(In)Security and Hybrid Justice Systems in Mindanao, Philippines

Abstract

Hybridity is often conflated with the fragile state or the ‘absence’ of the state in a conflict environment.¹ The emergence of hybrid institutions is also explained primarily in terms of the lack of capacity and legitimacy of state organs and its personnel or in the condition of a power vacuum.² A sense of power disequilibrium or societal imbalance and disarray inheres from this presumption. Hybridity, however, serves a function that sustains conflict resilience and at the same time address immediate justice needs. Hybrids arise to provide a state of equilibrium and to provide order in an otherwise messy condition—while