Kabul: Bridging the Gap between the State and the People; in: Kaldor, Mary and Sassen, Saskia (eds): Cities at War Global Insecurity and Urban Resistance
2020, Columbia University Press

 

The Afghan Local Police – Closing the Security Gap?
with Sam Vincent and Hameed Hakimi; 2015; Stability: International Journal of Security & Development, 4(1): 45, pp. 1–26

The Afghan Local Police (ALP) was designed as an international counterinsurgency programme that works by raising small, village-level defence forces from within rural Afghan communities. Despite being driven by counterinsurgency objectives – that is, seeking to defeat insurgents – its emphasis upon harnessing local populations reflects broader fashions in development and security policy circles. Such policies, in turn, are commonly seen as emerging from a body of theoretical literature that is rethinking the nature of political order in conflict-torn spaces. At face value the range of well-documented controversies surrounding the ALP suggests, however, that the practice is much more ‘messy’. Using the case study of the ALP in the district of Andar, we make two main arguments. First, the mess and ambiguity surrounding the ALP reveal a gap between objectives and practices, suggesting that interventions that work by seeking to harness the ‘local’ introduce problems that have yet to be fully recognised. Second, however, in explaining the ‘mess’ of the ALP we argue that the theoretically-driven work that is commonly taken to justify ‘bottom-up’ interventions, if taken seriously, is well-suited to understanding and even anticipating the supposedly unexpected consequences of intervenors seeking to tap local dynamics.

 

Human vs. state security: how can security sector reforms contribute to state-building? The case of the Afghan police reform
2015; Working paper series, 13-135. Department of International Development, LSE, London, UK

The paper analyses how security sector reforms (SSRs) can contribute to statebuilding. It is argued that successful state-building requires an endogenous political process which aims at creating political legitimacy instead of certain ideal type Western state structures. In a conflict-torn society this demands security for citizens – an environment in which they feel safe and protected – allowing them to express their opinion freely and participate in a state-building process. The example of the Afghan police reform illustrates that a state-centric SSR is in danger of delegitimising and destabilising the state. In contrast, a human-centric security approach is more likely to support an endogenous process of building legitimate institutions.