Security and justice reform: findings from the Conflict Research Programme

Research undertaken by the Conflict Research Programme (CRP) suggests that standard strategies for security and justice reform are routinely undermined by the dynamics of conflict. Security Sector Reform (SSR) and Disarmament, Demobilisation, and Reintegration (DDR) policies often end up providing a mechanism through which different factions engaged in conflict can compete for funding, status, and participation in the state apparatus. Indeed, CRP has identified several instances in which armed groups were actually formed in order to participate in SSR and DDR programmes.1This memo summarises research on security and justice from CRP’s five sites – DRC, Iraq, Somalia, South Sudan, and Syria – plus additional research on Sudan. We use the term ‘security arena’ rather than security sector to describe the evershifting, splitting, and re-combining array of armed actors (mutably classified as gangs, warlords, mercenaries, representatives of multiple “regular” security institutions, etc.) and how these are shaped by the dominant conflict logics of the political marketplace (transactional politics) and identity politics (mobilisation on the basis of exclusive identity such as ethnicity or religion). In parallel to security arenas, we find systems of legal pluralism where a combination of weak and often corrupt formal legal systems operate alongside customary and religious systems. While the latter often operate more effectively than the formal systems, they tend to impose harsh age and gender hierarchies