Author: Selman Almohamed
Site of publication: German Institute of Global and Area Studies
Type of publication: Article
Date of publication: August 2019
Security Sector Reform: An Overview
A state’s capacity to legitimately monopolise the use of force within its territory represents one of the basic ingredients of statehood in the Westphalian world of sovereign states. Relatedly, reforming the security sector of the state as an avenue to strengthen its territorial jurisdiction comprises the “defining element of modern statehood”. Further, SSR is perceived by leading multilateral donors such as the UN and the OECD as an indispensable precondition for development, human rights, and sustainable peace.
However, similarly to the mainstream SSR approach, the local turn was not immune from criticisms and caveats: First, focusing on national elites as the local partners of international donors could result in what Lemay‐Hebert dubs the “empty‐shell” approach. The police reform in post‐2003 Iraq represents a clear example of this. The cooperation between the US‐led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and the Iraqi Ministry of Interior (MOI) empowered corrupt elites and led to counterproductive outcomes. Second, lumping divergent social communities under the qualifying adjective “local” presupposes the homogeneity of what could be an amorphous amalgam of multiple actors holding different interests, attitudes, and power structures.
This non‐homogeneity is nowhere more noticeable than in the aftermath of violent internecine conflicts, rendering the presumption that local actors comprise a whole with coherent and consensual views untenable. Thus, there is a need to deconstruct the concept of local ownership “to expose the multiplicity of local actors, interests and levels of capacity, authority and autonomy”.
Regional Politics: The Missed Dimension
The model traces the transnational networks that exist between adjacent states and on which governments, non‐governmental entities, and social groups can rely to exchange both material and ideational resources. Lenders follows Rubin et al. in adumbrating the four basic transnational networks of the model: First, military networks which facilitate the flow of arms and mercenaries. Second, political networks which pertain to political elites’ cross‐border relations. Third, economic networks which relate to cross‐border trade in “conflict goods.” And finally, social connections perceived mainly as familial, diaspora, occupational, and shared‐identity relations.
The Organizational Erosion of the Army before the War
In 1961 Sierra Leone became independent from Britain. The country was governed by the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) between 1961 and 1967. However, with the ascendance of Siaka Stevens from the All People’s Congress (APC) party to power in 1968, security governance deteriorated conspicuously. This deterioration was accompanied by concomitant symptoms of the deinstitutionalization of the state on the economic, social, and political levels.
The Civil War, Security Vacuums, and the Army’s Paralysis
The decades‐long organizational erosion of the armed forces in Sierra Leone was further exposed by the eruption of the civil war in 1991. A multitude of factors and indicators demonstrated the army’s enfeebled position throughout the war. First, the abrupt attack of the RUF forces propelled the army to seek new recruits without following vetting procedures, which allowed new entrants from shady backgrounds and lacking in discipline to join the force.
This situation, among other things, created what came to be known as “sobels,” army members who are soldiers by day and rebels and looters by night. This problem was accentuated by the collaboration between the RUF and the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) junta that took power in 1997.
Army Reform after the Civil War
The restructuring of the armed forces included a multipronged policy which cut across several elements of the reform process. For instance, recruitment became open, fair, and competitive, and no segment of the population was to be excluded. On a different plane, some measures were taken to enhance the accountability and transparency of the operating security institutions, such as the army’s regular newsletter and biweekly press briefing, in addition to the crafting of a new budgeting system for all government ministries including the security sector.
Further, training in the reformed armed forces did not focus merely on combat readiness. Rather, emphasis was put on increasing army recruits’ awareness of human rights issues in order to protect individual Sierra Leoneans from the arbitrary actions of security agencies, something which had historically tainted their reputation and led to a loss of trust on the part of the population.
In fact, it might be misleading to acknowledge the marked success of security reform in Sierra Leone without shedding light on the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) programmes which predated the cessation of war. However, this paper looks only at the final phase of DDR (2000–2002) because it was the only one uninterrupted by renewed fighting, and was crowned by the official end of the war. When DDR began in Sierra Leone under the auspices of the UNAMSIL, three armed militias were basically targeted: the RUF, the CDF, and the renegade group within the army. As a result, almost 72,500 combatants were disarmed.
West African Dynamics and Their Impact on Sierra Leone
Economically, different regional trade networks in West Africa undergirded an informal system of diamond production and exportation which had been established during the colonial era and flourished under the military dictatorships within the region. During the war in Sierra Leone, an arms‐for diamonds trade intensified between Charles Taylor and the RUF (Vorrath 2014: 10), whereby the role of alluvial diamond mining and smuggling surpassed the instigation of violence to become a crucial factor in sustaining militia leaders and funding for arms.
During this time, the Nigerian position of supporting state sovereignty and working to uphold regional stability was advanced in the context of West Africa. Because it was the paramount contributor to the financing and manpower of the Economic Community of West African States’ (ECOWAS) troops, Nigeria led the ECOMOG in Sierra Leone in 1998 to restore President Kabbah, who had been overthrown in 1997 by the AFRC/RUF junta. Further, when the UNAMSIL took over from ECOMOG in 1999, Nigeria, and as a sign of cooperation, participated with 3,000 troops in the UNAMSIL. Moreover, Nigeria spearheaded the ECOWAS Mission in Liberia (ECOMIL), which intervened militarily in 2003 to oversee a previously agreed upon ceasefire, and in the same year confiscated 30 tones of weapons sent to Taylor by Gaddafi.
Regionalism and SSR: A Holistic, Constitutive, and Entangled Relationship
Based on the two cases of army reform in Iraq and Sierra Leone and the previous discussion, I reason that regional politics and the RCFs model can contribute to our understanding of the success and failure of SSR and post‐war stability in the following ways: First, observing the regional dynamics in the cases of Sierra Leone and Iraq reveals two distinct conflict formations which I will call “convergent” and “divergent” formations.
the above articulation of the constitutive relationship between RCFs and SSR enables us to recognize the entanglement of SSR and regional politics and to view their relationship as holistic. This challenges one of the main features of atomism – that is, “separability” – and thus guards the analysis against methodological individualism, and the methodological nationalism of IR. Hence, this reasoning might be conducive to shifting the analytical focus of SSR scholarship from international‐local, donor‐recipient bifurcations to a new understanding whereby SSR in a certain country is approached as a constituent part of a holistic relationship with the region in which it is located.
Conclusion: Regional Politics Is Integral to SSR
This study was motivated by the intriguing under‐representation of regional politics in the scholarship on security sector reform. It has therefore undertaken a review of the development of SSR perspectives in order to explore the basic analytical focus of each approach to SSR. Additionally, it has shed light on the positioning of the regional dimension in the discipline of IR and in studies on civil wars.
The comparison of the two cases makes evident that the regional formation of several actors, structures, dynamics, and networks created a permissive environment for SSR to bear fruit in Sierra Leone, while leading to faltering SSR in Iraq. This observation engendered an investigation into the distinctive regional characteristics of Iraq and Sierra Leone and led to a differentiation between two types of regional conflict formations: convergent RCFs and divergent RCFs.