Exporting decentred security governance: the tensions of security sector reform

Abstract

Security Sector Reform (SSR) has become the developed world’s preferred approach to transforming security governance in poor and fragile countries and a key instrument in the state builder’s toolkit. This article approaches SSR as a social technology informed by international ‘best practice’ and models of governance that seek to build secure communities in so-called fragile states while simultaneously securing the developed world from the perceived risks posed by these states. It shows how recent efforts to export security governance reflect the impact of modernist social science on development policy and how the ascendancy of networked policy models has inspired reforms to endorse non-state security actors and build security partnerships between state and non-state actors in fragile states. These approaches are however fraught with tensions, in large part because the non-state – especially after the events of 11 September 2001 – remains associated with state failure and danger. Thus, much as SSR has by necessity come to acknowledge the multiplicity of security providers in fragile states, current initiatives nevertheless seek to position the state at the hub of a network of security providers. In so doing, SSR fails to recognise the ‘statelessness of the state’ and the manner in which governance, order and security are produced and assembled in interaction and competition between multiple actors and institutions.