ABSTRACT
The article starts from the observation that external attempts to transform security governance in fragile or post-conflict states through SSR have not normally led to the comprehensive transfer of international standards of democratic security governance to recipient states. Instead, SSR initiatives result in the piecemeal and partial diffusion of different sets of security norms, organizational structures or technical capacities to recipient states. A crucial guiding assumption in our analysis of these patterns is that domestic actors and their interests determine the outcomes of external reform attempts, by borrowing selectively2 from external models of security governance, instead of adopting them wholesale. Security governance models are thus not ‘downloaded’ in their entirety from the international level, and reform processes instead result in outcomes that combine external and domestic forms of security governance in different, and unanticipated, ways. These mixed or ‘hybrid’ security orders combine elements of domestic and external security governance, and so far remain underexplored and poorly understood.
