Hybridity: Law, Culture and Development

This book explores recent developments in the concept of hybridity through a multi-disciplinary perspective, bringing ideas about legal plurality together with the fields of peace, development and cultural studies. Exploring the meaning and implications of hybridity in a range of contexts, the contributors to this volume all pursue a concern with how the concept of hybridity can help understand and address the complex, and messy, reality of legal plurality.

Analysing the concepts of hybridity and hybridization, their history, their application in law and legal studies, and their implications for thinking and rethinking legal plurality, the book shows how the concept of hybridity can contribute to an understanding of the processes that occur when different normative or legal orders or frameworks confront each other. In doing so, moreover, it exposes the limited relevance of dominant understandings of concepts such as sovereignty, state-centrism or universal human rights.