Paper short abstract:

We identify the conflicts between liberal and 'traditional' institutions that generate social breakdowns in fragile states, and show how understandings generated by classical dualist and modern hybridity theorists enable us to understand and address the problems they create. .

Paper long abstract:

Orthodox theorists assume that security and justice and other essential services should be provided by modern state and private institutions in Late Developing Countries, but they provide very inadequate cover in most weak states and almost none in fragile or conflict states where local communities have to rely on often reinvented 'traditional' institutions' to maintain order and create livelihoods. These coexist and interact in complex and often contradictory ways with modern institutions creating what were originally conceptualised as dualistic societies, but are now being understood as hybrids. Their institutional arrangements and evolutionary processes cannot be understood using a theoretical apparatus that ignores the tensions generated by the coexistence of the liberal institutions that should dominate their political and economic relationships, or by treating local institutions as autonomous systems. Instead we need to understanding the contextual factors that enable them to co-exist and co-evolve together to produce unique solutions and developmental trajectories that sometimes produce progressive outcomes, but often icrease disorder. We show how this approach allows us to develop a convincing historically based analysis of the problems involved in creating political order or disorder in weak states, using Bourdieu 'logic of practice' and Malinowski's 'three column anthropology' (1945/61) to formulate a synthetic analytical framework to address these issues.