Hybrid Peace: Ethnographies of War

Abstract

The article observes the latest ethnographic research on modern warfare, which sheds light on interconnected internal security regimes, military invasions abroad, and so-called hybrid or rhizomatic warfare. The paper critiques two analytical categories: notions of hybrid warfare and the “state of exception” (Giorgio Agamben). Hybridity in the context of modern warfare is generally used to describe the enemy or threat, rather than self-description. The author of the article proposes the notion of “hybrid peace” in the dual meaning of peace as space and peace as the opposite of the state of war. This notion points to the ontological uncertainty of the world at the beginning of the 21 st century as a state of undeclared wars, and this state of uncertainty is no longer a “state of exception.” The new normality of the hybrid world is examined in terms of those zones where the use of military force is possible and military violence is justified, and those where it is not. Examples of the study of such military interventions include works on drone warfare in the Middle East, the extraterritoriality of garrisons and guerrilla movements in Central and West Africa, and the rhizomatic operations of the Israel Defense Forces. To understand these and many other cases, the author finds productive the notion of Carl Schmitt’s “nomos of the Earth” and his “theory of the guerrilla.”