The Rise and Fall of Security Sector Reform in Development

This chapter provides insight into security sector reform (SSR) as a development instrument that emerged in donor policies and international organizations during the late 1990s and early 2000s and accentuated the security-development nexus. The chapter presents what its characteristics were, how and why it thrived and also the reasons for its demise rather than consolidation as a development approach. Characterized as much by a developmentalisation of the security agenda as the other way around, SSR aspired to be holistic, governance focused, and 'multi-layered'; it included attempts to merge development, political and military as well as state and non-state actors within one platform of transformation. It stressed the political process of reform over the technical. Whereas SSR led to ground-breaking policy formulations vis-à-vis the development community in the late 1990s, the fundamental militarization of international interventions that followed 9/11 has arguably compromised SSR as a development approach.