Reviews of special issue

Introduction

The introduction is written very clearly and seeks to establish the broader terrain within which this special issue is situated and the distinct contributions that the collection makes. The introduction makes a persuasive case that the collection contributions in two core ways, by ‘decentring’ scholarship on international intervention to bring a broader range of contexts, actors, experiences and perspectives into view; and by drawing across a range of disciplinary subfields to bring insights from area studies, development studies, critical peace studies, sociology and anthropology into the study of international intervention, an area of enquiry still shaped predominantly by the core traditions of the discipline of international relations (IR).

The introduction serves two purposes: firstly and most importantly to set up the collection in this way – to establish the need for a broader approach to international intervention and to delineate the distinct contributions of this collection; and, secondly, to introduce the specific articles and how they relate to each other and flesh out this broader research agenda. I suggest that the claims elaborated here with regard to the first of these purposes would be strengthened by attending to the following points. None of these require extensive revisions but would tighten the main claims being made in the introduction.

Much of the setting up of the issue, the need for a broader perspective, conceptual rethinking, etc., hinges on initially identifying the changing form of international intervention. There is an emphasis on ‘the changing nature of international interventions’ unfolding, which demands adequate conceptualisation beyond existing theoretical approaches. However, the periodisation of this identified change remains vague and unspecified. There are references to ‘in the past decades’; juxtapositions between ‘current’ interventions and ‘early’ or ‘earlier’ interventions; ‘traditional’ peacekeeping and ‘more recent interventions’; and the characteristics interventions ‘now’ have. The authors observe that ‘though international interventions are often considered to be a relatively recent occurrence, they have a long and often unwritten history’, but the longer history is not discussed or sketched. The broader claims that the introduction makes of the issue as a whole would be strengthened if a clearer sense of the periodisation of perceived change could be set out here. When and where did the earlier or traditional forms of intervention take place? Can some examples of the earlier forms be given?

Alongside delineating a sense of change in the practice of international intervention, the argument for this contribution – the need to rethink the conceptual approach to intervention – also rests on pointing out the limits or deficiencies of the existing literature. The editors argue that existing approaches remain shaped by traditional narrow concepts of what constitutes intervention (a focus on military intervention); by a narrow focus on Northern actors and perspectives; and by an underlying assumption that intervention remains the exception rather than the norm. These criticisms are no doubt valid, but the case needs to be made in a more convincing manner by demonstrating these flaws of the existing literature. This could be done by (i) including one or two paragraphs specifically reviewing what the editors refer to as ‘the state of the art in the field’, as well as – or, at the very least – (ii) including specific references whenever claims about the existing literature are made (such as ‘a majority of studies’; ‘traditionally more narrow conceptualisations’; ‘research on interventions still tends to …’; ‘current research retains too strong a focus on ..’ etc.). In other words, the argument for a decentred approach needs first to demonstrate more clearly that much of the existing or core literature on intervention is narrowly ‘centred’.

The section outlining the research agenda to which the collection contributes identifies the need for two elements: firstly, a more global study of interventions; and, secondly, a more sophisticated and in-depth conceptual and methodological approach to the study of intervention. The first of these is elaborated in terms of giving voice to experiences and perspectives beyond the North, pluralising the scope of what is examined when we explore intervention, in a way that heeds existing debates about inequalities in knowledge production, the ‘local turn’ in international peace-building literature and research strategies that pluralise the political subjects of inquiry. The discussion rightly underlines that doing so requires deconstructing binary labels of ‘local’ and ‘international’, the need to not think of ‘local’ as a geographic referent. The second element is elaborated in terms of drawing on a broader range of methods and theoretical perspectives, such as ethnography, the study of affect, interpretive methodologies and a relational approach or ontology.

These two elements are introduced as firstly empirical or primarily empirical and, secondly, a theoretical reconfiguration of the study of intervention, which is ‘more fundamental’. This identification of the global broadening out and pluralising being primary empirical, an initial move that then needs complementing by theoretical rethinking, seems to go against the very things being argued here. Much of the literature criticising the Eurocentric character of mainstream IR argues precisely that what is required is not just a broader empirical scope to include societies and regions previously left out. Eurocentrism is not just a problem of a narrow empirical scope, but always a methodological problem raising bigger questions about the politics of knowledge, epistemology, the processes and consequences of concept formation and so on. The problems and implications of Eurocentrism cannot be grasped through a ‘theoretical’ and ‘empirical’ binary because the two are always implicated. While the challenge of ‘decentring’ set out here has not been charted primarily in terms of Eurocentrism, nevertheless much of what is discussed shares the same terrain. In short, what the introduction discusses here in setting out a research agenda is richer than is warranted by this ‘empirical’/‘theoretical’ division. I would suggest changing the delineation of the two elements or strands of the agenda to avoid this separation, which does not do justice to what is actually presented.

Much of the introduction refers to the concept of ‘intervention society’, referencing Bonacker et al. (2010). The notion appears before the introduction of the concept (p. 4, ‘How the effects of interventions are perceived by individuals in intervention societies’). I suggest that the concept is introduced specifically, before it is employed. Can this concept be unpacked a little more? As a concept drawn from sociology, what are the implications of IR using this concept? Does it reinforce a dichotomy of the ‘domestic’ and ‘international’, or does the notion of ‘society’ in ‘intervention society’ go beyond just what is being intervened in/on? Have other critical approaches in IR started to use this concept? Does the use of it here in this special issue simply add to IR, or also add to the conceptualisation of ‘intervention society’ itself?

Finally, can the editors of this special issue, in addition to summarising the individual articles, offer some commentary on the relations between them? This need not be extensive (although if a subsequent edited volume were planned, it would be well worth pushing this further). Does the critique in some of the articles go further than, and have implications for, that elaborated in others? For example, the treatment of ‘local’ research and knowledge in articles 1 and 3 is quite different. The first employs a relatively uncritical endorsement of how locally produced knowledge might be communicated with policy makers to improve policy, while the third outlines a notion of selected ‘local’ knowledge being deliberately incorporated into broader transnational processes in a way consistent with broader and more powerful Western-centred agendas. The various articles draw in different ways on other disciplines and literatures beyond IR – from sociology, ethnography, science and technology studies – with what effect. How is the notion of ‘decentring’ deployed in the various articles, in different ways, with different consequences? Several articles discuss and claim to employ some form of ethnographic research – do they do so in different ways, and if so, how and why, if at all, does it matter?

It is inevitable that an edited collection of individual contributions will address shared themes in different ways – the introduction might draw out some of the further questions that arise from such differences, even if briefly, as a way of further expanding a future research agenda started by this collection.

In this regard I wonder also whether it would be worth thinking about the order of the articles. Is the current order the best one? Perhaps some comment on the different problems posed and raised in different ways by the articles could be woven into an account of their order and sequence as well as what each does by itself.

Decentring the intervention experts

This article focuses primarily on relatively broad questions of method related not just to the production of knowledge per se, but specifically to the problem of how academic knowledge and policy formulation do and might interact, and the challenges and requirements for academic knowledge to be constructed and communicated in such a way as to effect change in the design of policy. This discussion is elaborated in fairly general terms and addresses the relationship between social inquiry, policy and implementation broadly, while also specifically concerned with contexts of post-conflict peace-building. The contribution to the special issue as a whole is articulated in terms of the need to ‘decentre’ the ‘intervention experts’.

The article makes a series of moves. The introduction first poses the problem of the relationship between academic research and policy in post-conflict contexts. The first section briefly reviews current literature on the character of post-Cold War intervention in terms of the ‘liberal peace’. The purpose of this section is not really to engage with the critiques of liberal peace-building, but rather to identify that the lack of success of such initiatives poses problems for academic research. Put simply, if international interventions to promote peace have not worked well, how can research into the process and experience of peace-building be done in a way to generate insights that can inform policy and therefore improve such interventions? This sets up the terrain for the rest of the article, which focuses on the problem of transferring knowledge and findings from academic research to policy makers. The second section reviews debates in what is termed the ‘knowledge utilisation literature’ (Is this the author’s own term or a term more generally used? This should be clarified.) and identifies a series of features of academic research that prevent or limit effective communication with and impact upon the world of policy making and implementation. One of the problems, it is argued, arises from the complexity of actual post-conflict settings themselves, which exacerbates the tendency for international policy makers to employ generalised models that cannot address the specificity and complexity of any particular local context. The third section of the article then discusses, at some length, the approach of ethnographic peace research (EPR), and charts how such an approach has the capacity to overcome a number of the barriers or challenges identified previously. This approach to research is rooted in the local context, involves lengthy participation with local actors and serves as a better base for producing insights that can be communicated to policy actors with actual local influence than more generalised, universal or abstract knowledge generated at a distance.

The relationship between this article and the concerns of the special issue as a whole is clear. The main weakness of this article in its current form is the lack of demonstration of the claims being made. Much of the discussion ironically suffers from the very problems being discussed: it is largely very general and ungrounded in any specific example or examples. How does the challenge of knowledge informing policy in post-conflict settings differ from other knowledge-policy settings? Much of the discussion draws on an article by Keeley and Scoones (1999) that focused on environment policy. Are the problems discussed here general to all areas of international policy? The section on ethnographic peace research, which constitutes the core of the article’s overall argument, makes a series of claims that are not demonstrated. I suggest that the article as a whole would work far better and make a more convincing contribution if some greater effort to demonstrate the claims being made could be provided. This could be either by describing one specific example of ethnographic peace research in a specific post-conflict setting and how the knowledge produced was or is being communicated to and used by policy makers or has affected actual policy practice; or by drawing on a series of examples to elaborate and ground some of the general claims that are made.

I wonder whether this article might be better placed later in the special issue, and one way of approaching the suggested revision might be for the author to incorporate reference to some of the concrete cases or examples discussed in other articles within this collection, as well as drawing on other examples, as suggested above.

The final brief discussion of positivist and post-positivist approaches touches on a much larger set of debates that are not adequately addressed here. This final discussion appears almost as an afterthought, and the points being made, such as the ‘nihilistic potential’ of post-positivist critique tending to support the status quo, are not substantiated and thus not convincing. This final brief section emerges from the observation that ‘critics will question the assumption that “better” knowledge as provided by an EPR agenda will result in “better” policy’. My suggestion would be that this concern of imagined critics is addressed in a more substantial way in the article itself, as indicated above, in place of this final part of the discussion.

Beyond the thrall of the state

This is an ambitious article. It aims to develop and defend a theoretically and methodologically sophisticated and innovative approach to the study of governance and peace-building in contexts of international intervention, which takes as the starting point the need to look and think beyond the state as the assumed centre of gravity of post-conflict peace-building and, hence, intervention. As such, the link between this article and the overall project is clear.

The article begins by developing the idea of ‘decentring the state’. The article starts with observations about the centrality of the state in IR theory and in the actual approach to international intervention, and argues that while an assumed state-centrism might be valid in some contexts where the state is the central conditioning agent of socio-political order, in many contexts of intervention the state is not central and so different conceptual approaches are required. This leads to the first main section, which introduces an alternative approach within IR that emphasises processes and relations between entities rather than the characteristics of entities themselves. In this approach, the state emerges as an effect of social relations, practices and narratives, rather than being assumed from the outset as a pre-given entity. The relational approach then requires attention to the processes by which everyday life, behaviours, actions and interactions are patterned and regularised to give rise to socio-political order and to ‘meta-effects such as the state and nationalism’. Central here are ‘patterns of affective exchange’. This step leads to the next section on affect theory. The second main section introduces and summarises affect theory and its recent incorporation within IR. The author rejects analyses that use ‘affect’, ‘emotion’ and ‘feeling’ interchangeably, and seeks to explain and distinguish between these phenomena. The section then moves on to discuss the use of affect theory in practice or as a method in ethnographic research.

The third and fourth sections of the article then provide an analysis of ‘relational-affective peace governance’ in Solomon Islands. After a brief contextual introduction, short descriptions of focus groups or contexts of post-conflict mediation are provided, emphasising the significance of particular forms of feeling/affect/emotion, followed by a more comprehensive mapping of affect, feeling and emotion across various processes and institutions and their relevance for conflict and peace. The final section of analysis draws these various strands together in a discussion that emphasises that a research method enabling sensibility to affect reveals aspects of the post-conflict context, and specifically, sources of socio-political order and governance, which might be missed by more conventional approaches assuming the centrality of the state; and that the study has revealed that the institutions of the church and kastom (traditional institutions) are significant sources of governance and political order alongside the state, and in much of the country are more important.

The article tries to do many things and I suggest that the contribution of the article would be strengthened if, firstly, the structure of the article is reworked, so as to foreground more convincingly from the outset the substantive concerns, and then make the theoretical arguments follow and work for the substantive concerns. At present the article reads as if it is being driven by debates in IR theory rather than the need to better understand an actual social problem in the world. The case of the Solomon Islands appears almost as an example to demonstrate a problem arising from debates in IR theory. The contribution of this potentially rich article would be strengthened if, instead, IR theory could be made to serve efforts to understand the world.

In order to do so I would suggest that the context of the Solomon Islands appears much earlier in the original setting up of the article, and the theoretical and methodological questions then emerge from that concrete concern. The reader needs to first get a sense of what it is that is difficult and challenging about the post-conflict context in the Solomon Islands, and then to be shown that conventional IR approaches, which assume the centrality of the state, fail to help understand that situation. Is there a dominant conventional account of the Solomon Islands post-conflict situation, whether in policy literature or IR/political science academic literature or both, which assumes rather than questions the centrality of the state and that fails to grasp what is actually going on in this post-conflict context? Can this then lead us to the need for a different theoretical and methodological approach – which would take us to the relational approach and affect theory, and then back to a richer account and analysis of the Solomon Islands situation informed by this approach.

In other words, I would suggest a logic for the article along the following lines:

Secondly, in reconfiguring the structure of the article I suggest that something more substantial about the actual post-conflict situation in the Solomon Islands is provided. While the burden of the article is to demonstrate the efficacy and significance of a different theoretical approach, the reader needs to be told more about the character of the conflict itself, and how it was or is being resolved. In its current form, some of the detail about this case only appears, frustratingly, right at the end of the discussion.

Thirdly, given the focus of the special issue as a whole, this article needs to say something more about international intervention as such, or at least defend why that is not the focus here. We hear virtually nothing about the international intervention in the Solomon Islands in this article. Perhaps part of the article seeks also to ‘decentre’ the exploration of post-conflict peace-building away from international actors and interventions to local actors, knowledge and institutions as the most important sources of harmonious enduring socio-political order, but if that is the case it should be made more explicit.

Counterinsurgency

This article provides a coherent, well argued and well substantiated analysis of the content and modes of production and circulation of military knowledge via transnational networks of expertise spanning ‘North’ and ‘South’, documenting a new approach to counterinsurgency focusing on the cooperation of elites from North and South. As an article in itself, the author/s provide a convincing account of recent developments that is well integrated into broader literatures and is well substantiated. The article requires attention to a number of minor matters – there are frequent spelling or typing errors and several references are missing from the bibliography – the article needs a thorough and careful proof-read. Some terms, such as ‘non-permissive’, seem assumed and technical. A more imaginative subtitle for the first section might be considered, instead of ‘analytical framework’ – something like Knowledge for Intervention, perhaps.

As a contribution to this special issue, in its current form the notion of ‘decentring’ seems rather weak. It is elaborated primarily with regard to the inclusion of experts, elites, ‘knowledge entrepreneurs’ from the South and exchanges between countries of the South (Somalia, Colombia, South Africa) such that a conventional focus on North–South hierarchies would miss these new South–South dynamics of the construction of transnational military and intervention doctrine and expertise. This seems a rather simplistic argument without further reflection. Surely an intentional effort to draw on and work with ‘local’ non-Western elites to strengthen the legitimacy of dominant positions, relationships and practices has long been an element of efforts to establish global hegemony. Certainly such an approach has long been evident in the arena of economic development. Something along these lines informed the debates in dependency theory of the 1970s regarding ‘comprador elites’, as well as sociological analyses of transnational class formation. In other words, there have long been critical analytical approaches to the construction and maintenance of international or global order, including its discursive or knowledge-based elements, which examine relations of power, alliances, cooperation and co-optation across the categories of ‘North’ and ‘South’.

Without wishing to force a relationship with the special issue as a whole, is there something more interesting that can be said about the notion of ‘decentring’ in relation to the substance and contribution of this article? Perhaps analytical attention to the role of non-Western elites in the construction, circulation and legitimation of dominant knowledge and practice (e.g. as conceptualised in terms of hegemony) has been more apparent in sociology and international political economy, and has until now escaped the attention of the literature on international intervention and counterinsurgency that might have followed more conventional IR state-centred conceptualisations. Could the argument in fact be that, in terms of the construction of transnational knowledge networks for or in relation to the exercise of US-centred or Western-centred power and global order, such forms of ‘decentring’ are not actually very new? Bringing out more strongly the contribution of this article to the special issue as a whole, and the concerns set out in the editors’ introduction, need not require significant revision but something more than is currently provided.

Marketing parliament

This article offers a very clearly argued and substantiated critique of Western interventions in the form of democracy promotion projects. The introduction does an excellent job of situating the article within a broader literature and, especially, within the concerns of this special issue. Thus, the article stands as an important piece of work in itself and is also very clearly oriented towards the aims and concerns of the special issue.

The article makes an original contribution drawing on original fieldwork to develop a well structured argument. I only have some minor suggestions to make.

‘Approaching the study of democracy promotion via its everyday effects arrives at a more appropriate and less normative understanding, etc. My discussion offers a first starting point for future, etc.’

There are also other works, including William Robinson’s Promoting Polyarchy (1996), which the author references, and the work of Milja Kurki (2012). There need not be a detailed engagement with these various works but they should not be ignored.

International interventions

This article provides an intriguing account of the experience of international intervention on the part of local or national intermediaries, examined in the cases of Lebanon and Cote D’Ivoire. The article draws on a framework of relational sociology to bring to the fore the perceptions and experiences of ‘the intervened upon’, on the basis of interviews with an array of individuals working for government ministries, donor agencies and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in various sectors in Lebanon and Cote D’Ivoire. The goal is to demonstrate, drawing on the various storylines emerging within these interviews, how the context and process of international intervention is characterised by a fluidity of power relations between international and national actors and agencies, and how the identities and agency of each are co-constituted. The focus on the experiences and interpretations of intermediaries is highlighted as an important contribution to understanding contexts of intervention, as these actors ‘make up the core of intervention projects’ and a study of their experiences reveals how ‘interactions settle into more sedimented, stabilised relations over time’ and that these ‘fluctuating and multifaceted’ constellations of power lie ‘at the heart of governance interventions in Lebanon and Cote D’Ivoire’.

After a discussion of the analytical framework of relational sociology, emphasising the arena of transactions as a focus of enquiry so as to avoid the essentialisation of static entities but rather to grasp ongoing relationships of interaction through which power relations are negotiated and played out, the article discusses insights from intermediary actors in Lebanon and Cote D’Ivoire. This main part of the article highlights perceptions among intermediaries in both contexts regarding the imposition of external agendas, the weight of bureaucracy, the problems of external expats with little local knowledge and the extent to which the position as intermediary between international donor agencies and other national or local actors affords possibilities for negotiation, shifting agendas and gaining leverage.

This is an interesting account, but it leaves the reader slightly nonplussed about why, ultimately, it matters. Is it possible for the authors to step back from the core analysis of interactions and perceptions of the intermediaries to reveal more clearly what is at stake in this account? This might be done by contrasting the insights gained from their approach with some of the problems of more conventional analyses of international intervention or agency in Lebanon and Cote D’Ivoire. It might be done by charting how this specific focus on two contexts of prolonged international intervention sheds light on some of the broader processes highlighted by the editors in the introduction. The introduction notes significant shifts in the nature of international interventions, observing, for example, that ‘unlike the military intervention style of early humanitarian interventions, current international engagement has frequently become less directly coercive and more transformative in scope’. Beyond the ongoing experiences of shifting and negotiating power and agency of local intermediaries in Lebanon and Cote D’Ivoire as they interact with various external donor organisations in the implementation of specific projects and programmes, is this part of a broader and ultimately significant process of societal transformation? What purchase does the concept of ‘intervention society’ offer to this analysis? How and why does it matter that such constellations of fluctuating power between national and international actors with sometimes divergent and sometimes convergent agendas and interests lie at the core of international intervention in these two societies? How do these processes differ from experiences of bureaucratic interaction in any context? It might be that the chosen analytical frame is not sufficient to address these broader questions, in which case the authors might provide some comment on the limitations as well as strengths of this approach, and how a relational sociology approach to the study of international intervention might need to be complemented by other approaches in order to shed more light on what is at stake in this moment of ongoing international intervention in postcolonial societies.

The interplay of interventions and hybridisation

This is a rich article in both conceptual and substantive terms. The article opens with a brief discussion of how the notion of hybridisation – a staple of postcolonial theory – has been employed as an important element, especially within the peace literature, to elaborate a critique of the dominant ‘failed/fragile state’ discourse within both the academic and policy literature. This opening argument, which briefly notes limitations of the mobilisation of the notion of hybridity in such contexts – its inherent ahistocicity and reproduction of criticised binaries, and the assumed exceptionality of contexts of hybridity – frames the body of the article, which provides a detailed and extensive discussion of the complexities of security in Puntland and broader Somalia. This account reveals within itself various contradictions that are brought to the fore in later sections of analysis prior to the conclusion. This is a rich and compelling account.

As noted, the article provides a rich elaboration of various strands of critique and alternative argument through the very significant case of Puntland (and Somalia more generally). I would like to suggest a number of minor revisions that would strengthen and sharpen the contribution set out here.

The article opens with a concise and brief discussion of debates in the academic literature about fragile states and hybrid political orders, then moves to a brief discussion of the case of Puntland, before the first main section discussing the notion of hybridity. As such, the case of Puntland appears as an example to work out academic debates. Could the introduction be re-ordered to foreground: first of all, processes of security intervention in Puntland and Somalia? For example, perhaps a short opening description of how external support, centring on the United Nations (UN) but including other actors, to security forces and security reform in Puntland and the region is immediately enmeshed within a more complex situation (e.g. perhaps as outlined from p. 15 on). This could lead to noting how such situations, perhaps the most classic of which is Somalia, have generally been conceptualised in terms of ‘failed’ or ‘fragile’ states, but such conceptualisation cannot comprehend the actual complexities unless by reducing them to a failure to match the assumed norms of western liberal orders. This then leads to critiques mobilising the notion of hybridity, and then on to the article’s main conceptual and substantive argument and analysis.

I am not suggesting any major revision here, but I am suggesting a brief recomposition of how the article might initially be set up, because I think it is very healthy in articles (and indeed edited collections) such as this, if a logic can demonstrate that the work of academic theory, debate and critique is to understand the world (which evidently is the burden of this article), rather than that the complexities of the world serving to arbitrate debates among scholars.

The introduction elaborates in brief terms a criticism of how the notion of hybridity has been mobilised in the critique of the ‘failed states’ and broader liberal peace discourse, a criticism that is then further substantiated in the body of the article and the final analytical sections. This seems to me an important contribution of this article, and worth sharpening. The opening summary of such an argument, in paragraph 3 of the introduction, is so concise that it is difficult to follow. I simply did not understand the sentence starting, ‘By doing so, the notion …’, although as I read the article I pieced together what this brief assertion might mean. Having suggested that the introduction might be reworked so as to foreground, first of all, the Puntland/security situation and then lead to dominant and critical conceptions (rather than starting with theoretical debates in themselves), it seems that the article does then need the section that delves into the notion of hybridisation. This section thus works well but might be sharpened to clarify more strongly the contribution and limitations of this concept in the existing literature, and the moves beyond such limitations that this article makes. The article argues that…

in a manner that has various problems, including the following:

In addition, and in contrast to the article’s own account, it demonstrates that hybridity or hybridisation (here employed in the analysis of security) is a process and is central to the ordering of authority. Can the article’s critique and contribution be sharpened with regard to this crucial (but so far underdeveloped) charge of ahistoricity?

At times the analysis in the article, in emphasising the centrality rather than exceptionality of the hybrid, seems to suggest this is a feature everywhere, a general process. Does this pertain in all societies or, specifically, postcolonial societies? If the latter, is the nuanced argument of this article that the concept, although originating from a strand of postcolonial theory, nevertheless has tended to reproduce the dichotomies that serve to dehistoricise the postcolonial condition through the reinforcement of binaries (of traditional/modern, normal/exceptional, etc.)?

If mainstream Eurocentric theory in IR, political science, etc., assumes universally valid categories of, for example, ‘the state’ ‘sovereignty’ and their corollaries (e.g. how modern bureaucracies and security sectors should function), such that any divergence appears as a ‘failure’ (as in the liberal ‘failed states’ dominant position), then emphasising the fundamental difference of ‘the other’ is dehistoricising. Yet, it is equally disabling to suggest that, in contrast, various features are general – this overcomes the problem of essentialised difference but flattens out actual historically constituted conditions and processes that have been strongly differentiated by colonialism, imperialism and ongoing unequal power relations. So, an alternative approach would be to emphasise the historical specificity of all concepts and forms, such that ‘the state’, ‘sovereignty’, ‘security’ and ‘authority’, appear differently in different contexts, but in ways that have been unevenly shaped and differentiated in significant ways by broader global processes such as, for example, colonialism. This general approach would then ground analysis that strongly – as this article does very effectively – reveals the complexity of relations of power in a postcolonial society such as Puntland, and Somalia more broadly, a complexity that is different from the Western norm (and thus incomprehensible to dominant perspectives and also confounds international interventions) not as its essentialised ‘other’ or lack (the failed state), but, in part, because it has been shaped by a longer history of colonial imposition and transformation (always partial) as well as more recent ongoing international interventions, but is not ‘essentially’ different due to being ‘other’. In addition, that longer history of colonial imposition and transformation was never a melding of two pure parts (I think this is part of what is being criticised here in terms of the notion of hybridity), but rather a historically complex, specific and contested process that, arguably, remains ongoing to this day, and never was nor is adequately comprehended by external analyses, nor by ‘history by analogy’ (e.g. of the form, security is diverse in contemporary Puntland, as it was in 17th century European societies; e.g. see the arguments of Mamdani (1996) and Grovogui (2002).

This is a lengthy comment but I am trying to make a relatively concise point. At times the author’s important critical elaboration of the purchase of the notion of ‘hybridisation’ seems to suggest that, in contrast to current exceptional assumptions, it is a general process. How general? Including, for example, Europe? Or, is there a way of historicising the complexity of the postcolonial condition (in general, and here, relations of sovereign authority as manifest in control over security) that avoids the ahistoricism of both Eurocentric universalism, and of dichotomies of ‘norm’/‘postcolonial essentially different other’? In this regard, could the article make some, even if brief, reference to how the current configuration of political power regarding clans and central authorities in Puntland and Somalia is not an amalgam of the ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ (e.g. as assumed by neopatrimonial analyses), nor purely ‘traditional’, but an evolving complexity that has for a long time been partly shaped, but never fully determined, by externally intervening powers and agendas interacting with local configurations of power, authority and norms?

I think these comments are broadly in line with the core arguments of the article, but I am suggesting that the article’s important critique in this regard could be sharpened.

Much of the analysis draws on the author’s familiarity with the situation in Puntland from their time spent there, as indicated in the first footnote. Nevertheless, in the extended account of developments within Puntland and the region, can some references be provided wherever possible?

It is generally clear how this article relates to the overall concerns of the special issue. Can some explicit reference to some of the overall strands (whether around the notion of decentring, or some other strand emphasised in the special issue introduction) be made explicit, just in one or two sentences in the introduction?

Finally, in revising the article, the bibliography needs to be fleshed out – many references are missing in the current version of the article.

Overall

I would suggest that each author be asked to add a few sentences to their introduction drawing some explicit link between their article and the framework set out in the introduction. This is currently done by focusing on the term ‘decentring’. The introduction elaborates and opens out this notion of decentring in a number of ways, and it would really help build the cohesiveness of this as a collection of linked articles, if the authors can strengthen some explicit connection between their own contribution and the broader collection. Not all of the articles do all of what is set out in the introduction, of course, but if each article could read the general framing and then pick up on some strand to elaborate briefly in the framing of their own article, that would really further the coherence of the collection as a whole.

This is a very rich collection of articles that combines to flesh out in some fascinating ways the important aims elaborated very well by the editors in their introduction.