Is the ‘hybrid turn’ a ‘spatial turn’? A geographical perspective on hybridity and state-formation in the Western Pacific

Our point of departure is the emerging critique of the problematic
treatment of scale across various disciplinary engagements with
hybridity. Adopting an overarching state-formation perspective,
we extend this geographical critique by combining the sociospatial
lenses of scale and territory in an analysis of one of the primary
animators of political economic change and contestation in postcolonial
Melanesia: extractive resource capitalism. Focusing on the
Solomons Group of islands, we examine two spatial phenomena
at the core of the contentious and frequently violent politics of
extraction animating processes of state-formation in these settings:
the social and historical production of islands as a scale/territory of
violent struggle; and the emergence of the ‘ideology of customary
landownership’ as a territorialising and exclusionary project that
also has salient scalar dimensions. While these phenomena illustrate
the inadequacy of hybridity’s crude spatial ontology, they also
demonstrate how hybridity perspectives can play a role in achieving
‘thick description’ of the complex interactions involved in spatialised
political economic processes. We conclude by sketching out some
agendas for research on the political economy of resource extraction
– and, more broadly, state-formation – in the western Pacific that
combine spatial perspectives with those of the critical hybridity
literature across various social science fields.