlights the limitations inherent in the excessive and ultimately counterproductive focus of internationals on building state institutions. Critical theorists argue that the liberal peace framework is a mechanism of exclusion resting "on coercion, a lack of consent, conditionality, and the prioritisation of elites over the interests of the many." (44) Furthermore, it is "statecentric, metrocentric and democentric," (45) focusing on the building of Weberian/Westphalian state institutions at the center, at the expense of the needs of vulnerable populations on the periphery. A state being built by external interveners is, time and again, only superficially democratic and, crucially, fails to meet popular demands. Citizens may possess abstract political rights while the state may be endowed with the basic mechanics of democracy such as regular elections, a parliament, a government, a relatively free media, and a formally independent judiciary. These kinds of institutions may be seen as legitimate in Western societies where everyday life is safeguarded by varying degrees of welfare provision and protection, but life in most of the non-Western world remains "uninsured" (46) with negative consequences in terms of trust in political arrangements. Thus, in postwar contexts, the state is often irrelevant to citizens' basic needs and personal security and does not address threats to human dignity originating from economic and social marginalization. Everyday people's needs are regularly sidelined, providing a powerful disincentive for citizens to subscribe to the liberal peace.

Because key formal institutions fail to meet popular demands, political participation takes place outside of these formal channels. Everyday life remains centered around informal institutions and norms. According to David Roberts, informal social networks, described as "Common Social Exchange," predominate in spite of their arbitrary, contingent, and unfair characters because they are able to address local needs more than democratization and marketization. (47) This informality suggests the importance of considering the "infrapolitics of peacebuilding"; namely, the hidden, localized, and diffused capacities of local actors to operate outside the liberal peace framework or to adapt it to meet local needs, particularly economic ones. (48) in fact, when the state is either unwilling or unable to provide for the essentials on which survival depends, individuals and groups engage in various forms of economic activities that may be corrupt in a formal, legalistic sense, but constitute indispensable strategies to ensure basic welfare to vast segments of the population. (49) For example, it is estimated that in Iraq in 2008, 80 percent of the workforce was engaged in the informal economy. (50) Even civil society organizations, which are frequently singled out by liberal peacebuilders as indispensable components of the liberal peace, end up being part of informal, clientelistic, and even corrupt sets of relationships. (51)

Of the four approaches reviewed above, the critical analysis of the failures of liberal peacebuilding's strategies is most useful in revealing the fundamental dissonance between the international and the local and the related persistence of older domestic institutions and norms that precede external intervention. The critical camp includes a broad group of scholars, ranging from post-Foucauldians, to poststructuralists, neo-Marxists, and others. At the risk of oversimplifying this complexity, it can be argued that the critical approach as a whole leaves two issues underexplored. First, while the importance of local agency and the everyday is rightly emphasized, the question remains as to whether such an agency can affect broader structures and even bring about meaningful change. For example, the call of critical theorists for a "solidarity of the governed" (52) (i.e., of those in both the developed and underdeveloped world subject to liberal governmentality) appears to be a rather abstract and weak means to overcome the limits of liberal peace.

Second, critical theorists remain deeply ambivalent with regard to both the role of the state and that of international actors. Some critics possess a strong welfarist bent, suggesting the need for a strong state in order to meet a population's survival and developmental needs. However, most scholars in this tradition see this kind of policy advice as problem solving and, thus, reject it as complicit with liberal, territorial, and ultimately restrictive notions of peace. As a result, the state's potential to provide political, economic, and social rights to the population under its jurisdiction is frequently underappreciated. But the state remains indispensable for enabling the political agency of citizens and guaranteeing their basic rights. The state does not need to be moulded in conformity with international liberal norms, as in current peace-building operations, but could meet the human needs of the population over which it exercises authority. Thus, the point is not so much to reject the Weberian, centralized, and securitizing state, as suggested by critical theorists, but rather to design state institutions that can be usefully engaged in serving the population they claim to represent. Furthermore, there is no reason why even international peacebuilding priorities could not be reoriented to support locally identified everyday needs. In sum, as Roberts points out, peacebuilding could be both "critical" and "problem-solving." (53)

These four ways of analyzing hybrid peace governance emphasize different aspects of the interaction between international and local actors. Game theory speaks to the strategic relationship between international and local actors wherein one's actions affect the other's perceptions and options. Path-dependence theory calls for a thick understanding of the local context while focusing on the impact of the choices made by international interveners. Likewise, the incentive/disincentive approach assumes a sender and a receiver, a policy shaper and a policy taker, and prioritizes the former over the latter. The critical literature emphasizes the dissonance and even friction between international priorities and local realities. What all of these approaches share is the effort to explain how hybrid peace governance emerges in war-torn states. They all offer important insights on this process, although none of them (with the limited exception of Barnett and Zurcher's model) explicitly considers how liberal actors may themselves become hybridized through their interaction with local agents.

Conclusion

The limits of liberal peacebuilding, well rehearsed in the literature, call for a new approach in order to achieve sustainable peace. A small but growing number of scholars suggest that the notion of hybridity can provide important insights into understanding the dynamics of peacebuilding processes and even in improving the quality of the peace being built. For example, Mac Ginty argues that the notion of hybridity reveals both the structural weaknesses of the liberal peace and, in particular, its coercive and incentivizing powers as well as the ability of local actors to force distortions on the liberal peace project. (54) For Roberts, hybridity presents an opportunity that may better serve a "wider range of everyday lives." (55) Similarly, Oliver Richmond argues that hybridity could represent an opportunity to develop more legitimate, locally accepted, and thus more sustainable forms of peace. In his view, an inclusive conversation between local and international actors could open up the space for the emergence of a postliberal peace centered on a detailed understanding of the local culture, a respect for alterity, and provisions for the welfare and everyday needs of the population, among other critical policies. (56)

Of course, not everything local can be considered useful in furthering the peacebuilding agenda; the possible disadvantages of hybrid peace governance must also be carefully considered. Most importantly, the local and the traditional are frequently oriented toward preserving the social order, including its hierarchy. (57) Although some local norms, practices, and actors may be included in domestic governance, they may also be exclusionary in character and could, perhaps, compromise the peace process in the long term. Somaliland's Guurti, for example, often identified as a positive example of the inclusion of traditional institutions within formally democratic ones, is said to contribute to a patronage system aimed at buying political support for local authorities. As it currently stands, the hybrid system in place in Somaliland "threatens to undermine the polity's stability." (58) Thus, traditional and local elements, while useful in providing short-term legitimacy to nascent state institutions, may not be well suited to delivering proper governance and development over the long term.

With this important caveat in mind, hybrid peace governance may present some significant advantages vis-a-vis the traditional, top-down, state-centered, technocratic, and unsustainable approach that has characterized peace operations since the early 1990s. To begin with, the notion of hybridity implies a rejection of the universality of the liberal peacebuilding blueprint, understood as a set of neoliberal democratization and marketization reforms. Instead, hybrid conditions call attention to the existence of locally rooted, everyday needs, behaviors, and aspirations that are only tangentially influenced, if at all, by the global biopolitics of liberalism. Each context presents particular and specific challenges to those individuals experiencing a postwar transition. Their everyday lives are shaped by a range of political, economic, and social dynamics that vary from context to context and, by definition, cannot be ameliorated by the same standard recipe. Worn-torn states and societies, like Leo Tolstoy's unhappy families, are unique in their problems, aspirations, and needs.

Second, hybridity calls for a reassessment of the relative impact of international and domestic resources. Mainstream liberal peacebuilding policy places great emphasis on the ability of internationals to shape postwar contexts and, in so doing, either romanticizes local actors or includes them instrumentally in legitimate external initiatives. Thus local, traditional actors, norms, and institutions are either seen by external agents as hindering modernization and democratiza-tion or empowered to operate within the liberal peace framework with expedient intentions and not as a genuine engagement with diversity--or both. When included in externally driven schemes, the local is expected to overcome the shortcomings of external intervention through the provision of essential domestic inputs within externally driven goals and priorities. In other words, local actors are expected to participate in and eventually own political, economic, and social structures devised and implemented by outsiders. By contrast, the concept of hybridity implies a rejection of the patronizing, top-down, statecentric, technocratic, and assimilative version of peace in favor of a locally rooted understanding of peace resulting from the interaction, accommodation, and sometimes clash between a variety of different actors, norms, and institutions.

Third, as a consequence, hybridity represents an alternative to the Western social engineering and paternalism evident in mainstream peacebuilding as framed by a series of paired hierarchies (us/them, peace-loving/conflict-prone, democratic/transitional, advanced/underdeveloped) that conveniently fit the interests of powerholders in the international system. It implies an attempt to democratize politics in that it involves an engagement with local reality, even in its nonliberal form. Rather than constantly focusing on the lack of liberal attributes and continuously pinpointing the real or perceived gaps and needs of the host state, hybridity suggests the need for liberal peacebuilders to consider how local resources can be developed into a locally engrained and more sustainable political order. Such an engagement is frequently a matter of necessity, not of choice, since local political, economic, and social life is carried out, for the most part, outside formal and superficially democratic institutions.

In sum, the notion of hybridity suggests the need to move beyond the on-tological and methodological dominance of Western actors and approaches and to engage with bottom-up, local views of politics and society. Some donors have begun to recognize that the attempt to build Weberian/ Westphalian states in the non-Western world through a process of transfer of institutional models has by and large failed, and they have conceded the need for a new approach. For example, the Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has acknowledged the notion of hybridity and argued that statebuilding should "pay due regard to informal and non-western forms of organization, rule-making, and conflict resolution." (59) The World Bank's 2011 World Development Report shows evidence of a conceptual shift from a standardized blueprint to greater attention to local context. (60) However, it remains chailengmg for donors to transform this new awareness and sensitivity into operational programs. Although the question of whether hybrid arrangements can provide a feasible alternative to liberal peacebuilding is increasingly raised and discussed, exactly which kind of hybridity is more conducive to peace and stability and more likely to develop within locally accepted forms of political representation is still poorly understood. Moreover, the areas of complementarities between local and liberal principles and practices, perhaps requiring a process of mutual adaptation, also need to be clearly identified. That said, more than two decades of experience with liberal peacebuilding suggest that a serious engagement with hybrid conditions and their implications cannot be wished away.

Notes

Roberto Belloni is associate professor of international relations at the University of Trento, Italy. His main research interest is postconflict international intervention in deeply divided societies, with particular reference to southeastern Europe. He has published extensively on this topic, including a monograph (State Building and International Intervention in Bosnia), book chapters, and articles in a number of journals such as Review of International Studies, Journal of Peace Research, International Peacekeeping, Civil Wars, Ethnopolitics, and International Studies Perspectives.

(1.) Many thanks to Anna Jarstad for her valuable help in discussing most of the ideas presented in this article.

(2.) See, for example, Kristine Hoglund and Minimi Soderberg Kovacs, "Beyond the Absence of War: The Diversity of Peace in Post-Settlement Societies," Review of International Studies 36, no. 2. (2010): 367-390; Roger Mac Ginty, No War, No Peace: The Rejuvenation of Stalled Peace Processes and Peace Accords (Basingstoke: Pal-grave, 2006). Needless to say, informal and illiberal rules of the game also exist in consolidated democracies, although in such cases formal rules supersede informal ones. See Gretchen Helmke and Steven Levitsky, "Informal Institutions and Comparative Politics: A Research Agenda," Perspectives on Politics 2T no. 4 (2004): 725-740.

(3.) Volker Boege et al., States Emerging from Hybrid Political Orders: Pacific Experiences, Occasional Papers Series No, 11 (Brisbane: Australian Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, September 2008). See also Kevin R Clements et al., "State Building Reconsidered: The Role of Hybridity in the Formation of Political Order," Political Science 59, no. 1 (2007): 45-56; Martina Fischer and Beatrix Schmelzle, eds., Bui/ding Peace in the Absence of States: Challenging the Discourse on State Failure, Berghof Handbook for Conflict Transformation, Dialogue Series No. 8 (Berlin: Berghof Research Center for Constructive Conflict Management, 2009).

(4.) Oliver P. Richmond, A Post-liberal Peace: The Infrapolitics of Peacehuilding (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 18.

(5.) David Roberts, Liberal Peacebuildinv and Global Governance: Beyond the Metropolis (London: Routleclge, 2011), p. 26.

(6.) Jonathan Di John. Conceptualising (he Causes and Consequences of Failed States: A Critical Review of the Literature, Crisis States Working Papers Series No. 2 (London: London School of Economics and Political Science, Development Studies Institute, 2008).

(7.) Roland Paris, At War's End: Building Peace After Civil Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2004).

(8.) Arun Agravval, "Dismantling the Divide Between Indigenous and Scientific Knowledge," Development and Change 26, no. 3 (1995): 413-439.

(9.) Renato Rosaldo, "Foreward," in Nestor Garcia Canclini, trans. Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. Lopez, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. xv.

(10.) Roger Mac Ginty. International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance: Hybrid Forms of Peace (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2011), pp. 51, 72.

(11.) David Chandler, International Statebuilding: The Rise of Post-liberal Governance (London: Roufledge, 2010).

(12.) Many thanks to Oliver Richmond for bringing my attention to the importance of this point.

(13.) James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

(14.) Severine Aulessere, The Trouble with Congo: Local Violence and the Failure of International Peacebuilding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

(15.) Gabi Hesselbein, Frederick Golooba-Mutebi, and James Putzel, Economic and Political Foundations of State-making in Africa: Understanding State Reconstruction, Crisis States Working Paper Series No. 3 (London: London School of Economics and Political Science, Development Studies Institute, 2006).

(16.) Boege et al., States Emerging.

(17.) Roberts, Liberal Peacebuilding, p. 82.

(18.) Maren Kraushaar and Daniel Lambach. Hybrid Political Orders: The Added Value of a New Concept, Occasional Papers Series No. 14 (Brisbane: Australian Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, December 2009), p. I.

(19.) The following types build on ibid., p. 5.

(20.) Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, Africa Works: Disorder as a Political Instrument (Boomington: Indiana University Press. 1999).

(21.) Hesselbein, Golooba-Mutebi. and Putzel, Economic and Political Foundations, pp. 3, 18.

(22.) Marleen Renders and Ulf Terlinden, "Negotiating Statehood in a Hybrid Political Order: The Case of Somaliland." Development and Change 4), no. 4 (2010): 723-746.

(23.) Richmond, A Post-liberal Peace, p. 178.

(24.) Mac Ginty, International Peacebuilding, pp. 62-63.

(25.) Roberto Belloni, State Building and International Intervention in Bosnia (Abingdon; Routledge, 2007), pp. 181-182.

(26.) Richard J. Goldstone and Adam M. Smith, International Judicial Institutions: The Architecture of International Justice at Home and Abroad (London: Routledee, 2009), pp. 106-1 JO.

(27.) See, for example, Roberto Belloni and Mladen Momcilovic, The German Civil Peace Service: Case Study of Serbia, unpublished report (Bonn: Bundesministerium fur wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit und Entiwicklung, 2011).

(28.) Jean-Francois Bayart, Stephen Ellis, and Beatrice Hibou, Criminalization of the State in Africa (Oxford: James Currey; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).

(29.) Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights, Inhuman Treatment of People and Illicit Trafficking in Human Organs in Kosovo, AS/Jur [2010] 46 (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 12 December 2010), p. 18.

(30.) Richard Fanthorpe, "On the Limits of the Liberal Peace: Chiefs and Democratic Decentralization in Post-war Sierra Leone;' African Affairs 105, no. 418 (2005): 27-49.

(31.) Christopher Clapham, 'The Global-Local Politics of State Decay," in Robert Rotberg, ed., When States Fail: Causes and Consequences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 79; see also Krause, this issue.

(32.) Michael N. Barnett and Christoph Zurcher, "The Peacebuilder's Contract: How External Statebuilding Reinforces Weak Statehood," in Roland Paris and Timothy D. Sisk, eds.. The Dilemmas of StatehuUding: Confronting the Contradictions of Postwar Peace Operations (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 23-52.

(33.) Ibid., p. 49.

(34.) Paul Pierson, Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 11.

(35.) Ibid., pp. 55-58.

(36.) Daniel Allen, "New Directions in the Study of Nation-building: Views Through the Lens of Path Dependence," International Studies Review 12, no, 3 (2010): 417.

(37.) Pierson, Politics in Time, pp. 167-172.

(38.) Allen, "New Directions."

(39.) Anna K. Jarstad and Timothy D. Sisk, eds., From War to Democracy: Dilemmas of Peacehuilding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Roland Paris and Timothy D. Sisk, eds., The Dilemmas of StatehuUding: Confronting the Contradictions of Postwar Peace Operations (London: Routledge, 2009).

(40.) Donald Rothchild, Managing Ethnic Conflict in Africa: Pressures and Incentives for Cooperation (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997), esp. chap. 4.

(41.) Aaron Griffith and Catherine Barnes, Powers of Persuasion: Incentives, Sanctions, and Conditionality in Peacemaking (London: Conciliation Resources, 2008).

(42.) Mac Ginty, International Peacehuilding.

(43.) Ibid.

(44.) Richmond, A Post-liberal Peace, p. 7.

(45.) Roberts, Liberal Peacehuilding.

(46.) Mark Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples (Cambridge: Polity, 2007).

(47.) Roberts, Liberal Peacebuilding, pp. 31-32.

(48.) Richmond, A Post-liberal Peace.

(49.) Michael Pugh, Neil Cooper, and Mandy Turner, eds., Whose Peace? Critical Perspectives on the Political Economy of Peacebuilding (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2008). See also Strazzari and Kamphuis, this issue.

(50.) Mac Ginty, International Peacebuilding, p. 127.

(51.) Roberto Belloni, "Part of the Problem or Part of the Solution? Civil Society and Corruption in Post-conflict States," in Christine Cheng and Dominik Zaum, eds., Corruption and Post-conflict Peacehuilding: Selling the Peace? (London: Routledge, 2012).

(52.) Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War, p. 234.

(53.) Roberts, Liberal Peacebuilding.

(54.) Mac Ginty, International Peacebuilding, esp. chap. 3.

(55.) Roberts, Liberal Peacebuilding, p. 96.

(56.) Richmond, A Post-liberal Peace, pp. 110-111.

(57.) Volker Boege, "Traditional Approaches to Conflict Transformation: Potentials and Limits," in Martina Fischer, H. Giessman, and B. Schmelzle, eds., Berghof Hand-hook for Conflict Transformation (Berlin: Berghof Research Center for Constructive Conflict Management, 2006), pp. 1-20.

(58.) Renders and Terlinden, "Negotiating Statehood," p. 742.

(59) Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Concepts and Dilemmas of State Building in Fragile Situations: From Fragility to Resilience, OECD/DAC Discussion Paper (Paris: OECD/DAC, 2008).

(60) World Bank, World Development Report 2011: Conflict, Security and Development (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2011). See also Zaum's review essay, this issue.