ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a more nuanced examination of the merits and drawbacks of hybridity in the specific context of peace and conflict studies and offers new research avenues for addressing some of the fallacies and criticism. Hybridity in peace and conflict studies has come to represent both the limits of liberal peace interventions and the transition towards post-liberal forms of peace that take into account local agency and context when designing peace interventions. The chapter offers a preliminary proposal for expanding the conceptual basis of hybridity. Three well-known concepts – liquidity, assemblage and figuration – could hold the key to rescuing hybridity. The chapter explores ways in which Zygmunt Bauman's liquidity, Deleuze's assemblage and Norbert Elias's figuration could complement and supplement hybridity debates. It describes the new possible conceptual avenues that would rescue hybridity from the perceived policy-prescriptive positivism and critical-emancipatory normativism.
