Community Policing in Rural Mozambique and Sierra Leone

Since the 1990s Community policing (CP) has been a key component of international security-development interventions, forming part of post-conflict security sector reform and democratization. CP reflects the Human Security turn in development thinking, supporting the notion that policing should focus on the safety of people rather than regime preservation. From an empirical perspective, this chapter critically scrutinizes how CP programs were implemented in rural areas of Mozambique and Sierra Leone in the post-war period. A core argument is that CP was appropriated to consolidate state authority at the cost of community ownership and democratisation. Simultaneously it has reproduced existing local power structures as well as given way to new forms of political competition at the local level. This shows that engaging in policing is not just a technical task, as many programs assume, but also an inherently political matter that gives access to authority and resources.