ABSTRACT
Despite a high degree of awareness that security and justice are routinely provided by a plural set of actors in the ‘global South’, donor-supported reforms of the security and justice sectors remain overwhelmingly state-centric in focus. This is facilitated in part by the belief that plurality exists primarily because of state weakness, and that as the state delivers improved security and justice services, alternative providers will cease to be relevant. However this assumption ignores other reasons for the popularity of a more diverse universe of security and justice provision. This paper seeks to contribute to resolving the disconnect between the reality of plural security and justice providers and donor-led statecentric security and justice reform (SSR).1 It does so by providing an analytical tool – the security and justice chain approach – to overcome the binary thinking of state/non-state, formal/informal, etc. that tends to dominate both academic and policy literatures and suggests too neat a separation between state-provided services and the wider plurality of security and justice actors. This paper argues that improved engagement with the plurality of security and justice actors will be facilitated by overcoming the strict state/non-state divide and focusing, instead, on an end user approach to security and justice, which recognizes the multiplicity of providers and their interconnectedness. Mapping out the various security and justice chains as people use them in practice in any given context is a useful way of illustrating such multiplicity and interconnectedness. Security
and justice chains, as they operate in Sierra Leone, will be set out in this paper to demonstrate how this kind of approach can help to transcend the unhelpful state/ non-state binary and promote security and justice reforms that better reflect the ways in which people actually access and experience security and justice.
