Rethinking state-centric security sector reform in conflict-affected states

Is the international community’s approach to security sector reform (SSR) in post-conflict and fragile states too focused on state provision? Is it unrealistic to expect the state to provide all justice and security? Does current SSR policy contradict development principles of a ‘people-centred, locally owned’ approach to recovery?

Calling for a broader multi-layered approach to SSR, a paper from Coventry University, in the UK, argues that the current state-centric approach – wrongly depicting all non-state actors as purveyors of injustice and insecurity – fails to consider the needs, wishes and demands of local populations.

In any post-conflict context there are a surprising number of security and justice agencies – non-state and state – offering localised protection with different methods and levels of legality and effectiveness. Non-state players can include religious authorities, political parties, militia, ethnic groups, vigilantes, residents’ associations, formal security companies, traders associations, community-based organisations interested in restorative justice and citizen crime prevention groups.

In sub-Saharan Africa at least four fifths of justice services are delivered by non-state providers – commercial, community and informal. Customary courts are often the dominant form of regulation and dispute resolution. In most circumstances, people look first to non-state agencies for crime protection and crime response.

Timor-Leste and Haiti provide recent examples of how the UN’s Department of Peacekeeping Operations has concentrated on building the capacity of recovering states, ignoring those who actually provide security. All too often the international community adopts short-term initiatives to strengthen the capacity of state security and justice systems and creates government agencies that cannot be sustained once donor assistance dries up.

Other major problems in current approaches are outlined:

• Most recovering countries do not have enough lawyers to staff a nationwide criminal justice system.
• State policing is often focused on urban commercial centres and disproportionately on crimes that affect the wealthy.
• Efforts to cleanse police system from officers guilty of human rights abuses are ineffective.
• There is naïve trust that public complaints and disciplinary procedures will control the state police.
• State-building endeavours are regarded as illegitimate in countries where the police and judiciary have been dominated by a particular ethnic group and autocrats have abused the legal system.

SSR can give legitimacy to undesirable centralising trends which benefit elites determined to use state power to expropriate resources, rather than to promote modern ideas of citizenship and nationality. Instead of just building up state agencies the international community should encourage post-conflict governments to monitor, license, and regulate the activities of civil society and private non-state service providers and to work in partnership with them.

International funders and designers of SSR interventions must:

• recognise the nature and composition of the post-conflict and fragile state without imposing upon it an idealised Western conception of what the state should be
• acknowledge that in much of the world there is no clean demarcation between state and non-state justice and security, but a continuum of methods of resolving disputes and delivering security
• abandon the presumption without empirical evidence that accountability and protection of human rights is best achieved through state systems
• not ask who should be providing security and justice, but who is actually doing so and offer support  where acceptable to these groups.

Source(s):
‘Multi-layered justice and security delivery in post-conflict and fragile states’, Conflict, Security & Development, 7:4, pp. 503-528, by Bruce Baker and Eric Scheye, December 2007

id21 Research Highlight: 29 April 2009

Further Information:
Bruce Baker
African Studies Centre
Coventry University
CV1 2TL, United Kingdom

Tel: +44 (0) 24 7679 5755
Fax: +44 (0) 24 7679 5761
Contact the contributor: bruce.baker@coventry.ac.uk

Coventry University

Eric Scheye
710 West End Ave.
New York, N.Y. 10025, USA

Tel: + 1 (212) 222-4683
Contact the contributor: aldomoro@mindspring.com