Understanding Resistance and its Implications for Hybridity: Insights from a Project on Alternative Visions of Peace and Justice

This paper focuses on one aspect of hybridity: resistance. Described as one factor which shapes hybridity in post-conflict contexts there is in fact very little in-depth conceptual work on resistance in the peace and conflict literature. This paper addresses that gap and will present a conceptual approach which is being developed as part of a research project on 'Resisting Transitional Justice? Alternative Visions of Peace and Justice'. It has been argued that transitional justice is part of liberal peace, and thus it can be subject to the same critiques (Sriram 2009). This paper speaks to the literature on hybridity through a focus on transitional justice which highlights the ways in which it is a political, and thus necessarily contested, process containing elements of hybridity in its everyday practice. Taking this observation one step further this paper also argues that we must seek to understand not only the nature of resistance in transitional societies, but the relational processes through which acts come to be defined as resistance. This builds on, and contributes to, the concept of hybridity which tends towards observing and describing resistance rather than explaining it as a relational concept. Importantly, our approach to resistance does not assume that it is necessarily a rejection of transitional justice as such, but rather that it may, if taken seriously, tell us something about the presence of divergent approaches to peace and justice within a given society, the kinds of divergences which produce hybridity. This prompts a series of research questions, for example, whose visions of peace are perceived as legitimate or deviant and from which vantage points? Thus resistance is not just about counter claims of policy making but is at its core a question of hybridity shaped by divergent understandings of justice, peace and reconciliation at times of transition.