DIIS researchers in special issue of 'Policing and Society' on post-conflict policing

This special issue of 'Policing and Society' (vol. 19, no. 4, December 2009) deals with the contentious theme of 'Policing Post-Conflict Societies'. Particularly it focuses on the central role played by non-state actors in security and justice provision in post-conflict contexts where state institutions lack both capacity and legitimacy to provide policing services to the citizens. The introduction to the issue by the guest editor, Professor Bruce Baker (Coventry University) sets the scene and argues that even though international agencies are concerned with effective police reform there has been a tendency to focus too rigidly on state building and ignore the need to include non-state actors.

Helene Maria Kyed's (project researcher, DIIS) article in this special issue is about police reform in Mozambique as part of the post-conflict democratic transition. Specifically she explores how Community Policing Forums that engage non-state actors in partnerships with the state police has been implemented in a rural former war-zone. Officially community policing was introduced as a response to the failures to democratise the police during the 1990s, and it was officially promised to engender 'a new culture of security' that included citizens and made the state police more accountable to the public and more in line with human rights standards. Based on ethnographic fieldwork Kyed asks what local versions of community policing means for everyday policing practices and where this is taking police-citizen relations. She shows that community policing was principally used by the local police to expand state police outreach and reassert sovereign authority by outsourcing extra-legal tasks to young men. The result is reconfigured forms of physical and symbolic police violence, which reproduce significant elements of past paramilitary policing cultures.

Peter Albrecht (Phd Candidate, DIIS) and Lars Buur (Senior Researcher, DIIS) have written about the inclusion of non-state actors in attempts to strengthen local level security through police reform. Their article explores how the role of non-state actors has been conceptualised vis-á-vis the role of states as providers of security and justice in fragile state settings. Albrecht and Buur argue that even though the central role of non-state actors in Security Sector Reform (SSR) in general and policing in particular has increasingly been acknowledged, the imperative of state building, which continues to structure SSR, makes non-state actors as providers of security at the local level an uneasy bedfellow. There are many reasons for this, including the political context in which SSR is undertaken, pressure to achieve results, etc.

Policing and Society, Routledge, Taylor and Francis: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713646669