ABSTRACT

For example, the terminologies of the ‘security transition’,14 ‘security sector evolution’,15 or of ‘security sector transformation’16 stress the processual character of all security governance interventions. Avoidance of the key term of the ‘sector’17

is likewise meant to pay tribute to the fact that applying such a label suggests a degree of fit between Western political systems and local governance that is in fact deeply misleading. Indeed, in many countries of the global South, state actors and social groups beyond the control of the state and/or institutions that are hard to classify with the categories of the state versus non-state spheres interact as salient security stakeholders in a particular local ‘arena of negotiation’.18

The emphasis in the critical literature on the process (instead of the outcome) and on the inclusion of informal groups (as opposed to purely state-centric reform endeavours) has given rise to renewed quests for an empirically informed localization of interventions that begins with an analysis of political reality rather than the misapplication of ethnocentric analytical categories.