Debating new approaches in peacebuilding and development
Together with Paul Jackson, Peter Albrecht has contributed to a new book, Hybridity on the Ground in Peacebuilding and Development: Critical Conversations.
The book engages with the possibilities and pitfalls of the increasingly popular notion of hybridity. The concept has been embraced by scholars and practitioners in response to the social and institutional complexities of peacebuilding and development practices. In particular, it is well-suited to making sense of the mutually constitutive outcomes of processes of interaction between diverse norms, institutions, actors and discourses in the context of contemporary peacebuilding and development engagements. At the same time, it has been criticized from a variety of perspectives for overlooking critical questions of history, power and scale.
In their chapter, Jackson and Albrecht interrogate the concept of hybridity by exploring security and justice across a number of African contexts, and how they are conditioned by power and politics. The chapter shows the power of local actors to resist the imposition of liberal statebuilding processes. Some hybrid structures do provide the means to subvert externally imposed statebuilding, but the political power of local elites moderate access to these approaches.
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