Can the security sector be governed in polities where citizens feel excluded from politics and armed conflict is endemic? Security sector reform in national insecurity situations is a quixotic enterprise. This research from Sussex University and partner institutions in developing and former communist countries argues that while such situations are traumatic they may open spaces in which some kinds of change are more feasible.
Most discussion of security sector reform has focused on the broad goals of reform and on policy prescriptions to make them operational. There has been much less consideration of the political and economic conditions which facilitate reform, the obstacles that confront it and the conditions that determine its sustainability. Above all, reform requires an understanding of the security sector itself. Instead of regarding the security sector as coherent and unified, it may be more fruitful to see it as a shifting terrain of security coalitions, which are assembled and reassembled as crises occur. One advantage of such an approach is that it challenges the assumption that the state should necessarily be at the centre of transformation. Moreover, military and security bureaucracies should not be stereotyped as obstacles to transformation, which have to be controlled by civilian structures.
In the final analysis, democratic control of the military and security services depends upon the health and quality of democracy itself, as shaped by the interplay of democratic institutions and democratic politics in each specific national context.
- Major political violence typically stems from profound crises in state legitimacy and state capacity.
- Structural violence can turn physical when there is a perception that economic and social conditions have worsened and the government is indifferent.
- When ethnic patronage is built into military, police and security bureaucracies, it corrupts them, weakens discipline, reinforces a sense of impunity and fosters public distrust of the state itself.
- A democratic strategy for security can only be built through dialogue and national reconciliation.
- Conflicts have increasingly diverged from the old stereotypes of symmetric wars between the organised military forces of nation states. Fragmentation of military powers poses severe difficulties for security sector transformation, since democratic control of official military establishments is not sufficient.
- Recent privatisation of violence can only be countered by sustainable development with restored public and democratic control of security provision.
Globalisation has shaped conflicts by global flows of weapons, global geopolitics, humanitarian interventions, regionalisation which causes violence to spill over national boundaries and the complex global networks that sustain conflicts – diasporas, terrorists and so on. Security sector transformation must therefore be set within this broader international picture.
- Since conflict and insecurity themselves have been regionalised and globalised, regional and global collective security mechanisms should be strengthened to counteract them.
- At the same time, transformations in the security sectors of the developing and post-communist worlds should not become hostage to donors’ international humanitarian agenda, still less to the war against terrorism.
- Transformation will only work if there is local ownership and if it is appropriate in each national and regional context.
