The Challenges Of The Security Sector Reform (SSR)

1.0 Introduction

The world is currently facing the most complex and challenging security environment in recent history. In the last 20 years, a new dimension of threats to security have emerged and in the process altered the way security is conceived within the discourse of the global security landscape. Dealing with these challenges requires a versatile and robust security sector. From the 1990s, Security Sector Reform (henceforth denoted SSR) emerged as a key concept, which became widely accepted by both development practitioners and security experts, following its proposition to a larger public in a speech by Clare Short, Minister for International Development of the United Kingdom, in London in 1998.

Since then, SSR emerged as a

The paper begins by examining the challenges to SSR, before looking at the nexus between SSR and SST. The paper then expands on the concept of transformative security reform by outlining specific policies designed to promote structural arms control and socio-political safeguards against militarism.

1.1 The Challenges of the Security Sector Reform (SSR) Nicole Ball referred the Security Sector as ‘the security family’, that includes: the security forces (military, paramilitary, police), the agencies of government and parliament responsible for oversight of these forces, informal security forces, the judiciary and correction system, private security firms and civil society. There are certainly varying definitions of the security sector in both the academic and policy literature.

According to the UN Secretary General’s report, SSR is defined as a “process of assessment, review and implementation as well as monitoring and evaluation led by national authorities that has as its goal the enhancement of effective and accountable security for the State and its peoples without discrimination and with full respect for human rights and the rule of

These reforms have to occur in an environment in which peace itself does not necessarily signify the end of violence but relatively secure environment for the reforms to flourish but in which peace settlements can continue to be contested. However, peace agreements can temporarily be slowed the situation that may exacerbate the warring parties to regroup and replenish arms supplies, as the case was in Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Angola. Therefore, actors involved in peace building face somewhat daunting tasks in simultaneously demobilizing and disarming the armed factions and wider society, whilst also re-imposing effective and impartial law and