Sustainable infrastructure in conflict zones : police facilities’ impact on perception of safety in Afghan communities

Rosa Affleck,Kevin Gardner,Elias Deeb,Curt Grimm,Cynthia Carlson,Semra Aytur

doi:10.21079/11681/41700

Abstract

The notion of sustainable infrastructure for the delivery of social services is to fulfill basic human needs; in war-torn societies, human safety is a critical basic need. The relationship between sustainable infrastructure development and human safety remains under-researched in Afghan neighborhoods. Therefore, this study examined the effectiveness of the police facilities constructed for stability enhancement in Afghan communities. To do so, this study used Afghans’ polling datasets on the police presence and the public safety perceptions, including newly collected survey data related to the influence of the police facilities on human safety and other factors contributing to the neighborhoods’ well-being. The datasets are organized with a multilevel structure in which different individuals are sampled within neighborhoods and analyzed using a multilevel model approach to capture the randomness of the responses. The results showed that police facilities are more important to perceptions of safety in less safe areas and that Afghans in villages perceived themselves as safer than in urban areas, relative to their own immediate region. Those perceiving themselves as being safer were older, more highly educated, and widowed respondents. Overall, Afghans perceived the police facilities as institutional symbol for promoting improvements and opportunities for fulfilling basic human safety need.

Highlights

Fundamental requisites for nation-building efforts typically include establishing basic services and functional security, governance, and economic and infrastructure systems in conflict zones [1– 9]
This study was the first of its kind to use a multilevel model approach to assess the relationships of residents’ perception of security and other social well-being factors of sustainability that come from having the police facilities within Afghan neighborhoods
The four selected dependent variables were modeled with two unconditional settings: (1) only random effects for the intercept without predictors and (2) collective associations of predictors with the best-fit responses and effects

Summary

Introduction

Fundamental requisites for nation-building efforts typically include establishing basic services and functional security, governance, and economic and infrastructure systems in conflict zones [1– 9]. Infrastructure development can provide economic stabilization by helping a nation develop both their capability and capacity [2,10] to become an emerging society [4,9,11]. An extensive example of such nation-building efforts was the stability operations in Afghanistan, in which the United States Government (USG) invested enormous amounts of funds and military resources for reconstruction (i.e., restoration of war-torn societies) and infrastructure development (i.e., creation of new institutions) since 2002 [12,13]. Part of the infrastructure development efforts for stability operations investment was for the USG and international donors to construct police stations and to establish the Afghan National Police (ANP) in anticipation of positive outcomes, in part due to the presence of the ANP. The aftereffect expected was that the Afghan police would demonstrate the functional capacity and capabilities to run their newly restored security infrastructure, reestablishing and maintaining a safe and secure environment for the population

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion