In the new PRIF Working Paper, “Façades of Security Sector Reform in Guinea-Bissau: Simulating Norm Translation,” Christoph Kohl examines the country's security sector reform efforts. The study is based on field research conducted in 2013 and 2014.
Around two decades after the international community urged Guinea-Bissau to implement comprehensive security sector reform to stabilize the small, authoritarian state plagued by military interference in politics, coup attempts, and poverty, the security forces, legislation, and judiciary remain problematic. Contrary to the successes claimed by international actors at the time, the poorly coordinated reform efforts had the opposite effect, contributing to the politicization and destabilization of the security forces.
In his working paper, Kohl argues that the widespread failure of the reforms can be attributed to the lack of “genuine” anchoring of security sector standards in respective local contexts. International actors were often content with appearances, i.e., simulating the translation of standards into local contexts.
As a researcher and member of the junior research group “Political Globalisation and its Cultural Dynamics” at PRIF, Dr. Christoph Kohl analyzed international efforts to reform the security sector in Guinea-Bissau, West Africa, from 2012 to 2016. Since then, he has continued to pursue this topic as an independent researcher.
The working paper is available for download (PDF, accessible).