The ‘Hybrid Turn’: Approaches and Potentials

Abstract

Hybridity, the hybrid turn and hybrid political orders have become increasingly common as terms in debates around peacebuilding, state formation, governance and, to some extent, counter-insurgency and security in postcolonial states. While circulating in scholarly debate, where they are best exemplified in the work of Oliver Richmond,¹ Volker Boege, Roger Mac Ginty and others, these terms, or approaches associated with them, now also appear regularly in policy and practice arenas,² where they have emerged as part of a response to what is seen as the relative failure of many international postwar reconstruction, statebuilding and security interventions to establish stable, relatively