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Key Text In Whose Interest is Security Sector Reform? Lessons from the Balkans

Author: S Woodward
Date: 2003
Size: 24 pages (1.8 MB)

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Summary

Extraordinary resources and efforts are being invested in security sector reform (SSR) in South-eastern Europe. However, whose interests are served by SSR activities in the region? This chapter from a book, published by Zed Books, claims that temporary foreign actors are driving the demand, financing and mechanisms of accountability for SSR. Instead of turning authoritarian regimes into democratic regimes, in which security is right for the citizens, external actors are motivated by a policy of ‘containment’, which aims to protect Western European countries against the effects of regional instability.

The end of the Cold War created fundamental changes in international security structures. In south-eastern Europe, security structures, and indeed entire systems of government, economy and society had been structured around particular strategies of national defence for conditions that had ceased to exist. This was particularly the case in the former Yugoslavia and Albania, and also, albeit to a lesser extent, in Romania, Bulgaria and Moldova.

There is currently a myriad of donor-funded SSR projects underway in south-eastern Europe, either as part of conditions for further economic aid or through military and police assistance aimed at creating peace and stability in the region. Security sector reform is based, firstly, on the assumption of democratic peace – i.e. that democracies will not go to war with each other – and secondly, that civilian control over the armed forces will enable it to serve the interests of citizens, rather than the state, as in authoritarian regimes.

The experience of south-eastern Europe suggests that two main elements are necessary for security sector reform - neither of which are present in the region thus far.

(i) Internal change: security sector reform depends on the vital spark of fundamental domestic political change to generate domestic interest in transforming the security sector and demilitarising the state, economy and society.
(ii) External security: SSR requires an external environment of relative security that makes both democracy and security sector reform possible.
The main difficulty facing SSR in south-eastern Europe is that these two preconditions, or indeed their absence, interact. This interaction produces a series of vicious circles that make any actual progress difficult to achieve.
This interaction arises, for example, because a minimum level of external security is needed to raise domestic demand for reform of the security sector and prevailing external insecurity makes it difficult to argue for military reform and defence cuts.

The SSR agenda of external actors - including aid donors - is motivated by a policy of ‘containment’, which aims to protect Western European democracies against the effects of the region’s instability. These effects include: refugees and internally displaced persons; organised crime and trafficking in drugs and persons; and threats of further war to the neighbourhood. A donor-driven SSR agenda faces serious challenges, including:

Donors need to recognise the consequences of a situation in which the conditions of both external and internal security differ from those on which donor-driven programmes of security sector reform are based.
The policy of containment – which underlies externally-funded SSR activities - results in a situation of ‘controlled insecurity’ promoted by the international community from which an exit is difficult to imagine.
The dominance of Western interests over local interests in shaping the demand for security sector reform in south-eastern Europe goes so far as to deny the declared interests of the region’s citizens.
According to opinion polls, citizens in the region are less concerned with the agenda of external donors - such as reform of the armed forces - and are more concerned about the rise in new forms of physical and economic insecurity.
The economic and political transformations in south-eastern Europe have generated high unemployment, rising prices, an end to the generous social welfare system and weak states that appear incapable of providing minimal public protection and public goods.
At the same time, the high level of internal insecurity in the region is exacerbated by external insecurity and regional instability because of the continuing requirements for defence spending, the obstacles to intra- and cross-regional trade, criminalised economies and the deterrents to foreign investment.
Democratic governments in the region must address the internal and external security concerns of citizens in south-eastern Europe. As long as citizens seek other avenues of safety and survival, the vicious circle of insecurity is reinforced.

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Source: Woodward, S., 2003, ‘In Whose Interest is Security Sector Reform? Lessons from the Balkans’, in Governing Insecurity: Democratic Control of Military and Security Establishments in Transitional Democracies, eds G. Cawthra and R. Luckham, Zed Books, London