How can European Union (EU) and Member State policymakers improve the impact of their security-related programming? What are the challenges that prevent policy from being implemented and what are the strategies that might ensure success? This paper from the Initiative for Peacebuilding (IfP) focuses on security sector reform (SSR) programmes. It shows that security-building efforts that succeed are grounded in effective national political processes and backed up by robust diplomatic dialogue between donors and recipient states. Security-building programmes fail if they focus on technical responses when the political conditions for progress at the operational level are absent. It finally makes a number of observations and recommendations to enhance the people-centred dimension of SSR and other security-building programmes.
SSR is now prominent in donor policy discourse and the ambitious objectives and broad scope of contemporary donor SSR policy. The provision of security and justice is one of the main requirements for a peaceful, democratic society and sustained social and economic development. Socio-economic development is in turn a condition for sustainable security. There is increasing acceptance within the EU and Member States that security-building activities such as these need to be holistic in scope, people-centred, locally appropriate and owned. However, the political and security realities in many conflict-affected contexts pose formidable challenges to those attempting to build security and justice in a transparent and sustainable manner.
Challenges faced by practitioners attempting to translate the EU’s policy commitments into practical action include the following:
- Security-building programmes relied on weak analysis. Sometimes analysis and monitoring information was not appropriately shared among relevant stakeholders.
- A lack of a strategic vision-based peacebuilding approach contributes to the difficulty in connecting SSR with conflict prevention.
- A lack of input from wider society. Where communities have been meaningfully involved, security-building and related development activities are seen as more relevant and legitimate by those they seek to benefit.
- Security-building programmes, especially security sector reform (SSR) support programmes, generally have weak local ownership
- Failure to coordinate activities can result in the poor exchange of information and inadequate communication between donors, recipient governments and communities.
- There is a failure to mainstream important cross-cutting issues, such as gender and justice, and limited attention is paid to political and diplomatic dialogue.
The European Council, European Commission and Member State security practitioners should:
- Plan and develop security-building activities on the basis of a shared and solid evidence base, including conflict analyses.
- Ensure that when carried out in conflict-affected or fragile states, security-building activities are explicitly targeted at conflict prevention and peacebuilding.
- Adopt more participatory ways of delivering security-building programmes, in the first instance by adopting and promoting new tools for consulting communities on security issues and programme priorities.
- Enhance efforts to increase local ownership of security building activities by supporting national security strategies with broad ownership and capacity-support for the operational structures to deliver programmes and reforms.
- Act at the national and local levels to respond to gender, justice and transitional justice issues, making better use of any existing guidance and supplementing this with community-wide awareness-raising and training.
- Prioritise the development of action plans for the Council Conclusions on security and development and situations of fragility. Ensure that security-building programmes are supported by political dialogue with key national, regional and international decision-makers.
