CIAO DATE: 05/2008
August 2005
Austrian National Defence Academy
The transition from interventionist (military) peace-keeping to local (civilian) ownership of public security management has proved not only to be a severe challenge for most peace-keeping operations and their civilian administrators, but also a reason for such operations being prolonged at tremendous cost. In many cases, peace-keeping operations and/or other international agents rapidly became part of the local economy, and thus contributed to the preservation of the status quo rather than to a sustainable process leading toward local governance; meanwhile local police organs - often remnants of the winning force in the antecedent conflict - remained tribal or clannish in their approaches and interests. They could thus hardly be seen as enforcement agencies of a law which remains equally applied to all citizens.
What seems to be needed instead of the scenario described above is a democratically overseen, systematic and cumulative process which involves confidence-building, legal, cultural (values) and institutional elements; each of which may need to be interpreted differently at different stages of the process: from utter local alienation from existing security structures to functional local ownership of public security management.
Against this background, DCAF invited practitioners and researchers to reflect on how to improve the prospects and parameters for local ownership of public security management and transitional justice in post-conflict contexts. DCAF convened the designated authors twice (in 2004 in Budapest and in 2005 in Riga) in cooperation with two associate institutions - the Centre for Strategic Studies at Zrinyi National Defence University/Budapest, and the Latvian Ministry of Defence. The value added of these conferences was to have brought in the structured views and perspectives of both providers and users of public security management and to have them discussed in the light of lessons learned from other current post-conflict reconstruction areas.
Resource link: After Intervention: Public Security Management in Post-Conflict Societies - From Intervention to Sustainable Local Ownership [PDF] - 1.7M