Course description

This course engages with key contemporary debates in the theory and practice of peacebuilding, conflict transformation and formation of peaceful political community. It investigates the challenges and questions generated through the interaction and enmeshment of top-down institutional approaches to peacebuilding with bottom-up informal modes of peace formation and governance in the local context. It explores the international/local and state/non-state interactions in peacebuilding, focusing on the notion of hybridity and concepts like 'hybrid forms of peace' and 'hybrid political orders'. The course begins by unpacking the conceptual framework and explores the theoretical arguments around statebuilding, hybrid political orders, hybrid peace and what is referred to as the `local turn'. In doing so we explore legal pluralism and hybrid approaches to policing and security. We then critically engage with these concepts - challenging the normative implications and considering the shortfalls of these arguments. Once the key concepts are bedded down we take a close look at what the `local' and hybridity means in practice through a series of guest lectures covering a range of case studies. Guest lecturers share stories as practitioners and field researchers from Indonesia, China, Indigenous Australia, Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, and Pacific Island Countries.

Archived offerings