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Critical hybridity: exploring cultural, legal and political pluralism
No full textIntroduction
No full textThis introduction presents an overview of key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book aims to create a space for a conversation to take place inside disciplines as well as across them, with the final aim of creating bridges between different accounts and perspectives of hybridity and hybridization. It also aims to steer the discussion away from the celebratory conception of hybridity by meshing it with considerations of power structures and relations. Migrating from the cultural and postcolonial fields, hybridity considerations have now permeated many disciplines, including peace and conflict studies, international development, and law
The Semantics of Statebuilding and Nationbuilding: Looking Beyond Neo-Weberian Approaches
No full textA narrow form of institutionalism, focusing on institutional reconstruction and the capabilities of the state to secure its grip on society, has prevailed in the statebuilding literature since the 1990s. If it is possible to identify a distinctive Weberian influence in the contemporary statebuilding literature, notably through an overwhelming focus on security and securitisation as the basis of state consolidation, and an implicit definition of legitimacy as belief in legitimacy, privileging top-down processes of justification of support for the central authority, it is also true that Weber’s influence in social sciences has been somewhat distorted in the process of knowledge production. Many social scientists have reduced Weber’s explanation of beliefs to the process of internalisation of these beliefs, oversimplifying state–society relationships and state formation processes. While demonstrating the limits of these approaches to state and statebuilding, this chapter also echoes the need to break the tacit neo-Weberian monopoly on state and statebuilding by suggesting a ‘social legitimacy approach’, loosely based on Durkheimian sociology
The Semantics of Contemporary Statebuilding: Kosovo, Timor-Leste, and the ‘Empty-Shell’ Approach
No full textThe international conception buttressing the set up of international administrations in Kosovo and Timor-Leste was closely intertwined with the semantics of statebuilding displayed at this time. The concept of ‘empty shell’ came to represent the mental image practitioners shared concerning the local context following the two conflicts and was ipso facto transformed into an operative approach. This chapter aims to analyze this international conception – dubbed here the ‘empty shell approach’ – by clarifying how the UN came to impose its authority over the two territories in a very similar process. While the literature on each statebuilding experiment is vast and compelling, few authors have attempted to contrast the two case studies, especially regarding the mental conception and the semantics informing the governance process of these territories since 1999. After defining and detailing the ‘empty-shell approach,’ the chapter looks at the operational approach related to this specific semantics of statebuilding, that is the ‘more is better approach.’ Finally, the chapter analyzes the limits of the ‘empty-shell approach’ through the specific example of the justice reform in Timor-Leste
‘Fragile states’:introducing a political concept
No full textThe special issue ‘Fragile States: A Political Concept’ investigates the emergence, dissemination and reception of the notion of ‘state fragility’. It analyses the process of conceptualisation, examining how the ‘fragile states’ concept was framed by policy makers to describe reality in accordance with their priorities in the fields of development and security. The contributors to the issue investigate the instrumental use of the ‘state fragility’ label in the legitimisation of Western policy interventions in countries facing violence and profound poverty. They also emphasise the agency of actors ‘on the receiving end’, describing how the elites and governments in so-called ‘fragile states’ have incorporated and reinterpreted the concept to fit their own political agendas. A first set of articles examines the role played by the World Bank, the oecd, the European Union and the g7+ coalition of ‘fragile states’ in the transnational diffusion of the concept, which is understood as a critical element in the new discourse on international aid and security. A second set of papers employs three case studies (Sudan, Indonesia and Uganda) to explore the processes of appropriation, reinterpretation and the strategic use of the ‘fragile state’ concept
Deconstructing a sovereign right: the hybridisation of the anti-death penalty discourse in Europe
No full textThe OECD’s discourse on fragile states: expertise and the normalisation of knowledge production
No full textThe concept of legitimacy has been highly influential in policy recommendations concerning state building in ‘fragile states’. Indeed, depending on how ‘legitimacy’ is conceived, the actions and practices of state builders can differ substantially. This article discusses what is at stake in the conceptualisation of ‘legitimacy’ by comparing the academic literature with the normative production of the oecd. Looking at two approaches to legitimacy – the institutionalist or neo-Weberian approach focusing on institutional reconstruction, and the social legitimacy approach emphasising the importance of social cohesion for successful state building – the article shows that both these conceptions are present in most reports, but also that the neo-Weberian approach tends to prevail over the social legitimacy perspective. Through a series of interviews with oecd officials and scholar-practitioners who have participated in the writing process of oecd reports, we hint, finally, at future research avenues on the social conditions of knowledge production and its normalisation
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