Journal Article
Building lasting security structures after violent conflict
Why the UN cannot be coherent when it provides security assistance to 'failed states'
Contemporary liberal interventionism is based on a paradox: It violates sovereignty in order to build sovereignty. A new article by DIIS Senior Analyst, Louise Riis Andersen, explores the ways in which this paradox constrains the United Nations’ attempt to find lasting security solutions in conflict-affected societies.
The article focuses on Security Sector Reform as part of the wider framework of human security that has shaped the international discourse on peace and security since the end of the Cold War. The UN has played a major role as a normative entrepreneur in formulating this framework, yet the organization faces severe difficulties when trying to translate it into practice in the form of a ‘people-centred’ approach to post-conflict security assistance.
The article identifies the main sources of UN’s predicaments and suggests that when the universal concepts of SSR meet the particular contexts of UN peace operations, hard choices have to be made between competing objectives and conflicting values: something is bound to give!
If international standards and norms, such as the ones prescribed by the SSR agenda, are to have effects on the ground, they must be translated and adapted to the particular contexts. The imperative of contextualization, however, pushes the UN in divergent directions: it emphasizes the need to assist the formal representative of the state—the internationally recognized regime—in establishing itself as the highest authority in the country. And it stresses the need to engage with non-state security providers that enjoy considerable local legitimacy and power.
To overcome the tension between the two, the article suggests that the key challenge for the UN—as it seeks to formulate a coherent approach to SSR—is to refrain from trying to turn ‘failed’ states into modern states and instead seek to identify and support legitimate forms of effective security that can work in the type of ‘hybrid political order’ that characterizes many conflict-affected states in the Global South.
Link: Louise Riis Andersen (2012) "Something's Gotta Give: Security Sector Reform and United Nations Peace Operations", African Security, 5: 3-4, 217-235
The article focuses on Security Sector Reform as part of the wider framework of human security that has shaped the international discourse on peace and security since the end of the Cold War. The UN has played a major role as a normative entrepreneur in formulating this framework, yet the organization faces severe difficulties when trying to translate it into practice in the form of a ‘people-centred’ approach to post-conflict security assistance.
The article identifies the main sources of UN’s predicaments and suggests that when the universal concepts of SSR meet the particular contexts of UN peace operations, hard choices have to be made between competing objectives and conflicting values: something is bound to give!
If international standards and norms, such as the ones prescribed by the SSR agenda, are to have effects on the ground, they must be translated and adapted to the particular contexts. The imperative of contextualization, however, pushes the UN in divergent directions: it emphasizes the need to assist the formal representative of the state—the internationally recognized regime—in establishing itself as the highest authority in the country. And it stresses the need to engage with non-state security providers that enjoy considerable local legitimacy and power.
To overcome the tension between the two, the article suggests that the key challenge for the UN—as it seeks to formulate a coherent approach to SSR—is to refrain from trying to turn ‘failed’ states into modern states and instead seek to identify and support legitimate forms of effective security that can work in the type of ‘hybrid political order’ that characterizes many conflict-affected states in the Global South.
Link: Louise Riis Andersen (2012) "Something's Gotta Give: Security Sector Reform and United Nations Peace Operations", African Security, 5: 3-4, 217-235
Something's gotta give
security sector reform and United Nations peace operations
African Security, 5, 217-235, 2012