Hybridity in policing: the case of Ethiopia

Hybridity is used in a broad range of disciplines to define a process or institutional outcome of mixed organisational systems and practices. In justice, security and policing studies, it is used to describe the interpenetration of different policing and justice providers. The paper examines the parameters within which hybridity is a beneficial concept for the analysis of policing providers and their relationships, and considers whether it offers anything beyond legal pluralism. In addition, it considers whether hybridity has normative value for designing and evaluating effective policing policy. The debate and the author's conclusions that integration rather than interaction marks the essence of hybridity are illustrated by a case study from Ethiopia. There, faced with capacity and legitimacy issues within the state justice and security system, the government has adopted hybrid policing within a wider embrace of legal pluralism. The hybrid policing entails the use by the police of case diversion to traditional leaders, the use of traditional justice processes such as mediation by the police themselves, and at the village level mixed approaches by community policing committees that consist of both police and local people including traditional elders.