Columbia International Affairs Online: Policy Briefs

CIAO DATE: 05/2013

Atrocity Prevention at the State Level: Security Sector Reform and Horizontal Equality

Jonas Claes

April 2013

United States Institute of Peace

Abstract

Security Sector Reform (SSR) encompasses activities aimed at improving a country’s capacity to deliver justice and security in a transparent, accountable, and professional manner. Horizontal equality strategies include a broad range of policy measures to increase actual and perceived equity in the distribution of assets, income, and opportunity between groups. When properly implemented these structural measures may enhance state capacity to prevent large-scale violence committed by non-state perpetrators while reducing the risk that state actors become complicit in the atrocities themselves. If poorly implemented these reform efforts may reinforce existing patterns of political or economic competition and marginalization, increasing the risk of civil conflict and atrocities.