by Fons Van Overbeek (Author)
The concept of 'hybridity' is often still poorly theorized and problematically applied by peace and development scholars and researchers of resource governance. This book turns to a particular ethnographic reading of Michel Foucault's Governmentality and investigates its usefulness to study precisely those mechanisms, processes and practices that hybridity once promised to clarify.
Claim-making to land and authority in a post-conflict environment is the empirical grist supporting this exploration of governmentality. Specifically in the periphery of Bukavu. This focus is relevant as urban land is increasingly becoming scarce in rapidly expanding cities of eastern Congo, primarily due to internal rural-to-urban migration as a result of regional insecurity. The governance of urban land is also important analytically as land governance and state authority in Africa are believed to be closely linked and co-evolve.
An ethnographic reading of governmentality enables researchers to study hybridization without biasing analysis towards hierarchical dualities. Additionally, a better understanding of hybridization in the claim-making practices may contribute to improved government intervention and development assistance in Bukavu and elsewhere.
Back Jacket
In Bukavu, a rapidly growing city in the troubled east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, neither claimants of land nor claimants to authority can rely solely on one procedure or institution to secure their claims. Lasting recognition of claims requires constant renegotiation across a shifting diversity of competing individuals and their practices, contributing to an unpredictable hybridization of practices. This constant hybridization of the requirements of recognition compromises the security of any claim - especially for those in the city's periphery.
This book meticulously demonstrates that an operationalization of hybridity through an ethnographic reading of Michel Foucault's framework of governmentality is an analytically productive choice. It provides a detailed, non-normative, and non-essentialist analysis of hybridity and sheds light on the complexities of hybridizing practices, while also providing clear-cut, easily accessible, and very concrete examples of how governmentality may serve ethnographic studies of 'the conduct of conduct' in all sorts of deeply complex environments.
Author Biography
Fons van Overbeek, Historian, Wageningen, The Netherlands.