Hybrid Security Governance Responses to Crises: The Case of the Ebola Response in Sierra Leone

Osman Gbla

doi:10.5334/sta.612

Abstract

This paper examines how hybrid security structures, enabled by international support, responded to the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone. The main objective of this article is to critically discuss the manifestation of hybrid security governance in practice, to consider the constraints and analyze the sustainability of internationally supported security governance interventions in post-conflict Sierra Leone. Specifically, the diverse networks and processes of the formal and informal security, policing and justice institutions are analyzed to generate an understanding of how their interwoven nature affects operational responses to national crises. Using secondary resources, the argument presented here finds that despite international intervention efforts, the hybrid security structures response to the Ebola outbreak show-cased the challenges of operationalizing hybridity due in part to international post-conflict reconstruction efforts prioritizing formal structures with too little support given to informal structures in the years before the Ebola crisis.

Highlights

In May 2014, the first case of Ebola was reported in Sierra Leone
The British-led security and governance international intervention was criticized for prioritizing formal actors with little focus on informal bodies (Denny 2014; Gbla 2006). This formal tilted preference was predicated at the time on the need to capacitate state bodies that were in the first place identified as major contributors to the state’s fragility and need to be capacitated in efforts aimed at delivering security and development (Denny 2014)
The Ebola epidemic provides a unique case study through which to analyse how hybrid governance structures in Sierra Leone responded to a national crisis

Summary

Osman Gbla

This paper examines how hybrid security structures, enabled by international support, responded to the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone. The main objective of this article is to critically discuss the manifestation of hybrid security governance in practice, to consider the constraints and analyze the sustainability of internationally supported security governance interventions in post-conflict Sierra Leone. The diverse networks and processes of the formal and informal security, policing and justice institutions are analyzed to generate an understanding of how their interwoven nature affects operational responses to national crises. The argument presented here finds that despite international intervention efforts, the hybrid security structures response to the Ebola outbreak show-cased the challenges of operationalizing hybridity due in part to international post-conflict reconstruction efforts prioritizing formal structures with too little support given to informal structures in the years before the Ebola crisis

Introduction

Conclusion