Developed countries imposing their own Security Sector Reform (SSR) processes onto nations recovering from war often rely on entrenched colonial attitudes with no guarantee of success.
Research led by the University of Kent specifically looked at the Democratic Republic Congo (DRC) and Nepal contrasting their outcomes and examining the reasons for success or failure of SSR policies based on European templates. They question whether the systems even work in their countries of origin where statistics show ongoing institutional racism.
SSR is a key feature of peacebuilding interventions and is usually undertaken by a state alongside national and international partners. Many programmes still aim to create a security sector following a European template, without sufficiently acknowledging that this might not work in countries outside of Europe.
Dr. Nadine Ansorg of Kent’s School of Politics and International Relations (POLIR) at Kent, together with Dr. Julia Strasheim, Federal Chancellor Helmut Schmidt Foundation, Hamburg, found that social and political dynamics, historical and cultural details, and the involvement of other nearby countries all have to be factored into when creating meaningful SSR policies for a nation.
In DRC, the high number of rebel groups from within and outside the country posed a major obstacle to a successful demobilisation of forces. Nepal, in a contained geographical area and without involvement of neighbouring countries and other vested interests, experienced a completely different outcome to DRC.
The research highlights the need to genuinely acknowledge that SSR programmes must respond to their specific contexts. A programme that works in one country will not necessarily work in another which may explain the mixed results in peacebuilding and the co-operation and tensions within reform programmes.
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