The role of security sector reform in sustainable development: donor policy trends and challenges

This paper attempts to account for the gap between donor policies in support of SSR in developing countries, in particular in post-conflict African states, and their record of implementation. It explores the inadequacies of the present development cooperation regime and argues that a substantial part of this gap can be explained by the tension that exists between the prevalence of a state-centric policy framework on the one hand, and the increasing role played by non-state actors, such as armed militia, private security and military companies, vigilante groups, and multinational corporations on the other hand, in the security sector. This paper, which acknowledges the growing importance of regional actors and questions the state-centric nature of SSR, recommends a paradigmatic shift in the current approaches to development cooperation. The external origin and orientation of SSR needs to be supplemented by more local ownership at the various levels of SSR conceptualisation, design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation in order to enhance synergy between donor priorities and interests on the one hand, and local needs and priorities on the other hand.     

The politics of security sector reform in ‘fragile’ or ‘post-conflict’ settings: a critical review of the experience in Timor-Leste

Security sector reform (SSR) policy has, for the better part of a decade, been viewed as instrumental to the larger international project of improving and strengthening the ‘capacity’ of post-conflict and ‘fragile’ states. The current policy approach, which represents a merging of security and development agendas in the post-Cold War era, is based on the premise that fragmented, ineffective, poorly managed and politicised state security institutions threaten political stability and undermine poverty reduction and sustainable development goals. The objective of this article is to examine aspects of what has been described as the ‘SSR policy-practice gap’ that arose in the course of implementing SSR policy in Timor-Leste by analysing the systemic basis of the gap. An analytical framework that untangles the relationship between SSR policy objectives, targets and outcomes is presented in concert with a discussion of the social and political circumstances that confronted international organisations and donor countries when they sought to implement SSR policy in Timor-Leste. By using the analytical framework to assess the policy coherence between SSR objectives and the SSR programme contained in UN Security Council Resolution 1704, the ubiquitous disconnect between SSR ‘Gospel and Reality’ is pulled more sharply into focus.     

The liberal dilemmas of a people-centred approach to state-building

The article explores the dilemmas of providing security assistance to post-conflict states. It argues that when used as a strategy for intervention, SSR exposes the inherent contradictions of liberal peace-building. The article focuses on the Weberian state monopoly versus other—hybrid or non-state—forms of security and justice provision. It presents the background for the discussion and suggests that as a strategy for intervention, the choice is not simply between a top-down ‘imposition’ of a universal state model and a bottom-up ‘working with what is there’ approach. It is also a choice between direct and indirect forms of rule. This makes the dilemma real for liberal-minded practitioners and observers.     

The influence of research and local knowledge on British-led security sector reform policy in Sierra Leone

Externally-led security sector reform (SSR) in conflict-affected countries may require an array of different and timely interventions to restructure the whole security architecture of a state. Whilst the intent of these efforts is political, their nature is usually technical, operational and targeted at military, police, justice or intelligence actors, or relevant groups in the civilian policy sectors. Because of their urgency, there is seemingly little or no room for research to influence the implementation of these activities. Nevertheless, academic studies on SSR have flourished in recent years, and case studies, ‘lessons learned’ and recommendations for policy-makers now enrich this burgeoning literature. This paper analyses one of the early cases of an externally-led SSR intervention, namely the United Kingdom (UK) assistance programme in conflict-affected Sierra Leone. It seeks to understand whether and how research and knowledge on topics relevant to SSR influenced the development and implementation of the UK's SSR assistance policy in this country. Building on the Sierra Leonean case study, it then examines some general issues and themes, which characterise the use of research in SSR policy in conflict-affected environments.     

Custom,contestation and co-operation: peace and justice promotion in Somaliland

This article explores alternatives to prevailing state-centric and legalistic approaches to supporting local security and access to justice. It does so through a case study of an initiative developed by an international NGO in partnership with a group of traditional authorities in Somaliland. The initiative aimed at enhancing local security and access to justice, drawing on customary conflict resolution mechanisms and everyday strategies of self-securing. At the same time, the initiative was shaped by international input and liberal notions of human rights and human security. This approach entailed a renegotiation of both local ordering and international discourse. Drawing on our fieldwork, we examine the initiative as it has evolved since 2003, and discuss what it suggests in terms of prospects for international support to ‘non-state’ actors. In particular, the article draws attention to the potential of working with everyday local practices to enable social change rather than focusing narrowly on reforming legal systems (whether state or customary).     

To arrest insecurity: time for a revised security sector reform agenda

Despite the exponential growth in the attention and resources devoted to security sector reform (SSR), positive tangible outcomes remain hard to find. A ‘conceptual-contextual’ divide exists between SSR's stated goals and its actual implementation, a fissure that suggests the need to re-evaluate its tenets as currently conceived and practiced. This paper contributes to such a reappraisal and argues for a new round of SSR debate and policy formulation that will be simultaneously more pragmatic and less ambitious, while listening carefully to the wishes of those who are to benefit from SSR. Our core argument is that the current understanding of SSR policy provides practitioners with neither the requisite intellectual foundation nor practical guidance to craft institutions that arrest insecurity. Consequently, a number of the central concepts of the current SSR agenda—local ownership, civil society, governance, multi-sectoral approach, etc.—need to be recast to make them operationally effective, managerially coherent, and susceptible to measurable evaluation.     

Laudable,ahistorical and overambitious: security sector reform meets state formation theory.

Security sector reform (SSR) is a concept that is highly visible within policy and practice circles and that increasingly shapes international programmes for development assistance, security co-operation and democracy promotion. This paper examines the concept and practice of SSR using theories of the state and state formation within a historical-philosophical perspective. The paper recognises that the processes of SSR are highly laudable and present great steps forward towards more holistic conceptions of security and international development. However, the main argument of the paper is that we should be careful of having too high expectations of the possibility of SSR fulfilling its ambitious goals of creating states that are both stable and democratic and accountable. Instead, we should carefully determine what level of ambition is realistic for each specific project depending on local circumstances. A further argument of this paper is that legitimate order and functioning state structures are prerequisites and preconditions for successful democratisation and accountability reforms within the security sector.     

Multilateral donors and the security-development nexus: discourse and practice in conflict-affected states

This article assesses how the ‘security-development nexus’ has impacted multilateral aid to conflict-affected states; an area until now understudied. Using a mixed methods approach, we examine both the policy discourse and aid commitments of the major multilateral donors: the European Commission, the World Bank and the UNDP. We investigate the extent to which these donors fund the sectors identified within the policy discourse as crucial to ensuring peace and stability – democratisation and peace, conflict, and security activities – and examine the impact of ‘Western’ security concerns on multilateral aid in conflict-affected states. Our new data indicate that in contrast to policy discourse, post-conflict states receive no more multilateral funding for democracy–building than states which have not suffered from conflict and furthermore, that in the context of the security-development nexus, multilateral aid to conflict-affected states is influenced by the key transnational security concerns of Western states. These results point to a potentially dangerous gap between policy and actual aid commitments, ignore the long-term nature of development and weaken the impartiality of multilateral aid.     

The Rule of Law and the UN Peacebuilding Commission: a social development approach

There is a danger that the Rule of Law Assistance Unit of the United Nations Peacebuilding Commission will employ the same dominant but problematic paradigm that the international development community has pursued across the globe. This top-down, state-centred paradigm, sometimes known as ‘rule of law orthodoxy’, stands in contrast to an alternative set of strategies: legal empowerment. Legal empowerment involves the use of legal services, legal capacity-building and legal reform by and for disadvantaged populations, often in combination with other development activities, to increase their freedom, improve governance and alleviate poverty. It is typically carried out by domestic and international non-governmental organisations (NGOs), but also by governments and official aid agencies. This alternative approach focuses directly on the disadvantaged and integration with other development activities, which means it often operates under the de facto rubric of social development. Legal empowerment strategies vary among countries and NGOs. But their impact includes reforming gender-biased, non-state justice systems in Bangladesh; ameliorating the legal system's corruption in post-conflict Sierra Leone; keeping the human rights flame burning in post-conflict Cambodia; advancing natural resources protection and indigenous peoples' rights in Ecuador; and strengthening agrarian reform in the Philippines. Addressing such priorities can help alleviate poverty, ameliorate conflict and prevent chaos or repression from dominating the disadvantaged, particularly in conflict or post-conflict societies.     

Civil security in the EU: national persistence versus EU ambitions?

Noting that European Union (EU) institutions are increasingly engaged in civil protection in the member states, security governance is used as an analytical framework to assess the depth of EU engagement in delivering civil security. It is shown that a state-centric approach is no longer adequate to understand the provision of civil security across Europe. To varying degrees, the EU has acquired responsibilities to facilitate, coordinate, manage, and regulate civil security, whether before or after a civil crisis occurs. The analysis demonstrates that, whilst intergovernmental practices and inter-state cooperation remain salient features of civil security, the responsibilities undertaken by the EU institutions across the entire policy spectrum are more substantial than a strictly intergovernmental perspective would suggest.     

Women and wars: Some trajectories towards a feminist peace

This paper seeks to explode a number of myths about women's absence from wars and conflict; it considers some problems about their vulnerabilities in these circumstances; and offers some feminist perspectives for addressing these problems. The paper considers the conflicting demands made on women in periods of war and revolution, and argues that differing historical processes result in different post-conflict policies towards women. There is, however, a commonality of experiences that universally marginalise women in the post-conflict and reconstruction phases. Even when women have participated actively in wars and revolutions, they are heavily pressured to go back to the home and reconstruct the private domain to assert the return of peace and 'normality'. This paper contends that the insistence on locating women within the domestic sphere in the post-war era may be counter-productive and located in the historical construction of nationhood and nationalism as masculine in terms of its character and demands. With the dawn of the twenty-first century and the long history of women's participation in wars, revolutions, and policy making, it may now be possible to use the symbolic importance given to them in times of conflict to articulate a different perception of nationhood and belonging, and to create a more cooperative and less competitive and hierarchical approach to politics and the reconstruction of nations and their sense of belonging.     

新加坡“发展导向型”政府的成功实践

本文旨在分析新加波"发展导向型政府"是如何制定政策维护社会稳定,推动经济发展并保持经济持续繁荣的.     

Peace-building and the predatory political economy of insecurity: evidence from Cambodia,East Timor and Afghanistan

International peace-building interventions in post-conflict countries are intended to transform the socio-political context that led to violence and thereby build a stable and lasting peace. Yet the UN's transitional governance approach to peace-building is ill-suited to the challenge of dealing with the predatory political economy of insecurity that often emerges in post-conflict societies. Evidence from peace-building attempts in Cambodia, East Timor and Afghanistan illustrates that the political economy incentives facing domestic elites in an environment of low credibility and weak institutionalisation lead to a cycle of patronage generation and distribution that undermine legitimate and effective governance. As a result, post-conflict countries are left vulnerable to renewed conflict and persistent insecurity. International interventions can only craft lasting peace by understanding the political economy of conflict persistence and the potential policy levers for altering, rather than perpetuating, those dynamics.     

The African post-conflict policing agenda in Sierra Leone

This article examines policing in Sierra Leone four years after the civil war. It evaluates the achievements in the area of policing against the major policing challenges in African post-conflict societies. These are recruitment and (re)training of a civilian force; establishing an organizational culture that is accountable and responsive to citizen concerns; organizational rebuilding and re-equipment; utilizing the resources of commercial and community organized policing; and establishing a sustainable basis. The research finds that for all the positive achievements, the fact remains that the government of Sierra Leone still does not exert effective control over, nor is it able to deliver state policing services to, significant parts of its own territory. The 7,000 active police officers are too small in number and too limited in resources to provide all Sierra Leone's citizens with a service that protects them from crime and investigates crime. Its fundamental weaknesses mean that post-conflict internal security programmes may have to look again at others who currently authorize and provide policing. It may be that some community led policing groups can be harnessed and if necessary reformed to assist the police in establishing the rule of law.     

Revenge and reprisal violence in Kosovo

One of the most often reported but under-studied phenomenon in post-conflict states is that of revenge violence. While such violence is widely acknowledged to occur after wars, it is often dismissed as epiphenomenal to the central problem of restoring order and good governance in the state. This paper seeks to refocus attention on this phenomenon and challenge the way that it is normally portrayed as a normal, almost incidental consequence of armed conflict. It develops an ideal-type distinction between revenge violence and its strategic mirror, reprisal violence. While revenge violence is premised on a judgement of individual responsibility for a prior act of harm, reprisal violence is driven by an assumption of collective guilt. This paper argues that these two types of violent activity—one expressive and the other strategic—are often intermixed in post-conflict states. Moreover, the interplay between them provides political cover for those who would employ violence to achieve strategic or political goals, while lowering the risks involved when doing so by attributing it to revenge for wartime atrocities. In effect, the fact that revenge and reprisal violence are mirror images of one another can serve to explain and subtly justify the use of organised violence against disadvantaged groups in post-conflict states. This paper examines the validity of this heuristic distinction through a within-case analysis of violence in Kosovo from 1999 to 2001 and identifies the policy consequences of this distinction.     

European Union Training Missions: security sector reform or counter-insurgency by proxy?

With European Union Training Missions (EUTM) Mali and EUTM Somalia, the EU seeks to stabilize countries facing state weakness caused by intrastate conflict. While the EU formally promotes security sector reform (SSR) through its foreign policy, the EUTM missions in Mali and Somalia in one sense can be described as “counter-insurgency by proxy” as military trainees combat local insurgencies shortly upon graduation. This raises the question whether the EUTM missions are consistent with SSR aims, such as creating a security sector that is legitimate, sustainable, and under civilian control, or inadvertently risk contributing to negative side effects in the medium term. Based on extensive interviews in Belgium, Kenya, Mali, Sweden, and Uganda with personnel who either served in or planned these missions, this study analyses factors which hinder the EUTM concept from being fully consistent with SSR and identifies possible policies to ameliorate the risk of unintended side effects.     

Security sector reform: The building of security in Bosnia and Herzegovina

This article addresses the issue of Security Sector Reform (SSR) in Bosnia and examines whether the reform of security structures has enhanced security of Bosnia as a whole. The experience of recent armed conflict, and fragmentation and ethnicization of security structures have created special challenges for SSR in Bosnia. Transformation of the security sector in Bosnia is made even more complicated by the plethora of international actors involved in the process. The article argues that, despite the complexity of the task, SSR has produced some notable results, particularly in redressing the balance of power between the state and entities in the spheres of defence, policing and intelligence. However, while some of the SSR initiatives appear to be very successful in their main objective, they have inadvertently created some new security risks and/or displaced problems into another area. Thus, the question remains whether Bosnia's security has been enhanced in the process. The article identifies two main obstacles which block further progress in the building of security in Bosnia: first, the lack of local ‘ownership’ of SSR, and second, the Dayton constitutional arrangements. The article concludes that until these two fundamental issues are effectively addressed Bosnia will remain a weak, marginalized country filled with insecurity, divisions and adversity.     

The policy-making dimension of post-conflict governance: the experience of Aceh,Indonesia

Rebuilding and strengthening the essential functions of government is a critical aspect of peace-building and recovery after conflict. There is now a wide literature on the challenges of post-conflict state-building based on the international community's experiences in such places as Kosovo, East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan. Much of this literature is concerned with the challenges of strengthening administration and service provision—what might be loosely called the policy implementation functions of government. Much less attention has been given to the policy formulation capacities of post-conflict governments. This is surprising given the importance of conflict-sensitive policies for peace-building and for laying the foundations for economic growth and employment. Many post-conflict governments lack capacity for policy development—a gap that is often filled by international technical assistance. In cases where the international community is providing support to a reasonably functioning government after a conflict, this study argues that more attention needs to be given to the government's policy-making capacity. Using the experience of post-conflict Aceh as a prism, the study argues that technical advice can be too easily wasted unless there is concomitant support for developing the institutional infrastructure needed to manage advice and to prepare options for political deliberation and choice.     

The challenges and lessons of security sector reform in post-conflict Sierra Leone

This paper assesses the main elements of SSR process in Sierra Leone, against its historical background as well as the imperatives of a responsive and responsible security sector. The reform of the security sector in Sierra Leone has enhanced the restoration of public safety in the country, and the positive features of the process relate to the inclusion of SSR as the first pillar of the country's poverty reduction strategy, and the emphasis of SSR on the decentralisation of the security apparatus. Significant gaps however remain. Donor dependency and the ‘youth question’ are continuing challenges. Arguably, the most significant deficiency is the fact that the security sector has not been adequately embedded in a democratic governance framework. There is an absence of functional oversight mechanisms, and a failure to involve other actors beyond the executive arm of government in the governance of the security sector. The paper cautions that SSR can be successful only as part of an overarching democratic post conflict reconstruction framework.     

Security sector reform: bringing the private in

As the links between security and development have been increasingly recognized, Security Sector Reform (SSR) has become a central part of development policy. Following a traditional Weberian conception of the state, these programmes are almost exclusively focused on the public security sector, neglecting the extent to which people in developing countries have come to rely on private security providers for their day-to-day security needs. While the reform of public security institutions is undoubtedly important, this article argues that a strict public/private distinction is a poor guide to security sector reform. Focusing on Sierra Leone and Kenya, the article argues that ‘bringing the private in’ is crucial to a comprehensive understanding of the security situation in most countries and that any attempt to ensure better security for all must take account of private actors. Private security companies and their integration into SSR matter not simply in terms of the maintenance of law and order, but also in terms of who has access to security, and ultimately, for the legitimacy of social and political orders.