ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the challenge still facing policing in many parts of the world today in terms of providing basic policing services to residents. It presents some observations about the nature of the challenges to effecting improvements in policing, drawing upon a number of personal experiences and research conducted in this area. The case for police reform, including the restoration of civil peace by the participation of police peacekeepers, is one that can be grounded normatively in a number of contemporary discourses dealing with international peace and security. Police reform, though implicitly required as a logical consequence of many critiques of human rights performance, has also tended to be overlooked in other crucial contexts. The mission environments in which police reforms and peacekeeping are attempted often conspire on several fronts to constrain what missions can achieve.
