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Security sector reform (SSR) is a central pillar of peace strategies, closely linked to but not interchangeable with state-building and democratization. There is a broad consensus that sustainable post-war peace needs a stable security environment and thus institutions that are able to inhibit non-legal manifestations of violence. The main elements of SSR are reforms in the state security institutions (military and police) as well as in the judiciary. The first generation SSR was characterized by Western blueprints and a lack of context sensitivity, with the empirical record being rather weak. As a consequence, programs moved away from “one size fits all” to a greater attention to local contexts. The need to include local, non-state actors has been acknowledged, but designing and implementing new approaches on the ground is neither easy nor going to happen in the immediate future. A further step in the...
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Kurtenbach, S., Ansorg, N. (2020). Security Sector Reform After Armed Conflict. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Peace and Conflict Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11795-5_3-1
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