ABSTRACT
For a concept that has been framed as indispensable for the success of various types of donor engagement in conflict-affected countries, from sustainable development and stabilisation to state building and peace building, security sector reform (SSR) has a remarkably poor record of achievement. The importance ascribed to the SSR model in international development and security policy, ‘as one of the essential conditions . . . for sustainable human development’,1 has not been matched by actual impacts on the ground. The conceptual-contextual gap in SSR that Jane Chanaa identified in 2002, during the early stages of the concept’s development, is even more relevant almost 15 years later. Chanaa argued: ‘While SSR concepts may sound impressive, and often form the bases of stated donor goals . . . the SSR debate often appears to underplay some of the key problems involved in translating principles into reality.’2 Those ‘SSR concepts’ continue to impress Western donor officials in 2016 – perhaps unsurprisingly, given that they reflect their own values, interests, and institutional designs – but the policy-practice gap to which Chanaa alluded is more apparent than ever. Over a decade of case study experience means there is no shortage of data to inform policy discourse aimed at narrowing that gap. When it comes to conflict-affected cases, however, this may be a fruitless exercise. Even a cursory examination of the range of cases of SSR implementation in conflict settings shows that the model is ill equipped to achieve its goals and is fundamentally out of place. By contrast, the SSR concept has resonated in countries making transitions from authoritarianism, state fragility or poverty. SSR, in many ways, is better suited to those types of environments, notably post-authoritarian states like South Africa, Indonesia and the former Warsaw Pact states,3 which have provided more stable conditions for reform. When it comes to conflict-affected countries, SSR has been swept up in the post-Cold War liberal peace project and, in turn, caught in its undertow. It has exhibited the same ambitious, some say misguided, assumptions about recipient desire, agency and capacity for the imposition of Western security sector templates. When the process invariably breaks down as a result of the inapplicability of those templates, it tends to transition into more conven-
with governance, human security4 and fundamental rights in favour of raw stability and parochial donor interests. Paradoxically, this illiberal approach that ‘privileges institutions over relationships and stability over justice, while fulfilling the aims of liberal peacebuilders, actually limits and reverses the objective of creating a long-term, positive peace.’5 Some scholars have called this a new form of containment, an effort to confine the threats posed by failed, fragile and conflict-affected states in the global periphery.6 Reflecting this imagery, former German Defence Minister Peter Struck once declared Germany’s domestic security had to be ‘defended in the Hindu Kush’, thereby justifying the country’s military engagement and security assistance programme in Afghanistan.7
