Legal empowerment as a theoretical and practical concept has gained increasing attention in international development. Due to the shifting aid paradigm, caused by the rising of South-South cooperation, legal empowerment’s proposed bottom-up character has challenged the larger conventional top-down approaches to development that traditionally have dominated the development agenda. Nevertheless, studies examining legal empowerment have failed to analyse whether the concept is produced in a top-down setting and hence omitted possible power imbalances that the discourse might be hiding. By conducting a critical discourse analysis through applying postcolonial theory, the dissertation critically explores the concept on a sample of public policy documents by two of the largest legal empowerment donors, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. The thesis analyses both how the donors approach the concept and how the discourse may distinguish in their approaches. Furthermore, it examines how power imbalances in the legal empowerment discourse might emerge from a Global North/South perspective. The study finds that the policies from both development banks do not discursively produce legal empowerment in significantly different ways, which moreover forswears the premise that the South-South development cooperation is to be essentially distinctive from the North-South cooperation. Furthermore, the both discourses were found to (re)produce postcolonial narratives that reduce the ‘subjects’ in the discourse into homogenous groups which could somewhat dispute the essence of the concept.

Hybridity, as it is currently understood in the Peace and Conflict Studies (PCS) and International Relations (IR) literature, is defined by the complex interactions between ‘the liberal peace' and ‘the local'. However, under this theoretical liberal-local rubric, the ways in which power is practiced has already been determined; how resistance is expressed and the forms it assumes have already been established. While it has yielded numerous important insights into how power circulates and resistance manifests in peacebuilding operations, the theoretical approach conceals other significant dynamics which escape detection by ‘the liberal peace' and ‘the local'. However, these undetected dimensions of hybridity comprise the very processes that emerge in ways which destabilise the boundaries between ‘the liberal peace' and ‘the local' and reshape the contours of the emerging post-liberal peace. Instead of accepting the liberal-local distinction which defines this theoretical hybridity, this thesis advances an alternative methodological approach to exploring the tensions at play in peacebuilding projects. Rather than deploying theoretical distinctions in order to explain or understand complex hybrid processes, this thesis develops a methodological strategy for exploring the tensions between how actors design a peacebuilding project and how that project changes as actors work to translate that project into complex, everyday living sites (Callon, 1986; Law, 1997; Akrich, 1992). This tension is expressed as practical hybridity. The process of practical hybridity unfolds as the concrete material changes, modifications, and adaptations that emerge as actors appropriate and contingently translate organised practices in new ways and for different purposes. Through an ongoing process of practical hybridity, the boundaries and distinction which define the distinction between ‘the liberal peace' and ‘the local' become increasingly unstable. Amidst this instability, the practices which characterised ‘the liberal peace' are becoming stretched into a post-liberal peace. Drawing on the work of Richmond (2011a; Richmond & Mitchell, 2012), Latour (1987b; 1988; 2004), and Schatzki (2002), and based on over five months of field research, this this thesis traces the process of practical hybridity at play during the implementation and evaluation of a peacebuilding project in Liberia. I participated as a research assistant on a Randomised Control Trial (RCT), implemented by a small research team under the auspices of the Oxford University's Centre for the Study of African Economies (CSAE). The team was assessing the impact of a legal empowerment programme managed by The Carter Center: the Community Justice Advisor (CJA) programme. As the CSAE's evaluation of the CJA programme unfolded, many dynamics associated with theoretical liberal-local hybridity surfaced; however, it also became apparent that this theoretical formulation obscured important dimensions which were reshaping what peacebuilding practice is in the process of becoming in the emerging post-liberal world.