Description
The concept of hybridity, developed by postcolonial scholarship, enjoys wide purchase in studies of contemporary peacebuilding. Hybridity is typically employed as an analytical tool to understand encounters between structures of global governance (and the agents of these structures), who carry out peacebuilding projects; and those subject to these forms of governance in post-conflict spaces. In this paper, I examine hybridity as a traveling theory, following Edward Said. Said argues that traveling theory can both nourish intellectual activity by moving past the constraints of the particular historical and social location to which a theory responds; at the same time as such travel risks a certain depoliticisation of ideas. In this paper, I provide an overview of the development of hybridity in postcolonial literature, and then review how this theory has been taken up to understand peacebuilding. I interrogate how hybridity travels, asking: What is lost in the travel? What new conceptual features emerge? I caution that the critical insights of hybridity risk being lost through a certain intellectual and political deracination of the concept in the peacebuilding literature, and argue for an attentiveness to the process of travel itself in deploying the analytical insights of postcolonial thought.
