Co-operation, Contestation and Complexity in Peacebuilding
Post-Conflict Security Sector Reform

Security Sector Reform (SSR) remains a key feature of peacebuilding interventions and is usually undertaken by a state alongside national and international partners. External actors engaged in SSR tend to follow a normative agenda that often has little regard for the context in post-conflict societies. Despite recurrent criticism, SSR practices of international organisations and bilateral donors often remain focused on state institutions, and often do not sufficiently attend to alternative providers of security or existing normative frameworks of security.

This edited collection explores three aspects that add an important piece to the puzzle of what constitutes effective Security Sector Reform (SSR). First, the variation of norm adoption, norm contestation and norm imposition in post-conflict countries that might explain the mixed results in terms of peacebuilding. Second, the multitude of different security actors within and beyond the state which often leads to multiple patterns of co-operation and contestation within reform programmes. Third, how both the multiplicity of and tension between norms and actors further complicate efforts to build peace or, as complexity theory would posit, influence the complex and non-linear social system that is the conflict-affected environment.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding.

Introduction: Co-operation, Contestation and Complexity in Post-Conflict Security Sector Reform

Nadine Ansorg and Eleanor Gordon

1. On the Spatial-temporal Diffusion of Community Based Policing from Japan to Peninsula Southeast Asia: The Case of Timor-Leste

Deniz Kocak

2. The Crime Preventers Scheme: A Community Policing Initiative for Regime Security in Uganda

Jude Kagoro

3. Judicial Reform – A Neglected Dimension of SSR in El Salvador

Sabine Kurtenbach

4. Gender and Defence Sector Reform: Problematising the Place of Women in Conflict-Affected Environments

Eleanor Gordon

5. Military Integration, Demobilization, and the Recurrence of Civil War

Margit Bussmann

6. Veto Players in Post-Conflict DDR Programs: Evidence From Nepal and the DRC

Nadine Ansorg and Julia Strasheim

Nadine Ansorg is Senior Lecturer in International Conflict Analysis at the University of Kent, UK, and Research Associate at the GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Hamburg, Germany.

Eleanor Gordon is Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Development at Monash University, Australia. She has spent 20 years engaged as a practitioner and scholar addressing inclusive ways in which to build security and justice after conflict.