Charles T. Call is Assistant Professor for Research at the Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown. University, US ... policing duties. The development of ...
Opinion Competing donor approaches to post-conflict police reform Charles T. Call
Policymakers are giving much greater attention to police reform than they did a decade ago. International actors recognise that post-conflict settings require some forces to maintain order and justice, yet war termination often results in the dissolution of the very institutions that previously provided these goods. At the same time, Western powers are eager to keep their soldiers safe and, therefore, not engaged in policing duties. The development of internal security capabilities in countries emerging from armed conflict has thus acquired increasing importance in international security, resulting in the proliferation of ‘lessons’ on how international actors can foster police reform, and what steps national authorities should take if they want to restructure their own police forces. This paper seeks to clarify the concepts surrounding ‘police reform’. Although one might think that ‘peacebuilding’ is a broad (or amorphous) enough term to encapsulate police reform, we need to recognise the varied policy and academic communities that seek to define ‘policing’ and ‘police reform’. In some ways, police reform resembles the famous story of five blind men feeling different parts of an elephant, each man holding an entirely different perception to the others. After discussing
Charles T. Call is Assistant Professor for Research at the Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, US, and Principal Investigator of the ‘Building Democracy After War’ Project. He has written several articles on United Nations civilian police, human rights and Latin American security forces, and has served as a consultant on public security issues to the United Nations, the Ford Foundation, the US Department of Justice and the European Commission.
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what the literature says about some of the important questions regarding police reform in post-conflict societies, the paper identifies and analyses competing perspectives on the subject. These alternative views give rise to problems in meaning, operations, evaluation and political priority.
Important questions What sort of information would be useful to practitioners/policymakers and analysts seeking to shed light or make generalisations about police reform? Below are some of the most pertinent questions. • Are police reforms important for preventing a reversion to war? • If not, why are they important? • Where should national/local decision-makers look for the ‘right’ models? • Are there dangers to international support for police reform? • How is ‘success’ measured? • What is meant by police reform/restructuring/reconstitution? • In what context should we conceive of police reform? What is its relationship with demobilisation, military doctrine and reform, intelligence reform, judicial reforms, civil society, and human-rights institutions? • How should local decision-makers proceed with police reform? Are there appropriate sequences, entrance/selection criteria and doctrines, for example? • Should international actors support local-level and/or non-Western alternatives to conflict resolution and security?
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Recent research answers some, but not all, of these questions. The answer to the first two questions responds to the more narrow interpretation of peacebuilding as preventing a recurrence of war (and contrasts with a more robust and ambitious definition of peacebuilding as removing the structural and social causes of armed conflict). One study of 18 peace agreements concludes that restructuring or reforming internal police forces is not indispensable to maintaining a ceasefire.1 If such reforms are largely superfluous to upholding ceasefires, we must conclude that they are important mainly for the broader notion of removing the structural causes of war. Despite the absence of serious data on the impact of police reforms, widespread consensus emerged in the 1990s among members of United Nations () agencies,
the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe () and Western
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governments, as well as among some development institution officials, that they advance stability, justice, democracy, human rights and even development. Yet there is no agreement about what priority should be given to police reforms in promoting these lofty goals, about the most suitable instruments for advancing such reforms, or about the best models or the ‘end state’ of police-reform initiatives. What are the appropriate models for police reform? To date, no single organisational or doctrinal framework has emerged as hegemonic among international preferences, have become apparent in police institutional development and training over the past decade or more. First, in East Timor, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Kosovo, Namibia and Panama, new police forces were created from scratch, with
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organisations, much less across the world. However, some clear patterns, even
new training academies usually overseen by foreign professionals. Doctrines and curricula were greatly influenced by international actors, with a formal emphasis on human-rights standards.2 And, in all of these cases, international actors played a strong role in designing and implementing selection criteria, as well as in contributing to oversight offices. In other settings, such as Angola, Bosnia, Eastern Slavonia (Croatia), the Palestinian Territories, Rwanda and South Africa, international actors sought to reshape significantly the doctrine and behaviour of existing police forces.3 Where identity conflict predominated, as in Kosovo and Northern Ireland, international actors emphasised the integration of ethnic or religious minorities into the police force. These cases illustrate a pattern by which international actors, when conditions perforce with specialised units and decentralised administration. Other elements of this pattern consist of: • police doctrines emphasising international human rights and principles of ‘democratic policing’; • a reliance at least for supervisory posts on some remnants of old security forces screened for human-rights abuses; • the incorporation of female officers; • an emphasis on career professionalisation, non-partisanship and technification; and • the establishment of internal oversight mechanisms.
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mit, seek to create new police forces, usually organised as a single civilian national
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While not followed in every instance, these broad elements form a general framework that is increasingly likely to be adopted by Western actors, as local political circumstances permit. Consequently, they constitute a basic ‘package’ for international organisations in post-war and post-authoritarian contexts, constraining the choices available to national-level decision-makers. Note, however, that two peace agreements signed in July 1999 in Africa, one for the Democratic Republic of the Congo and another for Sierra Leone, did not include any provision for police reform or development, reversing a 10-year trend in other regions. Numerous ‘lessons’ have been drawn from studies of the above countries. Some, such as the importance of linking police reform with the judicial system (prosecutors, judges, codes and prisons) and placing police reform in an overall political context, are so often repeated as to be a sine qua non mantra. Others, such as the importance of oversight mechanisms, choosing quality over quantity and going beyond training to focus on overall institutional development, have not been fully ‘digested’ by international or national actors. In general, the peacebuilding literature has focused more on what international organisations have done, and the constraints they face, than on systematic evaluation of reform processes.
Alternative perspectives on police reform The literature contains no unequivocal answers to several other key questions concerning post-war police reforms. These questions, such as how is ‘success’ measured, what do we mean by ‘police reform’ and how should we think about it, have very different answers depending on one’s values, criteria and institutional perspective. In order to understand and assess international efforts in this area, it is necessary to
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differentiate between alternative perspectives on police reform. Five are identified below.4 These are distinguishable by their principal concerns, the language that they employ and the types of organisations that tend to hold them.
Human-rights perspective The most straightforward standpoint is the human-rights view, the main concern of which is the protection of internationally recognised human rights, usually emphasising freedom from torture, mistreatment and threats to life. Held by international and national non-governmental organisations, this perspective uses the language of ‘reform’ and ‘police conduct’.5 Its hallmarks are the purging of human-rights vio-
lators from military and police ranks, the revamping of police doctrines and
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training to emphasise human-rights standards, and the establishment of internal and (especially) external mechanisms of accountability.
Peacekeeping/military perspective Much of the literature familiar to peacebuilding scholars falls within this category. Although the literature exhibits some heterogeneity, in general, its main concern is with order and stability after armed conflicts, focusing almost exclusively on reform years immediately following the termination of war, and, especially, with preventing a reversion to conflict. Certain authors who address police reform in post-war settings give particular emphasis to the role of foreign military troops, viewing
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in post-conflict settings. The result is heightened concern with ensuring order in the
policing and police reform chiefly as the means to alleviate public security burdens and physical risk and other costs associated with deploying peacekeeping troops.6 The terminology is of police ‘restructuring’ and ‘reorganisation’ (as opposed to reform), offering a more technical and less intrusive connotation. There is a greater focus on the interests and experiences of international actors, rather than on the performance, effectiveness and conduct of, and popular support for, national/local police organisations. A separate concern, particularly of agencies charged with peacekeeping tasks, is the incorporation of former enemies into police forces. The logic is that reforms may help to prevent future conflict by integrating formerly excluded groups into policing structures. This can lend legitimacy, public trust and guarantees of physical security members of those groups and reducing their incentive to take up arms. In situations where previously excluded groups are armed movements, many members have carried out grave human-rights abuses. There is thus a tension with human-rights advocates who seek to exclude all such violators from new security structures. In some cases expediency may eventually yield to accountability. In Bosnia and Haiti, for example, some perpetrators initially included in reformed police forces were purged after a period of months or years.
Law-enforcement perspective This perspective emphasises the strengthening of local/foreign capabilities in order to control crime. It uses a language of crime control and professionalisation, and is a
Competing donor approaches to post-conflict police reform
to those who have been targeted by the state, reducing the sense of alienation felt by
Many officers; Donor country police
Western governments and
military establishments;
‘Police conduct’
Human rights
non-governmental
Institutions tending to exhibit perspective
, and the Spanish Guardia Civil)
organisations
organisations and
agencies (such as the
‘Professionalisation’
/peacekeeping scholars inter-governmental and consultants
reorientation/reform’
‘Police reorganisation/
‘Police restructuring’
Crime control
Dominant terminology
Order/capability
Human rights
Law enforcement
Main concern
Peacekeeping/military
Human rights
Perspective
Alternative perspectives on police reform
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Some development agencies
institutions;
International financial
‘Rule of law’ ‘Rule of law’
development
reform and
ance, judicial/legal
dedicated to govern-
Some donor agencies
‘Citizen security’
‘Police/justice reform’
Democracy; justice
Democratisation
‘Security-sector reform’
development obstacles
Economic costs;
Economic development
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view often held by international law-enforcement officers involved in peacebuilding,
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including many civilian police (), and personnel with the Department of Justice’s International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program (), Federal Bureau of Investigation () and Drug Enforcement Administration ().7 Most individuals who hold this perspective share broader goals of human rights and democratisation. However, much like military trainers, they tend to see professionalisation and strengthened law-enforcement organisations, rather than purges and the incorporation of former enemies into policing structures, retaining experienced, but possibly tainted, ex-police officials or recruiting new personnel unblemished by the conflict, they tend to support the former position. In addition, officials from enforcement agencies in powerful states, like the in
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as the best ways to advance human rights, democracy and peace. In debates over
the , also see foreign police forces as a mechanism for carrying out their own cross-national crime-fighting tasks—establishing contacts and building capabilities to help stem drug trafficking and smuggling, for example.
Economic development perspective Some development agencies and international financial institutions have recently overcome longstanding resistance to involvement with armed institutions and have supported demobilisation and police-reform projects. Under the rubric of ‘securitysector reform’, these projects reflect interest in enhancing the environment for economic development, removing impediments to foreign investment, and reducing the costs of crime and violence. For instance, the Inter-American Development Bank development projects. Treating the new ‘security sector’ like other economic sectors, such as health and agriculture, allowed international organisations to press developing countries to reduce exorbitant levels of military expenditure.8 These developments have opened the way for police-reform initiatives.
Democratisation perspective This perspective emphasises the rule of law and long-term justice and security, rather than short-term order. It encompasses the human-rights view to an extent, but goes beyond it with a focus on institutional development. Using terminology like police reform, rule of law and justice reform, donor agencies dedicated to judicial reform and the rule of law, and many academic analysts of police reform, are the best exam-
Competing donor approaches to post-conflict police reform
has cited the social and health costs of violence as reasons for expanding its police
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ples of this more variegated category.9 Development agencies, initially drawing principally on economic rationales for police reform, have increasingly embraced this perspective as well, drawing on a more holistic relationship between security, development and democracy, including attention to policing. Scholars not only analyse post-conflict societies, but they also examine post-authoritarian cases and established democracies, providing a wider range of lessons, which must be sifted with more care to assess their applicability to post-war environments.
Conclusion These five perspectives, to a certain extent reflective of different communities of policymakers and scholars, yield diverse lessons. Human-rights advocates, for example, measure ‘success’ in terms of police abuse, whereas law-enforcement officials might look to crime rates or police capacity. The peacekeeping/military perspective tends to dominate donor decisions about funding police aid programmes, resulting in heavier short-term funding to ensure immediate stability and quick deployment of a local/national force to relieve foreign peacekeepers of security duties. By contrast, the democratisation viewpoint is based on a longer-term, integrated, institutional development approach that places policing in the context of democracy building and justice reform. Scholars of police reform have, therefore, sought to open up short-term, order-oriented peacekeeping thinking to the ‘democratisation’ perspective. Are there dangers to police reform? The history of police assistance, from the establishment of constabularies in the Caribbean basin a century ago to the Cold War programmes of the United States Agency for International Development
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(), shows that dangers do exist.10 Human-rights advocates persist in reminding policymakers of the risks of fostering more technically competent and politically powerful torturers and abusers within foreign police forces. And the experience of nations like El Salvador indicates the risks of insufficient attention to crime control. The combined effects of dramatic and abrupt ‘downsizing’ of security/military forces (60,000 to 6,000 personnel), disruption in the legal and political system, the time required to develop a new police force, the ramifications of war termination on unemployment, and neglect of a weak and corrupt judiciary contributed to a wave of violent crime that left homicide rates higher than the annual average during 12 years of civil war.11
Different perspectives on police reform yield different dangers. The peacekeeping/
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military standpoint has overly dominated discussion and thinking about postconflict police reform, to the detriment of long-term democratic development. At the same time, both the law-enforcement and development perspectives are too narrow and fail to reflect a more holistic concept of police and justice reform. Meanwhile, human-rights advocates have failed to confront difficult issues pertaining to policing models and institutional development and capacities, focusing instead on human-rights training and accountability for wartime abuses in ways that education/training as part of military programmes indicates their limits in the face of adverse organisational cultures and an absence of accountability. Finally, the democratisation perspective insufficiently addresses short-term imperatives of
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may not address the current policing environment. The experience of human-rights
preventing renewed conflict. Each of these perspectives is necessary to comprehend the array of burgeoning international aid given to foreign police forces. Any discussion of police reform requires consideration of which perspectives are in play. The democratisation view remains too little understood and embraced among practitioners. Scholars of this view have not successfully translated their research into a practical form for decisionmakers, especially in post-conflict settings. For example, lessons about what works in community policing, about the effectiveness of different mechanisms of accountability, and about forms of organisation and patrolling have limited utility in nonWestern, lowly-institutionalised political settings without a much more rigorous examination of what cultural adaptations might be necessary. In general, there has institution-building, might draw on the insights of anthropologists of particular societies to strengthen, rather than to undermine, local forms of conflict resolution, justice or policing. Finally, what can we learn from these efforts more broadly? The peacebuilding literature has focused heavily on analysis and lessons of direct use to policymakers. While such ends are of immense importance (and often undervalued in the academy), we should also be attuned to theorising the elements of this amorphous concept of peacebuilding and seeking to contribute to broader debates in international relations and organisation and democratisation theory.
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been little analysis to determine how international actors, prone to national-level
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Endnotes 1
Workshop discussions for ‘Implementing Peace Agreements after Civil Wars’, co-sponsored by Stanford University’s
Center for International Security and Cooperation () and the International Peace Academy, Stanford, California, November 1999. 2
For a general discussion of international roles in public security reform in these cases, see Oakley, R.B., Dziedzic
M.J. and Goldberg, E.M. (eds), Policing the New World Disorder: Peace Operations and Public Security, (Washington, : National Defense University, 1998), Azimi, N. (ed), The Role and Functions of Civilian Police in United Nations Peacekeeping Operations: Debriefing and Lessons, Report of a 1995 International Conference in Singapore, (Cambridge, : Kluwer Law International and United Nations Institute for Training and Research (), 1996), a special issue of International Peacekeeping, volume 6, number 4, winter 1999, Marenin, O., ‘United States Police Assistance to Emerging Democracies’, Policing and Society, 1997, 00:1–15. 3
See Call, C.T. and Stanley, W., ‘Protecting the People: Public Security Choices after Conflicts’, Global Governance 7(2)
Spring 2001; articles in International Peacekeeping, volume 6, number 4, op. cit., (especially Mark Malan, Tor Tanke Holm, Claudio Cordone, Brynjar Lia and Francesca Marotta), regular reports of the United Nations Secretary-General to the Security Council on the United Nations Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina () (1996–99), and Neild, R., ‘From National Security to Citizen Security: Civil Society and the Evolution of Public Order Debates’, Report of the International Center for Human Rights and Democratic Development, Montreal, Canada, 1999, available online at www.ichrdd.ca. 4
Some authors have differentiated mainly between a subset of these perspectives, such as concepts of public security
reform that emphasise ‘order’ versus ‘justice’, or ‘development’ versus ‘security’. See, for example, Eide, E.B. and Holm, T.T., ‘Introduction’, International Peacekeeping, volume 6, number 4, op. cit., pp. 1–8, and Mani, R., ‘Contextualising Police Reform: Security, the Rule of Law and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding’, International Peacekeeping, volume 6, number 4, op. cit., pp. 9–26. 5
In addition to reports by groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, see Chevigny, P., Edge of
the Knife: Police Violence in the Americas, (New York: The New Press, 1995); and Cordone, C., ‘Human Rights Training for Police’, International Peacekeeping, volume 6, number 4, op. cit., pp. 191–209. 6
Despite the discussion of police institutional development in Oakley, R.B., Dziedzic M.J. and Goldberg, E.M. (eds),
Policing the New World Disorder: Peace Operations and Public Security, op. cit., for instance, the thrust of this volume is to advance ways to analyse alternatives to a military role in public security abroad. Also Schmidl, E. A., Police in Peace Operations (Vienna: Landesverteidigungsakademie, Militarwissenschaftliches Buro, 1998); and Azimi, N., The Role and
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Functions of Civilian Police in United Nations Peacekeeping Operations: Debriefing and Lessons, Report of a 1995 International Conference in Singapore, op. cit. 7
This perspective is most visible in policing journals and publications of the Department of Justice’s National
Institute of Justice, for example. 8
See Department for International Development, Security Sector Reform and the Management of Defence Expen-
diture: A Conceptual Framework, Discussion Paper No. 1, February 2000, London; Mendelson, J., ‘The World Bank and Security Sector Reform’, Bulletin, issue number 5, The Conflict, Security and Development Group, King’s College London, 2000, pp. 7–9. 9
See Bayley, D., Democratizing the Police Abroad: What to Do and How to Do It, (Washington, : National Institute
of Justice, 2001); Call, C.T. and Stanley, W., ‘Protecting the People: Public Security Choices after Conflicts’, op. cit.; Marenin, O., ‘United States Police Assistance to Emerging Democracies’, Policing and Society, 1997, pp. 00:1–15; Neild, R., ‘From National Security to Citizen Security: Civil Society and the Evolution of Public Order Debates’, op. cit.
10
Lobe, T.D., ‘US Police Assistance for the Third World’, PhD dissertation in political science, University of Michigan,
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1975, Huggins, M.K., Political Policing: Internationalizing Security Through US Assistance to Latin American Forces, (Durham, : Duke University Press, 1998), and Millet, R.L., Guardians of the Dynasty: A History of the -Created Guardia Nacional de Nicaragua and the Somoza Family, (New York: Orbis Books, 1977). 11
From 1992, when the peace accord was signed, to 1994, reported homicides rose from 3,229 annually to 9,135 (figures
provided by the Director of Statistics of the Prosecutor’s Office, 1996). The 1994 figure exceeds the annual wartime average of 6,500 (assuming the commonly used figure of 75,000 deaths from 1979–91). See Call, C.T., ‘From Soldiers to Cops: War Transitions and the Demilitarization of Policing in Latin America’, PhD dissertation, Stanford University,
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California, 1999.
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