Chapter 9

Hybrid forms of peace

In a step beyond liberal peace frameworks, hybrid forms of peace are emerging in diverse locations around the world. Local patterns of politics based on contextual social, cultural, and historical norms, identities, and material resources influence hybrid peace along with western/northern peace thinking related to democracy, rule of law, human rights, and a vibrant civil society. What is emerging is neither strictly a liberal nor a local form of peace, but a hybrid, formed through political contestation involving a range of actors, their preferences, and security interests. In some cases, a negative hybrid peace may be emerging, as in Afghanistan where warlords and external peacebuilders make very uncomfortable company, but in others there is the possibility of more positive hybrid forms, as in Timor Leste or Sierra Leone, where local customary law and governance may be slowly aligning with the modern state.

Such processes have significant implications for any emancipatory form of peace. It should reflect the interests, identities, and needs of all actors, state and non-state. It would aim at mutual accommodation across identity groups and regions of the world, as well as autonomy and social justice. An everyday form of peace is its objective as well as complementing the liberal peace that emerged from the internationalist dreams of the 20th century. It raises the question—in an era when the West is no longer internationally dominant—of how local forms of legitimacy, or alternative political, social, and economic systems, and norms of peace can engage with international forms. Can international understandings of a liberal human rights regime (part of the civil peace and crucial to a liberal social contract) be reconciled with local, customary, or religious practices in very diverse locations around the world? A hybrid form of peace may therefore transcend the third generation peacebuilding and statebuilding approaches. A fourth generation approach may include more localized and contextual traditions and approaches rooted in each post-conflict society. It would also have to deal with the very significant global inequalities that remain between states and societies around the world. A hybrid peace may represent an evolution beyond a positive peace.

Hybrid forms of peace: a fourth generation of peace?

In Somalia, despite the collapsed nature of the state, many local communities have organized themselves to maintain stability, justice, and the economy through customary and ad hoc informal institutions, as notably in Puntland and Somaliland. In Cambodia a relatively authoritarian democracy has emerged since the early 1990s’ peacebuilding, where a vibrant civil society, particularly in the realms of human rights, has kept pressure on the government. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, the conditions of a weak, post-war state have been partially alleviated by both international support and local communities’ attempts at mitigating them. In Timor Leste, as in Liberia, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Guatemala, the Solomon Islands, and many others, international and local cooperation has produced a specifically contextual version of peace, to varying degrees incorporating customary practices. Local organizations, operating in civil society, often informally, and combining local customs and justice with the emerging modern state, have been vital to this process. The state has often been reshaped by these processes, though its elites may also resist the required reforms and compromises. It may require, as in Afghanistan, difficult compromises with tribal groups and their historical practices, including the Taliban and various warlords, which would certainly involve significant reform on their behalf. Thousands of internationally supported local development committees and NGOs have been essential to this process and for creating wider stability.

In general, these examples indicate a slow movement towards what might be called a post-liberal peace, one where international norms and institutions interact with different, contextual, and localized polities. This process capitalizes on the core of the original conflict resolution and peacebuilding agendas. It addresses human needs and root causes, connecting the new state or polity with older, locally recognizably legitimate agendas and engages with grassroots and the most marginalized members of post-conflict polities.

Along these lines it has become accepted that national ownership and contextual specificity are necessary for peacebuilding. Basic security, a rule of law, political institutions and processes, basic services including health and education, core functions of government, and employment remain part of this new phase of peacebuilding. Employment generation, economic vitalization, and transitional safety nets are seen as a way of distributing a peace dividend.

Further attempts to refine international policies have followed this line of thought, notably the World Bank ‘World Development Report 2011’, which talks of a ‘social compact’, the Busan Partnership Agreement on development cooperation and a ‘New Deal for Engagement in Fragile States’ in late 2001, and the 2012 UNDP report ‘Governance for Peace: Securing the Social Contract’. These documents illustrate an evolution in policymaking that reflects an attempt to develop a fourth generation approach. They mention the social compact, the need for legitimacy, people’s security, justice (but not social justice), economic development, and ‘fair services’. Transnational global civil society has yet again been instrumental in pushing for this ‘new deal’.

Local contributions to peace

This understanding of the potential of peacebuilding in a more contextual sense has long been present in post-conflict sites, where local groups have often formed to bring about peace for themselves on a small but effective and now widely replicated scale.

For example, in the 1990s conflict resolution workshops run in Cyprus by mainly American or European scholars allowed people interested in peace to meet across the green line, which had divided Greek and Turkish Cypriots since 1974 or even earlier. They valued the contact with their ‘enemies’ and the ability to debate, but they also felt that the conduct of the workshops glossed over the difficult political, economic, identity, and justice issues they faced. On the other hand, the academics that ran them were often frustrated by what they saw as local tendencies not to cooperate, to remain dogmatic, not to engage in the way they wanted, and yet to appear to be dependent on them for any contact with the other side.

Despite all of these problems, local participants were able to use the process to build a peace constituency, which did not represent a single consensus about a peace settlement for the island, but allowed a sophisticated form of peaceful coexistence to emerge amongst the members of these ‘inter-communal groups’. In the latest formal attempts to develop a peace process even the island’s two governments and political leaders recognized the importance of such civil society movements, after years of ignoring their potential.

In Mozambique and Namibia, since the end of their conflicts in the 1990s, government or internationals have not addressed social and economic issues fully, given the history of colonization and white settlement. Civil society is often described as weak or absent, dependent upon fickle donor priorities and funds. Nevertheless, local organizations have continued to engage in human rights, development, education, or training work, often within a subsistence context (meaning they do not receive any donor or international support). When such organizations decide to work in this manner, without significant donor support, they often find that they are able to survive and develop their own approaches. In Mozambique, one NGO is using traditional musical instruments in rural areas to teach people about pluralism, peace, and coexistence. Another organization has developed its own small arms decommissioning project, which has earned worldwide fame. Weapons are turned into sculptures and pieces of art. Such small activities often have a broader social significance even if political and economic obstacles to peace remain. Their ambitions are captured in a famous sculpture outside the UN Building in New York (see Figure 7).

In Guatemala, a prosperous European settler community has dominated politics and the economy before and even since the peace process of the 1990s. The majority community of Mayan people, often living in rural settings in relative poverty, barely even recognize that they live in the same state. They have developed numerous ways of preserving their culture and identity and have increasingly become more successful in finding spaces in which they can survive and coexist with the modern state. They have worked hard to have their culture and cosmology included in national and international fora, and so are carving out hybrid peace.

In Sri Lanka, despite very difficult circumstances for any peace process during the 2000s, certain local organizations have navigated around the constraints imposed by separatist violence, nationalist and elitist government, and ethnic and religious chauvinism, with skill that other internationals, such as mediators from countries like Norway, foreign donors, or the UN, have not been able to emulate. While the latter have been undermined by rapacious and paranoid local politics, local organizations (which in the interests of their safety should not be named), working in the areas of human rights and peacebuilding, have managed to maintain their roles of advocacy and accountability despite difficult, changing local conditions. They have managed with a mixture of international support and their own capacity and knowledge to offer the possibility of a hybrid peace.

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7. Non-Violence—The Knotted Gun (1980) is a bronze sculpture by Swedish artist Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd which is placed outside the UN Building in New York

In both Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina after the wars and during the late 1990s and early 2000s, international actors became frustrated with their local counterparts’ tendencies to obstruct or ‘go slow’ on institutional reforms designed to bring the liberal state into being, particularly where these demanded social, cultural, economic, reform, or identity changes. The result in Bosnia was deadlock over the reform of the state while in Kosovo it brought into being a contested state. In Bosnia local non-cooperation at the elite political level with the various international actors made developing the liberal peace very difficult in a highly fragmented state. In response, a number of civil society organizations on the ground, involved in human rights and transitional justice matters, and cultural projects, emerged in an attempt to speed up progress in resolving the country’s various problems (though not necessarily conforming to international expectations of a liberal peace). In Kosovo, a range of organizations had undertaken to provide many of the services that the state had refused them during the 1980s, and after the war in 1999, they emerged from the shadows to become part of the new state. Both phenomena denote a potential hybrid form of peace and state emerging.

In Timor Leste since independence in 2002 and during the UN peacekeeping operation and especially after the recurrence of violence in 2006, local actors have been crucial in building a hybrid peace that has both social and political dimensions. Two of the most visible examples were the return to the landscape of ‘sacred houses’ and the creation of a social welfare system. Sacred houses are centres of family and social life, where local politics, arrangements, and economic support are decided, and where celebrations and ceremonies take place that bind communities, including conflict resolution ceremonies (see Figure 8). Their re-emergence is indicative of a deeper stabilization where international approaches had failed. Income from the Timor Gap oil and gas reserves, combined with a sense at the highest levels in government that a peace dividend needed to be distributed more directly by the state, and that the state had to reflect Timorese identity and history more closely, has more recently made peacebuilding more relevant to people’s daily lives. As a result Timor Leste has become more stable and, of course, hybrid.

In the Solomon Islands, there are similar dynamics emerging in the post-conflict period. Most communities gain their law and justice, representation, and welfare from localized, customary, orchurch-oriented institutions and processes. The modern state appears to them to be distant and often predatory, as do international markets. The Ministry for National Unity, Reconciliation, and Peace, established in 2009, has a very clear understanding of the contextual difficulties that the liberal peace system finds itself in, as well as an understanding of how local institutions, along with the liberal peace system, may offer empowerment and an alternative. This includes incorporating the customary system of elders and chiefs, customary law, the role of the churches, and the imagining of some specific cultural and historical symbols and identity formations that make the state relevant to its people. As in Timor Leste, a parallel form of politics to the modern peacebuilding process exists that internationals can barely comprehend. In Timor Leste, the modern state seems to be beginning to converge with these. This has yet to happen in the Solomon Islands in a formal sense, but informally, it is beginning. For example, a team of local and international constitutional lawyers are now working on the implications of a merger of state and customary institutions, a process that has also begun across the region.

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8. These buildings are known as uma lulik or sacred houses in Timor Leste

This is also something that Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai has called for in the context of Afghanistan. He developed his ‘big tent’ strategy to try to be inclusive of difficult actors such as the Taliban and a range of factions. However, this attempt at creating a state inclusive of powerful actors has led to its co-option by warlords and a continuing Taliban rebellion, underlining the weaknesses of statebuilding as an elite practice that is supposed to trickle down. However, Karzai argues that liberal democracy can be achieved but only if it respects local identity, religion, tradition, and society.

Encouragingly for liberal peacebuilding’s supporters, local agents of peacebuilding often seek to develop relations with international donors. They draw on arguments in favour of democracy, human rights, free markets, and a rule of law, but also want to localize these. This requires exceptions and modifications to account for local contextual dynamics, sometimes confronting liberal norms, sometimes learning from them.

What is notable about most peacebuilding and statebuilding cases is that inequality and social exclusion (i.e. very high statistical indicators of poverty and inequality) are often little changed from the point at which a peace process began. This means that there has not been much of a peace dividend in everyday life in practice (though there has been a security dividend).

International assistance and enablement are necessary for peace to emerge in many of these locations, but ultimately emerging post-liberal and hybrid forms of peace depend on ‘local ownership’ to attain local legitimacy.

Peace formation

The difficulties faced by peacebuilding and statebuilding policy raise the question of how contributions to peace from a range of informal local actors may be understood and externally supported. Collaboration and cooperation has been a key motivating factor for the formation of society and polities throughout human history in villages, communities, cities, states, and international organizations. It is widely accepted by anthropologists that peace systems emerge side by side with violence and war. Trust networks, civil society, and social movements mobilize over issues pertaining to violence and inequality, which interfere with peace and order. In other words, at least partly, a society desires to be peaceful, orients its cultural framework in that direction, and produces the social, political, economic, and institutional means to do so.

There are a range of potential spaces in which ‘peace formation’ processes may arise. Peace formation may draw on social, kin, and customary networks. It may include many different types of association, from unions to charities or regional trade networks. It may require formal international support for civil society. A rich web of relationships and networks is emerging from the local to the global that oppose embedded injustices and inequalities. The capacity for self-organization for non-violent resistance or to provide support, public services, and even security and policing, where the state is non-existent or incapable, has been a common occurrence, as the case of Somalia has illustrated since the early 1990s. It is often aimed at providing public services—health, education, and basic security and needs—in an everyday setting.

Basing peace projects on locally legitimate institutions, processes, customs, identities, and actors and their needs is vital. Any such process will inevitably be a political choice, probably best made by a wide range of actors on the ground and enabled internationally. These processes blur the lines between formal and informal dynamics, the state, custom, and the traditional. Often women’s groups are at the forefront, from Liberia to Bangladesh and Brazil. It places society, the village, the community, and the city at the centre of peace, rather than the state, security, and markets.

This deeper fabric of peace agency in local contexts, even if heavily disrupted by conflict, tends to have pre-existed most state and international level interventions. Conflict and the many interventions that occur during a peace process may also spur innovation and new social and political projects to emerge which help transform the conflict into a new political agreement. It may utilize new forms of media and communications, not to mention transport and trade connections, or informal networks through academic or global social movements or INGOs.

Without external support, of course, what such local mobilization can achieve in terms of peace formation may be very limited. Likewise, without local peace formation dynamics, international actors will probably be ineffective in promoting change or transformation, resulting in at best a negative hybrid form of peace. Peace formation dynamics contribute to the nature of the state and, to some degree, the shape of the international system, offering the possibility of a locally and internationally legitimate positive hybrid peace.

There were hints of peace formation in early post-Cold War peacebuilding frameworks. In post-war El Salvador UNESCO supported a Programme on ‘Establishing a Culture of Peace’ in 1992 that recognized that human development, poverty reduction, and addressing root causes also meant engaging with peace in cultural terms. By 1995, programmes were under way in Mozambique, Burundi, and the Philippines among other countries, to connect peacemaking with social values, assumptions, and historical perspectives and structures, eventually becoming part of a national culture. This approach was aimed at respect for difference, solidarity, and social justice in general, and the establishment of a wide range of venues and spaces of dialogue in which rights, representation, and justice might emerge. They would eventually coalesce into institutions, it was hoped. Local peace architectures link grassroots organizations, local peace councils and committees, with local and national governmental institutions.

After the Lome Peace Accord in Sierra Leone in 1999, a Commission for the Consolidation of Peace was established along with national Commissions for Democracy, Human Rights, and others. The UN Peacebuilding Commission also helped to coordinate these. A parliamentary group also containing civil society members was established to work on a ‘national peace infrastructure’, which has included a range of fora, including a women’s forum. Similarly, in Timor Leste UNDP has supported a Ministry of Peacebuilding’s engagement with land and gender issues. Local peace councils of elders and activists have to become integrated into formal decentralized government as well as a National Peace Council, aimed at mediating conflict using local tools. Gradually the local structure has built up into a national structure, with varying degrees of success. Nepal also has a Ministry of Peace and Reconstruction along similar lines. South Sudan has established a Ministry for Peace aimed at a comprehensive implementation of the 2005 peace agreement, as well as using traditional methods, aimed at increasing the breadth of stakeholders in a peace process, improving the participation of civil society and communities, and enabling a broad reconciliation.

To some extent peace formation and its translation into peace infrastructures draws on local and historic practices of conflict management and resolution. In Somaliland in the early 1990s, localized peace agreements led by local elders utilizing customary law eventually resulted in a constitutional structure that included elected party representatives as well as a clan-oriented upper house. This grew out of widespread but localized peace conferences and discussions across Somaliland driven by the grassroots as well as business, clan, and political leaders, which has resulted in a reasonably stable polity, though it is as yet unrecognized as a state.

In Afghanistan, there are long-standing traditions of conflict resolution by tribal elders, village councils, the jirga dialogues, and the Peace Shuras or Councils, at local, district, and national level. These have become part of a more formal understanding of peace and stabilization, through the Community Development Councils and the National Solidarity Programme run by a government ministry, which, though far from successful, have become part of the international expectation about the nature of the state that will emerge.

In Kenya after the post-election violence of 2007, an Open Forum was created and a Citizen’s Agenda for Peace was developed. Individuals gathered from all sectors of society in the weeks immediately after the conflict broke out. This was based on a peace movement started previously by a group of women in 1993, which led to the formation of a series of peace committees. A National Policy on Peacebuilding and Conflict Management emerged in 2009, and peace committees in all districts were set up according to the National Accord and Reconciliation Act of 2008. This process drew in a number of ministries and levels of government and the media, and was also connected to the high-level peace process. Crucially, it was driven and legitimized by civil society and at the grassroots.

Such agendas influenced the 2011 Busan Agreement on a ‘New Deal for Engagement in Fragile States’ amongst the main international donors. This referred to core peacebuilding and statebuilding goals, and emphasized the need for legitimate politics, people’s security, and justice, drawing on the Millennium Development Goals. The G7+ (an organization of so-called ‘fragile states’—the ‘club that everyone wants to leave’—including Timor Leste, Somalia, Sierra Leone, and fifteen others) influenced this agreement. Such developments have brought to the fore the notion that societies build peace and states, not only donors or state elites. This has meant ‘putting the last first’: a partial reversal, and has certainly led to a refinement of Western knowledge about peace.