Security Sector Reform After Armed Conflict

Security sector reform (SSR) is a central pillar of peace strategies, closely linked to but not interchangeable with state-building and democratization. There is a broad consensus that sustainable post-war peace needs a stable security environment and thus institutions that are able to inhibit non-legal manifestations of violence. The main elements of SSR are reforms in the state security institutions (military and police) as well as in the judiciary. The first generation SSR was characterized by Western blueprints and a lack of context sensitivity, with the empirical record being rather weak. As a consequence, programs moved away from “one size fits all” to a greater attention to local contexts. The need to include local, non-state actors has been acknowledged, but designing and implementing new approaches on the ground is neither easy nor going to happen in the immediate future. A further step in the evolvement of post-war SSR can be an approach to decolonize reform aspects: to radically question the origins of knowledge and practice of SSR and to center efforts more in the communities affected by reform than with ideals of the security sector that resemble more those in the Global North.