Wednesday 31 August 2011

Settled in Bangui


Yesterday I arrived in Bangui. As we flew in over CAR there was dense rain forest everywhere and for ages this is all there was except for some tiny, tiny villages scattered around the rivers. Then suddenly the Ubangui river, which separates CAR from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), appeared and I could see Bangui spreading out on the left hand side of the river as we flew in from the south-west. Beautiful indeed. Luckily there were so few clouds which allowed me to see a part of this fascinating country from above. After a long, long voyage and three stops in Amsterdam, Nairobi and Douala I was tired and warm but happy to eventually arrive. I got picked up at the airport by my landlady’s staff. Not only did the person who met me take me to the apartment but he also took me through the hustle of immigration, customs and getting the luggage without any problems. I didn’t have to wait in “line”, I just followed this nice man through everything while he spoke to the custom and immigration officials in Sangho (lingua franca in CAR) which I do not understand at all. Hopefully I’ll be able to pick up a few words during nine weeks in the country. Amazingly none of the bags I had checked in at the airport in Stockholm had disappeared along the way. 

Although I have informed my contacts here in Bangui that I have arrived I won’t start to work until next week. I’ll take a few days to adapt and get familiar with the town which is more like a large village. People are extremely friendly and helpful. I really feel welcome and like what I have seen this far. The town is small, small and dusty with red earth everywhere. Most of the houses are only one storey buildings. This and the lack of paved roads adds to the impression of being in a village (rather large though with around 700 000 inhabitants). I am now writing from a café with WIFI, I walked here from the house and it was a sweaty walk I can tell. This is where I’ll go to post on the blog and the connection works perfectly fine so I think I will manage to post at least twice a week as planned. Given that I have something interesting to say that is...

I am really happy to be here and excited to start to work next week. Until then I have hopefully finished all the seven (!) baguettes I mistakenly bought this morning. I asked one in my landlady’s staff to buy me a baguette and an avocado, he came back with seven baguettes and three avocados. Well, that means I won’t be hungry for a while...

Wednesday 24 August 2011

The conflict and ongoing SSR process

I'll try to give a short introduction to the conflict(s) in CAR as well as a brief background to the ongoing SSR process. 

CAR gained independence from France in 1960 and until the early 1990’s political instability, military coups and dictatorial rule characterised the political landscape in the country. For a detailed description of the modern history of the CAR have at look at International Crisis Groups Report Central African Republic: Anatomy of a Phantom State

The first multi-party democratic elections were held in 1993 and brought Ange Félix Patassé to power. He failed however to accommodate the interests of the people and in 1996-197 followed several mutinies as the military was unhappy with salary arrears and general conditions for the soldiers. In 1997 the Bangui Accords were signed by the mutineers and the government. The military has been (and still is) heavily involved and closely connected to politics. The attempts to professionalise the armed forces and put them under civilian rule failed and in 2001 the chief of staff Francois Bozizé left the capital and brought with him hundreds of troops from his own ethnic group to launch a rebellion against the regime of the democratically elected president Patassé. In 2003 Bozizé ousted Patassé with the help of deserted soldiers from the the Force Armées Centrafricaines (FACA). After the military coup Bozizé embarked upon a democratisation project which resulted in his victory in the 2005 presidential elections. However the exclusion of former president Patassé from the elections provoked a rebellion in the north. In 2005-2006 the three different rebel groups I mentioned last week, APRD, FDPD and UFDR challenged the government. All rebel leaders had some kind of connection to the former president Patassé and accused Bozizé for exclusionary politics. 

In 2008 the the government finally reached a Comprehensive Peace Agreement with all three rebel groups. As a part of the agreement former rebels was to be merged into the FACA. According to the International Crisis Group this has to a large extent been done by giving the former rebels legitimate control over territories they already held instead of actually restructuring the FACA which has provoked the resurgence of new armed groups. 

The conflict in CAR is to a large extent elite driven. The former elite (sometimes in exile) have used the legitimate grievances of the population for their own personal means and have transformed self-defence groups (created by people to protect themselves from bandits or the government security forces) into rebel movements. Often the incentives as well as the objectives of the rebel leaders and the low ranking fighters diverge. To understand the complex politics in CAR check out Louisa Lombard's paper Central African Republic: Peacebuilding Without Peace and for more details on the conflict have a look at the UCDP Conflict Encyclopedia

As I wrote last week the government has signed a cease fire June this year with the “last” rebel group. As long as there will be no real change in CAR politics there is a large risk that new groups will emerge. Below I’ll try to give a brief background to the ongoing SSR process based on what I know at this point in time. I am sure I will be able to give a more accurate picture once I have settled in Bangui.

France has since independence provided military assistance to CAR although it can hardly be labelled SSR. As early as 1996 SSR was discussed in the CAR: during the National Conversation on Defence it was stated that the current status of the security forces was deeply unsatisfactory and needed to be addressed. For a detailed description of the SSR process in CAR have a look at the chapter written by NDiaye in this DCAF Yearbook.

Several attempts followed to restructure the security forces: in 1997 following the signing of the Bangui Accords a committee consisting of the government and the United Nations Mission in the Central African Republic (MINURCA) was established to address the restructuring of the Central African Armed Forces (FACA). Andreas Mehler describes how the focus of these efforts only included state security forces and excluded other security providers. The SSR activities did only involve the restructuring of the FACA and did not address activities related to civilian management and democratic oversight. Between 2000-2007 the United Nations Peace-building Office in the Central African Republic (BONUCA) supported the government to carry out military reforms to a certain extent.

By the end of October 2007 the government submitted a paper to the donor roundtable in Brussels in which the whole security and justice sector was described as dysfunctional. In the paper the government also acknowledged non-official security forces as being a part of the security sector. In 2008 the UN established the United Nations Integrated Peacebuilding Office in the Central African Republic (BINUCA) replacing BONUCA and in April the same year the government held a national seminar on SSR. A comprehensive SSR process was initiated, for the first time also including the democratic aspect of SSR. With the help from donors like UN, EU, Belgium and France, reforms of the army and gendarmerie; the police; the ministry of finance; the judiciary: and institutions dealing with democratic oversight have been undertaken. 

It is this ongoing SSR process that I am going to have a deeper look at when in CAR. This is my last post before I leave so next time you hear from me I’ll be writing from Bangui! Very excited!!! 

A bientôt!

Monday 22 August 2011

Narratives from Uganda

For those of you interested, Peter is blogging about his field study in Pader, Uganda. I am sure it will be really interesting to follow.

Thursday 18 August 2011

What exactly am I going to do in Bangui?

The previous posts have been much longer than I planned. From now on I’ll try to write a bit shorter. 

Tuesday I met with my supervisor at the DPCR in Uppsala. As I wrote I hoped that he would be able to help me do formulate something concrete out of my rather abstract thoughts and he did. We spoke for almost 1.5 hours and now I know what to do. My main research question is the following: Why does foreign supported SSR in post-war states contribute to law and order in some cases and not in others? It is a clear and straight forward question. In the thesis I will do a comparison of a number of cases and then the field study will be used to understand the causal mechanisms through process tracing . I will use the existing literature on SSR in post-war states to identify possible explanations and reasons for failure/success i.e. how come SSR contributes to law and order in some cases and not in others. 

Before leaving I’ll try to make a list of possible explanations which then can guide me as I come up with questions for the interviews. In Bangui I hope to be able to meet with EU, UN and other representatives for the international community, with people working for the government, civil society representatives and if I am lucky with personnel serving in the armed forces (police, military and gendarmerie). I already have some contacts so I am optimistic about it. 

I also need to operationalise the term law and order which means that I have to clarify what this concept means in this study. What signifies law and order or the lack thereof? Together with my supervisor I came up with a tentative definition which is the presence or absence of illegal organised armed groups. The presence of such groups means that the state does not have monopoly on violence and use of force, hence is unable to provide law and order. I need to develop the operationalisation of law and order and perhaps also use indicators like violence towards civilians. 

Now I have identified and operationalised my dependent variable as law and order and started to list possible independent variables (explanations) with help from the literature. The purpose of the field study is thus to understand what can explain the lack of law and order in the CAR which serves as a case of foreign supported SSR in post-war states.  The CAR is a case where there is no law and order outside the capital. Although the government agreed to a comprehensive peace accord in 2008 with the three main rebel groups APRD (Armée Populaire pour la Restauration de la République et la Démocratie), UFDR (Union des Forces Démocratiques pour le Rassemblement) and FDPC (Front Démocratique du Peuple Centrafricain) and signed a cease fire with the last rebel group CPJP (Convention des Patriotes pour la Justice et la Paix) in June this year there are still several illegal armed groups operating in this vast country. One of them is the infamous LRA (Lord’s Resistance Army) who are terrorising civilians. Furthermore road bandits, coupeurs de route or so called zaraguinas, harass the population which has resulted in the creation of various self-defence groups on the country side. Although a bit old this report gives a good overview of different actors in the conflict. 

The CAR is obviously an example where the SSR process seems to have had a rather limited impact on law and order, this however is something I’ll come back to once I have arrived in Bangui. Next week before I leave I’ll try to give a background to the conflict and the ongoing SSR process in the CAR.

Tuesday 16 August 2011

Thoughts on security sector reform in post-war fragile states

Last week I met with my supervisor-to-be at the Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI) . I will do a 10 week internship within the research cluster FOI Studies in African Security during the second half of the semester. Hopefully I will be able to use my findings from the field research in the CAR not only for my master thesis but also during the internship at FOI. This autumn NAI and FOI will continue their cooperation and arrange a Lecture Series on African Security with focus on Central Africa in which I will be involved, although the CAR is not on the agenda. In addition I will be given the opportunity to use my findings from the field study to write a short report. This report will have a clear policy focus in contrast to the thesis which is theoretically driven with more advanced requirements on scientific method. I think this is a great chance to use the material for two different purposes even if the research questions guiding the studies can and will be closely related.  This way I also have some time to work with the material collected in the CAR at FOI, it is a fantastic opportunity and I am really happy that I am given this chance.  

This week the main task is to formulate a clear research question that can guide my study. As I started to plan this field study in November last year and received funding for it I obviously do have some kind of provisional plan and a preliminary research question. The research question has however changed and will probably do so again during the course of time.  At the moment it is quite diffuse and therefore I need to further work on it while taking into account that the realities on the ground might not “fit” into the theoretical proposition. Basically this means that I have to keep an open mind to whatever explanations and answers I will find once I am out there. Nevertheless the study has to be theoretically motivated and of course connected to previous research. Later today I am meeting with my supervisor at the DPCR in Uppsala to discuss the research design. Below I try to illuminate why SSR is interesting from a peacebuilding perspective, share some of my ideas and give a snap shot of some previous research related to the subject. Here I do not go into discussions about definitions of contested concepts like peace, security etc. although I am aware that I need to take care of this at a later stage. 

Since the end of the 1990’s SSR has been used as a strategy to prevent conflicts and consolidate peace in fragile states emerging from war. In 2005 OECD/DAC published the OECD DAC Handbook on Security System Reform: Supporting Security and Justice . This document has served as the basis for most donors’ strategies on SSR even though there are differences in the interpretation. In theory at least SSR takes on a people centered approach to security based on the concept of human security .  The security sector is understood in a broad sense comprising not only core security actors like the military, police and intelligence services but also the judiciary, government ministries, parliament, civil society, media and non-state security forces like militias, vigilantes and rebel groups. 

SSR is often used as a means to promote democratic governance of the state security institutions while also improving these institutions’ capacity to provide security to the population. It is important to differentiate between SSR in post-war contexts, in transitional democracies and in developed countries. As a peace and conflict researcher I focus on SSR in post-war societies which includes a third objective, namely to contribute to the overarching objective of building peace. This illustrates how post-war SSR is conceived of both as a process of democratisation and a method for building peace, encapsulating the idea of peace and democracy as two mutually reinforcing goals. Research shows however that in practice efforts to promote peace and democracy sometimes clash; democratisation can have unwanted effects on peace and vice versa. 

In an article Robert Egnell and Peter Halldén demonstrate how problematic it is to provide technical solutions to complex socio-political processes which often is the case in foreign supported SSR. The Westphalian understanding of the state does not always fit the informal power networks and social realities on the ground. The authors argue (p.45) that increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of the armed forces without reforming the political power structures may have serious consequences in terms of human and regional security as the police and military are embedded in the informal network structures in which “big men” struggle for power. Mats Utas and Magnus Jörgel have written an interesting report describing these types of networks in conflict prevention and peacebuilding in the Mano River Basin Area.

This shows how important it is for the international actors to understand existing structures of power when supporting SSR. Failure to do so together with unequal support to capacity building one the one hand (i.e. enhancing the capacity of existing armed forces) and support to democratic governance on the other (i.e. strengthening democratic control of the state security forces) might have undesired outcomes. This legitimacy-efficiency dilemma is crystallised in SSR in post-war fragile states; the only actors (domestic) with capacity to provide security have often committed atrocities during the conflict and are in many cases still connected to the former leaders of the armed group through informal networks. Thus to increase the capacity of those security actors is quite problematic from a legitimacy point of view, particularly so when programmes dealing with accountability and governance are lagging behind. 

This brings me to the rather complicated concept of local ownership. The question of local ownership in SSR; who should design and implement the reforms of the security sector and which actors should be reformed is particularly puzzling in fragile post-war states. It has been described how the state in many cases is a minority provider of security in these contexts where the security forces often are perpetuators of insecurity and injustice. As I mentioned last week foreign supported SSR in fragile post-war states is often state-centric although the state in many cases is unable to deliver security and justice to its population. In such a context it is not, at least not to me, obvious who to work with. 

The decision to involve certain actors and exclude others in the SSR process has important implications for the outcome in cases when security and policing de facto is provided by informal security actors. John Heathershaw and Daniel Lambach points to the fact that actors who actually provide security are often left out of the SSR process. In a report on the role of informal security providers in the SSR process in Liberia Ana Kantor and Mariam Persson describe how already functioning mechanisms for security provision are neglected when informal security actors are excluded from the process. This approach might implicitly violate the principle of local ownership which leads to the question; which locals are we talking about and what are these locals meant to ‘own’? This question and how it relates to SSR has been examined in depth by Timothy Donais et. al.

Hellmüller identifies two ambiguities of the term local ownership with regards to peacebuilding; firstly international actors chose the national elite and not local leaders as their counterparts, secondly the local actors that are involved are only given ownership over a pre-defined process and do not participate in the decision-making process. As for international actors and their support to SSR, research shows that even though donors often emphasize the importance of local ownership, it is often the outsiders’ view of security that determines the character and substance of the SSR process. In an article Barry Ryan  describes how people’s everyday security concerns often diverge from the priorities of the international actors; when social actors are excluded from the SSR process the perceptions of the population are easily overlooked.

As this brief summary shows it is not obvious which locals the concept local ownership refers to. From a peace and conflict perspective I think it would be interesting to look at this issue from a less normative point of view than that of who should be involved. Although the assumption that peace is desirable is highly normative I believe it would be fruitful to examine how the involvement of certain local actors or the exclusion of others affect the SSR process and its ability to contribute to peace. If I break down post-war SSR in two distinct processes; capacity building and democratisation and then look at how it affects peace through local ownership I might be able to identify what mechanisms are at work. It is, as far as I know, unclear how different types of local ownership in post-war SSR affects the larger process of peacebuilding. It might be of interest to donors and other international actors to understand how different types of local ownership shape and influence SSR processes and ultimately the chances for lasting peace. If the aim of SSR in post-war societies is to build peace it is important to understand how local actors can contribute to this process and what possible dilemmas might emerge.  

I hope to be able to come up with an interesting and clear research question out of this rather abstract discussion. In those situations of confusion it is great to have an experienced and competent professor to turn to; he can hopefully help me to formulate something concrete out of this. We’ll see where I end up in a couple of days.  



Monday 8 August 2011

How did I get here?



Today there are exactly three weeks left before I leave for Bangui. The plane takes off just after 5 pm on the 29th of August. After a few stops in Amsterdam, Nairobi and Douala I arrive in Bangui, the Central African Republic (CAR) just after noon the next day the 30th of August. It feels surreal that the departure date is approaching so fast. I remember when I started to plan this field study. It is almost a year ago now. Isn’t it amazing how fast time goes by and how little we know about what is yet to come?   

Many people have asked me (just after they realise that the Central African Republic is a country and that it has been known under that name for more than 50 years) why I decided to go there to do the study. I guess that the reasons for why I want to do a field study on security sector reform (SSR) and why I chose the CAR as my case needs an explanation. 

Throughout my studies on undergraduate level in Crisis Management and International Cooperation at the Swedish National Defence College (SNDC) in Stockholm I often felt that many scholars focused on how to improve interventions from the point of view of the intervener e.g. coordination between civilian and military actors, between different organisations etc and not so much on what effects those interventions have on the population in the society affected. In particular I was interested in whose security we were talking about during our courses and who has a right to define what security is. Even though it is both interesting and important to understand the policies and politics of the interveners I believe we miss something if we fail to take into account how the interventions are perceived and what effects they actually have on the society concerned. 

During the course on the European Union (EU) and its security and defence policy at SNDC we seldom criticised the norms and policies of the EU. Rather the course was based on the assumption that what the EU tried to do was something good. I was happy to see that not everywhere studies of the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) now renamed the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP)   were permeated with this naivety. During a semester at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) I had the opportunity to study the EU and its policies in a more critical way. In Brussels my interest in foreign, and particular EU interventions grew and even more so as I worked at the department for foreign and security policy at the Permanent Representation of Sweden to the European Union during the Swedish Presidency of the EU during the second half of 2009.

I spent the spring 2010 in Geneva doing an internship at the Geneva Centre for Democratic Control of the Armed Forces (DCAF) which is an organisation that contributes to enhancing security sector governance (SSG) through security sector reform (SSR). There I worked with the Deputy Director/Director of DCAF Brussels and continued to focus on the security and defence policy of the EU with a particular focus on EU support to SSR. 

During the internship I learnt more about SSR and my interest in foreign supported reforms in post-war societies increased. SSR is a particularly interesting type of foreign intervention since it often is understood as a tool for democratisation, peacebuilding and conflict resolution all at once thus encapsulating the liberal/democratic peace paradigm in many ways. For some basic information on SSR and SSR in peacebuilding see DCAF Backgrounder on Security Sector Governance and Reform and  DCAF Backgrounder on Security Sector reform in Post-Conflict Peacebuilding.

The question of definitions of security and whose security we are talking about become pertinent in any foreign supported SSR. Nowadays the individual and not the state is the referent object of security but the subject (i.e. who is providing security) still is the state in most cases (see Sara Hellmüller's working paper) despite the state's lack of capacity and/or will to provide security to its people. SSR is often state centric which in many ways contradicts development principles of a people-centred approach in post-conflict and fragile state contexts. Bruce Baker has written extensively on the subject of policing in African states where the providers of security often are other actors than the state. In an article Baker presents an alternative approach to the current state centric SSR which according to the author "rests upon two fallacies: that the post-conflict and fragile state is capable of delivering justice and security; and that it is the main actor in security and justice".  Baker points to some important problems in donors' support to SSR in fragile states that are closely connected to the questions of whose security and who are to define and provide security.  

In August 2010 when I started the two year Masters Program in Peace and Conflict Research at the Department of Peace and Conflict Research  at Uppsala University the thought of doing a field study started to grow in my mind. Although I had some practical experience from Brussels and Geneva I felt that I lacked a practical understanding of the “other” side. I had mainly worked with defence and security issues from the donor's/intervener’s point of view. As I was accepted to the masters program in Uppsala I saw that as an opportunity to switch focus from the interveners to the intervened upon (to use Gelot's and Söderbaum's terminology). 

As a part of the first course in the program, Causes of War, we had to write a paper on the causes of an armed conflict in one or two cases using different theoretical explanations. I had no clue which conflict to write about but I thought I’d go for something different as often we (in the West) tend to focus on some conflicts and forget about others. Since I speak French I decided to pick a conflict in a Francophone country which basically meant a country in Africa. First I was thinking of Chad but soon my attention was directed towards its neighbouring country the Central African Republic. I knew nothing about the country but that made me even more curious and interested. This was my first contact with this for me rather unknown country. 

It turned out that the Central African Republic is one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world. The country has experienced armed conflict, military coups and rebellions for most of the years since it gained independence from France in 1960. The state institutions do not reach outside the capital Bangui and the government fails to provide the population with any services whatsoever be it health care, education or security. The International Crisis Group (ICG) has described the CAR as a phantom state.
 
A few weeks later I sent an email to my former supervisor at DCAF and asked if he had any idea on where it would be interesting to do a field study on SSR. He suggested the CAR. I asked one of my former colleagues at DCAF the same question, strangely she also answered that the CAR would be an interesting case. So then I knew where to go, I thought it was a clear sign that both of them suggested CAR while I also randomly had picked the conflict there for the final paper in the Causes of War course. Now I only needed to get familiar with the SSR process in the CAR, write a project plan, find contacts in the country and secure funding. This was in the beginning of November 2010. 

In February 2011 I received a Minor Field Study Scholarship from the Swedish Development Agency (SIDA) and two months later it was announced that I was one of the lucky holders of the Nordic Africa Institute Travel Scholarship. So as summer approached I knew that for me autumn wouldn’t come before early November this year. I booked the ticket and started to plan the trip more in detail. Now I have the visa, I am vaccinated against all kinds of tropical diseases and I have bought myself clothes suitable for humid tropical climate. Three weeks to go. Three weeks to work on my research design and to prepare the work in the field. 

During the weeks before I leave I'll try to answer questions like: Why is the SSR process in the CAR interesting from an academic perspective? What is it a case of? What scientific method best serves the purpose of this study? What is the purpose of this study? I hope that I'll be able to come up with some tentative answers blogging about the preparations. Hopefully this can serve as a point of departure once I am out in the field.