The emergence of SSR was based on an assumed integral relationship between development and security, and the need to narrow state-building down to one core component that could be operated upon. The concept originated from narratives of policy- makers and academics about the failure of governance and the waning and disappearance of state capacity and legitimacy, which resulted in the intensification of intra-state conflict. The focus on fragility, i.e., lack of capacity, emerged after the end of the Cold War, and was accentuated by the post-9/11 understanding of the security-development nexus. The absence or weakness of government control in the Global South was assumed to be a direct
42
Of the last five of the 31 ongoing conflicts, four were so-called ‘internationalized intra-state’ armed conflicts, meaning that the government, the opposition or both sides received support from external governments. Only one was of an inter-state nature (Eriksson, Wallensteen and Sollenberg 2003). Wallensteen and Sollenberg (2000:648) define a violent conflict as “a contested incompatibility which concerns government and/or territory where the use of armed force between two parties, of which at least one is the government of a state, results in at least 25 battle-related deaths.”
threat to the security of Western states. “Rogue and failing states,” Coletta (2007:393) argues, were looked upon as “the ones most vulnerable to exploitation by millennial groups.” Hence, ensuring or strengthening government authority and control emerged as the main solution to problems of both security and development.
4.3.1 Effective + legitimate states = human security
As formulated in the mid- to late 1990s, SSR was, on the face of it, not explicitly or conceptually centered on working on state institutions. It emerged in the wake of the ‘human security’ paradigm, within which the individual rather than the state became a priority for multi-lateral and bi-lateral donor agencies (see Kaldor et al. 2007; Ball 2010:32, Sedra 2010:16). The Human Development Report, published by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in 1990, argues that development must focus on people, even though they are grouped by country, rather than on the security of national (state) boundaries, and on advancing health, education, political freedoms and economic well-being (King and Murray 2001:587).
However, ‘human security’ was formulated with the important and somewhat contradictory caveat that the state should continue to be the key provider of these services. That the state should have the mandate to make order in the justice and security field was not questioned. Any alternatives to the state and its centrally-governed institutions as the sole enforcers of order could hardly be imagined.
The primary questions in this state-centered policy-making discussion were how and towards whom these ordering effects were to be directed and how states could fulfill their functions effectively and legitimately. Lack of development was seen as a cause of insecurity and financial support was now starting to be allocated to the production of defense white papers and the building of ministries of defense and intelligence services in Sierra Leone and beyond (for Sierra Leone see Ashington-Pickett 2010:20; le Grys 2010:43; Gaeta 2010; Kondeh 2010).
4.3.2 ‘Securitization of development’ ‘developmentalization of security’?
SSR emerged along the lines of the ‘developmentalization of security’ rather than the ‘securitization of development’. This focus constituted an attempt to depart from train-and- equip programs,43 where training and military hardware is provided to make internal and external security forces more effective (see Sugden 2006:10).44 Characterized as ‘holistic’ in scope and ‘politically sensitive’ in approach, SSR as one of the practical expressions of state-building was structured to deal with the governability of a country’s internal and external security institutions. Moreover, emphasis was put on their democratic accountability through ministerial management and external oversight by parliaments and civil society organizations. In other words, a technical process was articulated in languages of stateness (see Sedra 2010:16; Albrecht et al. 2010:75; van de Goor and van Ween 2010:98; Fitz-Gerald 2010:163; Hutton 2010:197).
During the 1990s and early 2000s a primary focus on individual military and police institutions and technically-driven reform efforts was giving way to an approach that regarded security and justice as part of a single system, underpinned by concepts of accountability and rule of law (Bryden and Hänggi 2005:26; OECD 2007a, b and c; Albrecht et al. 2010:75). On paper, therefore, SSR can be seen as a considerably more intrusive approach to state-building than train-and-equip programs. Figuratively speaking, SSR seeks to tear the state apart in order to build it back up from within. It targets not one organization within, but the justice and security field as a whole. In other words, the system of related actors would be re-composed as a set of centrally-governed institutions that resembles a state of the western universalist variety.
Train-and-equip is ultimately about building up the effectiveness of a security institution, but rarely considers how the justice and security field as a whole is affected, and how power is distributed across it. This narrow and rather technical approach was pursued
43
The two approaches are often conflated, however, as was the case in Sierra Leone, where “training and equipping the new army and police force” has been seen as constitutive of SSR (Bellamy and Williams 2005:183).
44
The SSR label has been applied to train-and-equip activities in other countries. In Liberia, for instance, DynCorp, a private security company, was contracted by the US Government to train 2,000 men to become Liberia’s new army. While initiated under the SSR label, the process was conducted without engaging Liberia’s legislature or other organizations in defining the nature, content or character of the new army.
globally in its purest form by the US from 2001–08.45 SSR, however, had been formulated in opposition to the train-and-equip approach, based on the assumption that isolated and targeted projects such as military training ultimately do not help establish ‘the state’ as the all-important bulwark against instability, disorder and chaos in otherwise unregulated physical space. In the case of the US, therefore, the rising concern with insecurity and terrorism was detrimental to the advancement of SSR as the ‘developmentalization of security’ (see Sherman 2010; Ball 2010).
4.3.3 The US, SSR and the effects of 9/11
9/11 had three major implications for how SSR developed within the US, which consequently shaped how SSR could be operationalized globally. First, the terrorist attacks led to the most comprehensive revision of the US national security architecture and policy since the end of World War II, including a sweeping expansion of executive authority and a broad erosion of civil liberties.
Second, these changes led to a disproportionate militarization of US foreign assistance in areas of strategic interest to the US, not least in Iraq and Afghanistan (Coyne 2011).46 According to Sherman (2010:59), this type of assistance has often undermined or contradicted principles of democratic governance, reinforcing repression and radicalization. Third, this change in US security policy has provided justification for a few countries to repress dissident and opposition movements under the mantle of counter- terrorism, while making it more difficult to challenge such practices internationally (ibid.).
45
Between 2001 and 2008, the budget of the US Department of Defense eclipsed the combined resources of the Department of State and USAID by a factor of 350:1, compared to 10:1 in other Western governments. Furthermore, until recently, US-funded SSR projects were not called “SSR.” Most of them still are not, as they fall under such rubrics as military assistance, police training and democracy and governance. Under the Bush administration, the priorities of counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism meant a relatively narrow focus on training military and police as complements to – and eventual replacements for – international forces. Prioritizing hard security has meant that oversight mechanisms of recipient countries, parliament and the judiciary in particular, suffered as a consequence (Albrecht et al. 2010:81).
46
For instance, the US Department of Defense was placed in charge of police reform in Iraq and Afghanistan, which has meant an emphasis not on community policing and civilian protection, but on engaging the police in military-led counter-insurgency operations. In Iraq, US military police officers trained civilian police, despite State Department pleas for a ‘military-to-military and cop-to-cop’ approach.
With specific reference to the intervention in Sierra Leone in 1999–2000, the realization of the fundamental militarization of foreign policy after 2001 was captured during an interview with Clare Short. As the Secretary of State for International Development when DFID was actively formulating SSR policies and intervening in Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq, Ms Short noted:
The possibility of absolutely merging commitments to development with all your other instruments of foreign policy, including the military, which was conceivable in those days [in Sierra Leone], is now sort of lost [because of Afghanistan and Iraq], but I think it will come around again (Clare Short, interview, June 2008). “We were a new Government, there were no mixed messages then,” Short continued, referring to debates over Iraq:
You can see a country like Britain taking on the idea of a stronger, multi-lateral world order, and this is all pre-Iraq obviously, where there was an aim of deploying troops alongside the objective of having a strong international law, well-organized states (Clare Short, interview, June 2008).
Short captures a dominant discourse among bi-lateral and multi-lateral agencies in the decade that followed the end of the Cold War and prior to the announcement of the War on Terror in 2001. SSR as a comprehensive solution rather than merely an extension of train- and-equip is the result of the particular worldview that existed in the aftermath of the Cold War. The ‘well-organized state’ that Ms Short mentions – effective and legitimate, to paraphrase Goldstone (2008:285-286) – was considered pivotal in combating instability and chaos. Unlike programs that merely make individual justice and security providers more effective, however, SSR became a matter of building the ability of ‘the state’ to execute security governance. Above all, this was to be sought by increasing the capacity of administrative staff to enforce order and the normative content of reform (accountability, democratization and rule of law).
4.4 Amalgamating security and development in the UK and the emergence of