Frictional Binaries: Hybridity, Civil Society, and Liberal-Local Peacebuilding in Mindanao

Abstract

International and local civil society organisations have usually been identified amongst the key actors for the conceptual and practical development of liberal and post-liberal peace approaches. The concept of hybrid peacebuilding, for example, has highlighted the need to empower local civil society groups. Critics of the ‘local turn’ in peacebuilding, however, argue against the conceptual idealisation of hybridity. Using examples from Mindanao, this chapter contends that the debates on liberal-local hybridity can most meaningfully gain from asking questions not only about the processes of internationalisation and localisation, but also about the ways in which hybrid mechanisms are able to produce more or less stable outcomes. By turning into the agency of civil society actors, it suggests that the concept of hybridity, which is often represented using dichotomised categories (e.g. ‘liberal-international’ and ‘illiberal-local’), tends to oversimplify the conceptual intricacies and dynamic processes between top-down and bottom-up approaches. The analysis in the chapter aims to contribute to the discussions on hybridity by illustrating the manner civil society actors are able to negotiate their complexities within the frictional binaries of liberal ideas, institutions and resources vis-à-vis local practices, power relations and norms.