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Competing donor approaches

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OpinionCompeting donor approachesto post-conflict police reformCharles T. CallCharles T. Call is Assistant Professor for Research at the Watson Institute for International Studies, BrownUniversity, US, and Principal Investigator of the ‘Building Democracy After War’ Project. He has written severalarticles on United Nations civilian police, human rights and Latin American security forces, and has served asa consultant on public security issues to the United Nations, the Ford Foundation, the US Department of Justiceand the European Commission.Policymakers are giving much greater attention to police reform than they did adecade ago. International actors recognise that post-conflict settings require someforces to maintain order and justice, yet war termination often results in the dissolu-tion 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 inpolicing duties. The development of internal security capabilities in countries emer-ging from armed conflict has thus acquired increasing importance in internationalsecurity, resulting in the proliferation of ‘lessons’ on how international actors canfoster police reform, and what steps national authorities should take if they want torestructure their own police forces.This paper seeks to clarify the concepts surrounding ‘police reform’. Although onemight think that ‘peacebuilding’ is a broad (or amorphous) enough term to encap-sulate police reform, we need to recognise the varied policy and academic comm-unities that seek to define ‘policing’ and ‘police reform’. In some ways, police reformresembles the famous story of five blind men feeling different parts of an elephant,each man holding an entirely different perception to the others. After discussingConflict, Security & Development 2:1 2002100what the literature says about some of the important questions regarding policereform in post-conflict societies, the paper identifies and analyses competing pers-pectives on the subject. These alternative views give rise to problems in meaning,operations, evaluation and political priority.Important questionsWhat sort of information would be useful to practitioners/policymakers and analystsseeking to shed light or make generalisations about police reform? Below are some ofthe 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 withdemobilisation, 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 appro-priate sequences, entrance/selection criteria and doctrines, for example?• Should international actors support local-level and/or non-Western alternatives toconflict resolution and security?Recent research answers some, but not all, of these questions. The answer to the firsttwo questions responds to the more narrow interpretation of peacebuilding as pre-venting a recurrence of war (and contrasts with a more robust and ambitious defini-tion of peacebuilding as removing the structural and social causes of armed conflict).One study of 18 peace agreements concludes that restructuring or reforming internalpolice forces is not indispensable to maintaining a ceasefire.1 If such reforms arelargely superfluous to upholding ceasefires, we must conclude that they are import-ant mainly for the broader notion of removing the structural causes of war.Despite the absence of serious data on the impact of police reforms, widespreadconsensus emerged in the 1990s among members of United Nations () agencies,Competing donor approaches to post-conflict police reformOpinion101the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe () and Westerngovernments, as well as among some development institution officials, that theyadvance stability, justice, democracy, human rights and even development. Yet thereis no agreement about what priority should be given to police reforms in promotingthese lofty goals, about the most suitable instruments for advancing such reforms, orabout the best models or the ‘end state’ of police-reform initiatives.What are the appropriate models for police reform? To date, no single organisa-tional or doctrinal framework has emerged as hegemonic among internationalorganisations, much less across the world. However, some clear patterns, evenpreferences, have become apparent in police institutional development and trainingover the past decade or more. First, in East Timor, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti,Kosovo, Namibia and Panama, new police forces were created from scratch, withnew training academies usually overseen by foreign professionals. Doctrines andcurricula were greatly influenced by international actors, with a formal emphasis onhuman-rights standards.2 And, in all of these cases, international actors played astrong role in designing and implementing selection criteria, as well as in contribut-ing to oversight offices. In other settings, such as Angola, Bosnia, Eastern Slavonia(Croatia), the Palestinian Territories, Rwanda and South Africa, internationalactors sought to reshape significantly the doctrine and behaviour of existing policeforces.3 Where identity conflict predominated, as in Kosovo and Northern Ireland,international actors emphasised the integration of ethnic or religious minorities intothe police force.These cases illustrate a pattern by which international actors, when conditions per-mit, seek to create new police forces, usually organised as a single civilian nationalforce with specialised units and decentralised administration. Other elements of thispattern consist of:•police doctrines emphasising international human rights and principles of ‘demo-cratic policing’;•a reliance at least for supervisory posts on some remnants of old security forcesscreened for human-rights abuses;•the incorporation of female officers;•an emphasis on career professionalisation, non-partisanship and technification;and• the


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