CIAO DATE: 03/07

Journal of Security Sector Management
Published by Global Facilitation Network for Security Sector Reform

 

Volume 4, Issue 3, September 2006

 

• Social Capital, Fear and Police Legitimacy: Measuring Community-Based Policing in Albania (PDF, 23 pages, 370 KB)
  Sean DeBlieck

  In recent years international development organizations such as the World Bank and United Nations Development Programme have started to implement SSR initiatives in a host of environments. While there are various theories for how this reform leads to development, little attention has been given to how to measure the progress of SSR on the ground, particularly in the reform of police services. This study tested indicators at two project sites of a UNDP police reform project in Albania. The results indicate that the best indicators for a police project's success on the road to development can be seen in public perceptions of police legitimacy.

• Is Human Security our Main Concern in the 21st Century? (PDF, 11 pages, 424 KB)
  Mike Fell

  'The idea of security is easier to apply to things than to people' (Buzan, B.)

  The question of how to achieve, manage, and study security is old and contentious, and 'for much of the intellectual history of the subject a debate has raged between realists and idealists, who have been respectively pessimistic and optimistic in their response to this central question' . Different types of security can be considered, such as political, military, economic, environmental, social, informational and human, and at different scales, from national, through regional, to global, although as Buzan's quotation above shows, its application to humans is not unproblematic. 'For much of the Cold War period most of the writing on the subject was dominated by the idea of national security, which was largely defined in militarised terms' , in a bipolar context, and rested on the old assumptions of the Peace of Westphalia, 1648, that states were the most powerful actors in the international system. As such, there was little concern for the security of the individual and other 'peripheral' threats.

• The Interdependence of Security and Perception (PDF, 9 pages, 225 KB)
  Jessica Stewart

  It will be argued that perception cannot be disconnected from the question 'what is the threat,' and thus perceptions are a necessary feature of any security equation. There are parties who would argue that it is only the actions and capabilities of actors which can be used to calculate threat, and in isolation perhaps this is true. A picture will be presented, of a system in which societies, both state and sub-state, act and react in a form of repeated 'game.' The 'game' played however necessitates assessment of a 'security' situation in a situation of imperfect information. Perceptions may be shaped or altered, or reliance upon them reduced through signalling or the development of norms and institutions, but perceptions will always be a fundamental feature of a society's decisions related to security.