Hybrid Spaces – Hybrid Identities? Women’s Agency in the Context of Peacebuilding in Post-Conflict Iraq

International Peacebuilding efforts in Iraq have been widely criticized from both practitioners and academics. Without neglecting these critiques I argue that external intervention – maybe especially the experience of failure and helplessness - has created a space through which “local” actors find opportunities to position themselves and act in the context of Peacebuilding. Distinctions between „the local“, national and international are blurred not only concerning structures and policies in Iraq but as well in the acting and positioning of actors themselves. Hybridity is both found in norms and thinking of actors and spaces that are created through acting. Locality is one element that structures acting but at the same time is transformed through acting into structures that we can call hybrid. Peacebuilding efforts of women in Iraq can neither be solely described as act of resistance nor are actors exclusively co-opted by the liberal peace doctrine promoted by international actors. In order to overcome the dichotomy between local and global the paper analyses to what extent concepts that define space and identity as constructed through practices and interactions and thus relational contribute to a deepened theoretical understanding of realties in post-conflict societies that goes beyond - or adds to - the notion of hybridity. Building on the work of Massey and Löw, I aim to evaluate how local and global can be described as spaces rather than “pure” places in the context of Iraq. In that sense, NGOs in Baghdad can be regarded as a space where local, national and internatonal/global structures are moulded in the way people act and position themselves and thus offer a promising empirical basis for developing theoretical concepts of these very phenomena.