| Summary: | The security sector reform literature is increasingly turning towards the inclusion of non-state security providers, but the long-term patterns of political development to which such engagement might contribute remain underexplored. This article thus provides several lenses with which to understand the relationship between non-state security provision and political development. It first presents three perspectives (functionalism, political economy, and communitarianism) with which to understand the nature and behavior of non-state security providers. Second, it outlines five possible long-term trajectories of political formation and the role of non-state security providers in each. These discussions highlight the idea of hybridity, and the remainder of the paper argues that the concept can be usefully applied in (at least) two ways. The third section proposes that hybridity can help overcome longstanding but misleading conceptual binaries, while the fourth rearticulates hybridity as a dynamic developmental process – 'hybridization' – that can be contrasted with security politics as the underlying logic by which security providers (both state and non-state) interact and change over time.
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