Paul Jackson
University of Birmingham Colonial and contemporary policing
Reproducing Colonial Patterns of Policing in Contemporary Police
Reform in Africa
Police reform in many developing countries has become one of the most common
and contentious elements of security sector reform processes in ‘weak’ or ‘fragile’
states. Typically viewed as part of broader SSR that emphasises security, including
the military, contemporary police reform exhibits a number of specific characteristics
that reproduce the colonial concepts of the police as an instrument of control. In the
modern era this has come to have two critical aspects: internal control in terms of
expanding state legitimacy and power across a territory; and globally in terms of
enhancing the capabilities of local forces to deal with non-traditional security threats.
With an emphasis on ‘professionalisation’ and the expansion of the liberal state in to
Africa, there is little consideration of the implications of looking at police forces
through the lens of colonial patterns, despite the fact that many of these
contemporary reforms reproduce concerns and patterns associated with the
maintenance of colonial control and also that some police structures held by
contemporary international donors to be ‘African models’ are in fact colonial
institutional structures. This paper examines what this looks like and the implications
for policing and power.
‘The British have taken many useful things with them when they have gone out to
colonise or administer parts of the world, but history may well record that they took
nothing which was to have a more profound and lasting influence than their own
particular conception of the police and its functions.’
Charles Jeffries, The Colonial Police (1952)
Introduction
This paper is something of a work in progress. It derives from my work in post-conflict state building,
specifically from work on security sector reform that I have done in various places, and from
research carried out on security and justice at a local level in Sierra Leone and Uganda. In this role, I
tend to work with local systems, chiefs and local courts and am taking the view that I ‘look back’ at
the state from outside. Consequently, I have spent a lot of time in communities where state police
are either absent or distant – or ‘beyond the tarmac road’ as my colleague Bruce Baker would say.
The UK’s involvement in Sierra Leone came as something of a surprise to many people, but it has
become integral to the justice and development policies followed by the UK since then, and
continued to this day. The idea of a ‘security-development nexus’ and the close relationship with
security and development is now enshrined in DFID’s approach to development aid more generally.
In fact, UK Aid has now become focussed specifically on those countries which have been identified
as being ‘fragile’ or ‘failed’ and which have recently emerged from conflict.
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In this, the UK follows – in fact has led – a drive amongst the international community to see the
state as being central to development more generally. The approaches commonly adopted under
the label of security sector reform (SSR) have stretched the idea of ‘security’ in to a bewildering
array of institutions beyond those engaged in ‘hard’ security, i.e. the military. One of the main
beneficiaries of this has been the police, which has been thrust in to the development frontline as
militaries are withdrawn from the streets of most countries and police become responsible for
internal security.
At the same time, this move was given a boost in the arm by the advent of the ‘war or terror’,
specifically the identification of failed states as uncontrollable havens for terrorists. Consider Tony
Blair in 2004:
‘We know that poverty and instability lead to weak states which can be havens for terrorists
and other criminals (...) Even before 9/11, al-Qaeda had bases in Africa (...) They still do,
hiding in places where they can go undisturbed by weak governments, planning their next
attacks which could be anywhere in the world, including Africa’ The Guardian, 2004
In other words, strong state institutions are necessary for the protection of themselves, but also for
the protection and security of the international community of states. Police reform is central to this,
given the primary role given to the police in domestic security, as opposed to the military, seen as
operating externally and primarily retrained within SSR programmes as peacekeepers. It is the
police, therefore who come to the centre of this global-local security demand and who therefore
need to be constructed in a specific way.
This paper outlines what this means in practice, through looking at Sierra Leone, but also drawing o
other examples of police reforms. It takes as its starting point the view that contemporary
international relations, and also many people carrying out these reforms, have ignored, or not
actually discovered that there are a series of historical processes that could be valuable in
developing police reforms. Specifically, the paper draws parallels between approaches to colonial
policing and the importance of structures in developing a philosophy of policing.
Drawing on Foucault’s idea of liberalism and control, the paper sees the policing structures as an
attempt to construct a liberal state that ends up by constructing a proto-colonial state where
policing is less about ‘policing’ in the sense of the ubiquitous approach of ‘community policing’ and
far more about extending state control over areas beyond the boundaries of the existing state, and
extending the power of the state even beyond the colonial state structures. As such it addresses an
area that is rarely visited by the literature, which is dominated by ‘immediate’, ‘how-to’ and policy
papers and rather neglects the historical evolution of state structures.
Security, development and liberal state building
The World Bank, along with DFID, identifies a number of reasons why security should be
incorporated into poverty reduction strategies.i Importantly, security is identified as a major issue by
poor states themselves. Whilst clearly there is an interest in declaring security as an issue for a
government in the current environment (particularly if you can define a terrorist threat), this is also
backed up very clearly by the World Bank’s Voices of the Poor Survey, which showed that poor
people themselves identify insecurity and access to justice as two core concerns.ii However, this
relies on how exactly those people define security. In Sierra Leone, for example, there was a very
clear change in local views of security in post-conflict from an immediate desire to stop the killing
and re-establish order to more development-related concerns, including reduction in crime
(particularly drug smuggling) and economic insecurity (particularly employment opportunities) as
well as domestic and sexual violence.iii The Bank study goes on to cite studies from Paul Collier that
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show how far conflict affects the economy, but then perhaps unsurprisingly moves on to identify
security as a core government issue and as a public good and an issue of service delivery.
The experience of DFID in the late 1990s informed by the collapse of Sierra Leone (explained in more
detail below), led the UK to engage with the security sector since the collapse of state security had
been seen as a key driver of the conflict itself and the inability of Sierra Leone to defend itself as a
state.iv The policy statement Poverty and the Security Sector set out DFID’s commitment to SSR as a
means of poverty reduction through the prevention of violence, the capacity to contain violent
movements and the prevention of damaging long-term conflicts. In addition, it goes on to outline
the role of the security sector in crime prevention and counter-terrorism that may also contribute to
a positive development framework. However, it does raise questions about how far SSR is actually
possible in the real world. As Broszka points out, SSR may be ‘sound in theory but problematic in
practice’.v
This reflects a broader approach to state building which has guided the response of the international
community to the phenomenon of failed states. There is a strong link between SSR and state-
building as a global project. In post-conflict contexts this is also linked closely with the idea of the
“liberal peace.” At its simplest, liberal ideology can be reduced to four core themes: individualism
(assertion of individuals over social collectivities); egalitarianism (moral equivalence of individuals);
universalism (moral unity having primacy over historical association or cultural forms); and
meliorism (belief in the ability to improve all political and social institutions). All of these elements
surround the core principle of individual freedom.vi
A liberal peace, therefore, exists when all of the above constitute normal social relations and justice
and liberty drive a social structure that is inherently peaceful. Democracy and capitalism are seen as
the vehicles for peaceful competition underlying liberal structures and the normative foundations of
liberalism are encompassed in the liberal notion of human rightsvii. At their highest level these are
the right to freedom from arbitrary authority, the social rights necessary to protect and promote
freedom and the right to democratic participation to protect the first two. Consequently when
international intervention is undertaken in the name of human rights it is entirely coherent to
initiate a process of democratisation as a means of developing social rights. Clearly it is the transfer
of the political architecture of the liberal state from western liberal countries to non-liberal states in
the form of state-building that leads to a tension between the presumed pacific nature of liberalism
and the issue of whether those structures really are the political manifestation of the moral freedom
of the local populations.
This has led to a number of important developments in terms of state building, not least the idea
that an international liberal peace requires non-liberal states to be liberalised in order for that peace
to become sustainable. Given the policy community’s focus on states, it is perhaps hardly surprising
that the main focus of international aid has been in trying to support states that are weak and also in
reconstructing states that are in crisis or collapsed entirely. There are a set of clear reasons for this,
not least of which is a concern with international security and the reliance on an international state
system on functioning states to carry out basic tasks. The current international security environment
also relies on states to maintain existing international order, thus the development of functioning
security sectors within those states comes to the forefront of this agenda.
In practice, however, the experience of state building has not been a happy one. As mentioned
above, the technical methodology of state building leads to construction of entities that may look
like states but in reality lack legitimacy or capability. Examples such as Timor-Leste and Kosovo also
point to an externally-led UN approach that incorporated local elites but marginalised the majority
of the populationviii. In Iraq the US attempted to construct a western style state armed with a whole
range of neo-liberal state theories that view the institutions of the state as almost being separated
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from existing politics. It dismantled the state that existed and started all over again, constructing a
new set of ahistorical institutions alien to the local population – a process labelled as a
‘MacDonaldization’ approachix. Somalia is the archetypal collapsed state but this is not simply a
function of its own history but also a problem of contemporary international relations, particularly
the universalisation of one model of the nation-state.x These examples show clearly that externally-
led, technocratic solutions have not been successful at constructing states and yet the approach
continues, despite significant criticismxi.
In particular, much state building is dominated by the construction of exit strategies, which in turn is
dominated by a ‘democratic election’ as the end-point. However, holding an election does not
necessarily constitute state formation, even though the assumption is that democracies can be
created in this way within project horizons. Aside from the broader challenges of creating multiparty
democracy in a post-conflict situation, the real issues with Iraq lie in a fundamental
misunderstanding of what the project of state-building actually means in practice.
There is a strong literature on state building that is driven partly by a policy situation on the ground
in Iraq and Afghanistan amongst other places. xii However, it rarely provides a comprehensive
theoretical framework for state-building and, as a result of its genesis, tends to concentrate on
technocratic approaches to the construction of states rather than the politics of what is being
constructed. xiii For example, Hippler outlines a three-point plan for state-building based on
improving living conditions, structural reform of ministries and integration of the political system.xiv
Again, this is a depoliticised version of reality that appears feasible but takes the politics out of state
building. In addition, such interventions are frequently carried out by bureaucrats, or in the case of
security governance, by military officers from the international community whose concerns are
primarily technical (i.e., teaching people to shoot straight) rather than political (i.e., teaching them
who to shoot at and on whose orders)xv.
More importantly, if this means (as it usually does) integration of the political system into the
international order, then who owns this process? Is this then a process that has some form of local
ownership amongst those who are supposed to benefit, or is it aimed at benefitting international
states relying on a state system? Presumably, all of this is done within a functioning security
environment? Many critics of current approaches attribute policy coherence to ‘liberal’ approaches
to international efforts that do not actually conform to actual situations. There are two facets to
this: firstly, there is a tendency to attribute far more coherence than actually exists and to construct
a single philosophy of intervention that isn’t really therexvi; and, secondly, there is a tendency to
criticise elements of ‘liberal’ peacebuilding (particularly those regarded as being forced) that are not
really liberal.xvii In this way, much criticism of liberal peacebuilding cannot be truly valid when so
many peace operations are not actually liberal.
Whilst virtually all current analysts accept that there are problems with the nation-state in many of
the contexts in which states are failing, there is still a tendency to accept the technocratic
parameters of state-building.xviii This casts the nation-state as the norm in international relations,
ignoring the broadening and deepening of security at international and subnational levels,
particularly the intra-state nature of much conflict, international conflict actors and also the role of
the state itself as an actor in non-state conflict. There remains an assumption that if we can develop
the right mixture of policies then we can create a healthy nation-state that can exist in the
international order, whilst in reality many of the states where nation-building is focused are states
only on book. There are numerous reasons for this, but here I have grouped them into six sets of
issues:
Firstly, for a real state to actually exist requires the population to buy in to the idea of the state at
some level; i.e.it must have legitimacy with its population as well as the international community. In
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a liberal state this is commonly taken as participation in the political management of the state
through periodic democratic elections. However, this type of formal legitimacy may not be possible
or even desirable for citizens, even given time to establish themselves in historically undemocratic
systems. At the same time, a technocratic approach may have the effect of creating a state structure
with no legitimacy with the general population, but that provides avenues to power for local elites
(Timor-Leste) or replaces a colonial authoritarianism with a post-colonial authoritarian state
(Zimbabwe).xix
Secondly, the construction of a new state requires a significant cultural shift in terms of how people
relate to the structures of authority, including the state as well as ‘traditional’ or ‘customary’
authorities that may regulate their everyday lives. Iraq is an example of where the approach of
dismantling the state in its entirety led to an artificial state overlaying subnational political systems,
developing a state that exists on the basis of external aid rather than domestic support. The example
of Afghanistan is even clearer. The emphasis on security governance that makes SSR part of state
building has been lost in the drive to train and equip troops to fight the Taliban.xx Without
integrating security into governance more broadly, external intervention risks creating just another
armed faction seeking to retain power.
Thirdly, state-building is extremely ‘capacity-hungry’ and there is a strong demand in conflict or post-
conflict states for technical expertise in security services, especially train and equip programmes.
These are relatively quick and easy to perform and they have easily quantifiable indicators, which
makes them good programmes for donors. At the same time, building up security forces without
constructing strong and responsive oversight mechanisms is risky. However, experience shows that
changing the governance culture of security takes time and is also very difficult.xxi
Fourthly, there are critical questions of sustainability following most security interventions.
Externally funded, and therefore externally driven, interventions can be extremely expensive and
reflect the concerns of those external funders, even if local ownership is possible. It raises questions
about long term sustainability of reform and security and also the relative balance between different
activities. The example of the changing definitions of insecurity over time within Sierra Leone cited
above shows that this balance needs to change over time to account for these changes, but
entrenched interests and the inflexibility of many donor planning systems effectively mean that
states may be locked in to set trajectories for some time.
Fifthly, state building is very uneven within states. Even where states have had a functioning core
before, during or even after conflict, this core has rarely penetrated into the countryside.xxii Many
people simply do not receive or have ever received services directly from states. In the area of
justice provision, for example, around eighty per cent of the population in Sierra Leone and Rwanda
receive justice from customary authorities like chiefs or village headmen, and this is accompanied by
local security in the form of chiefdom police, hunter militias or ‘vigilantes’.xxiii At best, this can
produce a positive political hybrid where local people both have a say and also have a choice in
terms of accessing services, including security, but also encompassing a variety of development
approaches. However, there is a risk that political hybridity also reinforces the position of local elites
and neopatrimonial rule.xxiv
Lastly, there are inconsistencies between state building, security and development. There is an
(unwritten) assumption that human security can be best served by creating a functioning state that
will then provide security as a public good and that development will then provide benefits to the
general population. However, human security in terms of ‘freedom from fear’ and citizen security in
terms of an entitlement to protection by the state in which they are citizens, remains elusive for
many people and the state’s (and by extension the international community’s) responsibility to
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protect citizens is yet to be realised in many places and may lead to claims of legitimisation of
international intervention in failed states.xxv
At the very least, such arguments have certainly been employed in terms of the forms of state
building employed in poor countries ranging from the reconstruction of Sierra Leone, creating a
state in Sudan or the ‘armed state building’ of Iraq and Afghanistan. As stated above, this has led to
a number of important developments in terms of peacebuilding, not least the idea that a post-
Westphalian international liberal peace requires non-liberal states to be liberalised in order for that
peace to become sustainable. Consequently, the chief aim of peace operations changes from
creating negotiated solutions between states to actively contributing to the construction of liberal
states, economies and social structures intended to spread liberal-democratic political structures.xxvi
It is this idea that Mark Duffield claims lies behind the merger of security and development policy
and the re-problematisation of security as both the result of, and precondition of, development
more broadly.xxvii
Clearly it is the transfer of the political architecture of the liberal state from western liberal countries
to non-liberal states in the form of state-building that leads to a tension between the pacific nature
of liberalism and the issue of whether those structures really are the political manifestation of the
moral freedom of the local populations.xxviii At the same time, there is a fundamental tension
between the idea of local ownership of security and shared values underlying SSR. International
donors are very keen to see states adopt transparency and accountability, but those constituting the
governing elite of a state may not see it that way and the citizenry may prefer to be safe than to
have more transparency.
At the same time as state building has become a core policy for many international actors, security
has become central to the way in which Western Governments deal with the developing world. In
particular, the desire to propagate the ‘War on Terror’ and to shore up ‘failed states’ has led
Western ideas of support to veer strongly towards enhancing developing countries to maintain their
own security and to maintain regional security complexes that will hinder the activities of those who
sit outside the formal state structure. State building and its cousin SSR have been co-opted into this
activity.
Policing, power and liberal states
Policing has a central role within SSR programmes. The military is usually seen as part of the problem
in SSR programmes, usually because militaries have such a chequered history in terms of coups and
counter-coups. The emphasis on the political side of the military is about professionalism in terms of
military capability, but also about depoliticisation of militaries and taking militaries out of domestic
situations. ‘Police primacy’ is seen as critical to the good governance agenda within SSR and DFID
identified one of the great victories of SSR in Sierra Leone in 1997 as being keeping the military in its
barracks and using the police to provide security throughout the elections.
The police, therefore, are left with a blank canvas for their two primary roles under state building:
Firstly, to extend state power beyond the capital city and main urban centres. This has been a
perennial problem for many African states (Herbst, 2000). However, this is not new. Even a cursory
reading of colonial literature would reveal that this was a concern of the colonial state itself, and one
that led to the phenomenon of indirect rule, whereby local communities policed themselves under
the watchful eye of a district officer.
Secondly, the police are invested with a specific range of powers, notably coercive powers of arrest
and arms. The type of coercive power operated is critical, and says a lot about the nature of the
state itself. Police powers range from unarmed constabulary to full-blown paramilitaries, and the
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balance of these forces says a lot about expectations of the police. In particular, extensive instability,
state collapse and criminality tends to call for strong police responses and external reformers may
use this as an opportunity to form police forces that are capable of exercising social control over a
range of issues. Central to this is how far external reformers seek to construct police forces that are
equipped to deal with global issues rather than local policing? This raises a series of questions
around how far the mission of the police is to extend the power of the state locally, to police
‘ungovernable space’ said to be within states, and how far there might actually be some policing for
the local people involved?
One starting point for this analysis has been identified by Erlend Krogstad in his excellent work on
policing in Sierra Leone, where he uses Foucault’s ideas of policing and power to change the lens
through which we look at police reform. In particular he outlines an approach that takes police
reform as an integral part of state building and identifies state building as a form of governance
rather than assistance. The idea that state building is a hierarchical form of governance (Duffield,
2001;2007), a form of civilising mission (Paris, 2002) or even a form of imperialism (Chandler, 2006)
is not new, but most of these analyses ignore the role of the police in this. This is important because
we know very little about the impact of structures on power in terms of policing and police reform,
whist not being as overlooked as prison reform, remains something of a footnote and is commonly
regarded as a ‘technical issue’.
The refocusing on to Foucault and power, can change this perception, showing that the institutional
structure of the police itself develops its own political logic. Much criticism of SSR identifies state
building as part of ‘liberal state building’ which is seen as a problem in itself (Chandler, 2006).
However, it tends to stop there, not really providing any practical solution, but also leaving much
analysis in something of a cul de sac. This becomes more problematic when one takes into account
the fact that many people (but not all) engaged in police reforms are not aware of how the policing
structures themselves are embedded in historical patterns of colonial police structures and that
these structures themselves have particular patterns of power associated with them. Within
ahistorical approaches to IR this is further manifest in cross-country comparisons of different police
reforms instead of taking a longer view of the historical evolution of policing structures. In the end,
there may not be that much difference between imperial state-state building and post-Cold War
state building and if there is, presumably it is important to identify what the differences might be. At
the same time, earlier work on colonial policing by Anderson and Killingray (1991) amongst others,
also shows that the global-local linkages are not as new as some IR theorists like to pretend and a
historical institutional approach may provide important insights in to the nature of police structures
and associated power. It may also explain why so many contemporary post-conflict structures look
very like their colonial counterparts.
Krogstad (2009) and also Ryan (2011) see Foucault as a means of changing the way we envisage
police institutions. The process of reform as identified in most current policy documents, sees civil
society as a means of transferring power from state to society. However taking the institution itself
as a political instrument changes this by suggesting that power is reconfigured by being passed
through reformed institutions in a different way, organising institutions, processes and people so
that they behave in a different way (Ryan, 2011).
This analysis draws on Foucault’s proposal that the state should not be taken for granted, but seen
as an assemblage of controls designed to instrumentalize human freedom. His study, Discipline
(1991) takes a series of institutions – prisons, hospitals, workshops and schools – and shows how
they institutionalise norms of behaviour that are then bought in to by the population. A norm then
becomes a binding obligation enforceable by coercive instruments, but essentially ‘policed’ by
societal conformity.
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The best example of this is Foucault’s analysis of the Panopticon, whereby a ‘political technology’
designed as a prison could be used to control a wide range of activities. In such a way the Panopticon
was a physical infrastructure that could modify the behaviour of the individual through knowledge
that they were being observed. As Foucault stated:
‘He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the
constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in
himself the power relation which he simultaneously plays both roles: he becomes the
principle of his own subjection’ (1991: 202-203)
In other words, an individual can be ‘normalised’ by society through adopting the norms of that
society and policing themselves.
Clearly in a post-conflict environment it is precisely many of these norms that have been broken
down and the most common solution to this is to increase the coercive capacity of the police to
enforce norms. The extension of this, of course, is for a dictatorship to impose a set of norms that
can then be enforced by a strong police force.
Through the rule of law, human norms can be moulded, and the police reformed to fit the particular
instrument of that law. Importantly it also suggests that state building is not a neutral process and
the law itself not a neutral element of state building. Who’s law thus becomes an interesting
question in any post-conflict reconstruction.
Policing in Sierra Leone as an example
A full analysis of the war is beyond this paper, but by the end of the conflict in 2002, the Sierra
Leonean state had suffered several years of war and several more of a predatory state structure.
Even if the Sierra Leone state had collapsed, it is critical to the story of how the country sank to the
position it found itself in the 1990s. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission summarized this very
concisely when it stated:
‘While there were many factors, both internal and external, that explain the cause of the
civil war, the Commission came to the conclusion that it was years of bad governance,
endemic corruption and the denial of basic human rights that created the deplorable
conditions that made the conflict inevitable. Successive regimes became increasingly
impervious to the wishes and needs of the majority. Instead of implementing positive and
progressive policies, each regime perpetuated the ills and self-serving machinations left
behind by its predecessor. By the start of the conflict the nation had been stripped of its
dignity. Institutional collapse reduced the vast majority of people into a state of deprivation.
Government accountability was non-existent. Political expression and dissent had been
crushed. Democracy and the rule of law were dead. By 1991, Sierra Leone was a deeply
divided society and full of the potential for violence. It required only the slightest spark for
this violence to be ignited. The Commission traced the roots of these lapses through the
post-independence period and into the colonial period.’
This context provided ripe breeding grounds for opportunists who unleashed a wave of violence and
mayhem that was to sweep through the country. Many Sierra Leoneans, particularly the youth, lost
all sense of hope in the future. Youths became easy prey for unscrupulous forces who exploited their
disenchantment to wreak vengeance against the ruling elite. The Commission holds the political elite
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of successive regimes in the post-independence period responsible for creating the conditions for
conflict.1
The post-colonial Sierra Leonean state had been in a state of decay for some years before the
outbreak of hostilities in March 1991. War, neglect, patronage, and the increasing use of violence by
a kleptocratic state meant that by the late 1990s the provision of security and insecurity had become
splintered into numerous factions, street by street in Freetown, community by community across
the country. It is commonly accepted that the failure of the state to honour its patrimonial promises
in large measures led to brutal and seemingly inexplicable violence as well as two military coups.2
At the same time, the colonial bifurcation of the state had led to an enriched core around Freetown
and an impoverished periphery in the countryside where the development of an alienated youth
created the conditions for the conflict. The restoration of a functioning state that could control a
monopoly of violence was therefore perceived to be an imperative in the early stages of intervention
and the military nature of the initial intervention coloured the way in which those external actors,
particularly the UK, structured that intervention.
The intervention in Sierra Leone is illustrative of the assumptions underlying much liberal state
building.3 The assumption at the heart of what became SSR was that even if Sierra Leone was failing
according to models of Western notions of statehood, it was in these conceptions of administration
and polity that peace and stability were to be found. By doing so, peace and state-building were
indeed, as Stepputat and Engberg-Pedersen note in general, assumed to be parallel, interdependent
and mutually reinforcing processes.4 It should also be noted that there was an absence of
alternatives or time to discern what those alternatives could be, leading the state-building process
down a particular road that has consequences further along the development process.
Beyond Sierra Leone, the state continues to be seen as a prerequisite for peace and stability, the
backbone of the prosperity narrative among academics and policy-makers alike.5 “The state”, UK’s
Department for International Development (DFID) noted in 2010 “equates with: (a) the institutions
or rules which regulate political, social, and economic engagement across a territory and determine
how power and authority are obtained, used and controlled (e.g., constitutions, laws, customs)”.6
This report, with the telling title of Building State and Securing the Peace acknowledges the central
role of those actors which are not governed by or necessarily affiliated with a central state.
However, they are defined as marginal to decision-making (civil society organizations) or as ‘informal
groupings’ (e.g., gangs and drug cartels).7 The key driver of the UK intervention was therefore to
reconstruct a state that was perceived to have fallen into decay over a period of some thirty years,
1 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Sierra
Leone (Freetown, 2004).
2 D. Keen, Conflict and Collusion in Sierra Leone (London: James Currey, 2005); K. Peters, Footpaths to
Reintegration. Armed Conflict, Youth and the Rural Crisis in Sierra Leone (Wageningen University Thesis),
p. 7.
3 A. Hehir and N. Robinson, eds., State-Building (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007); T. Berger, ed., From Nation-
Building to State-Building (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008); I. Taylor, ‘What Fit for the Liberal Peace in
Africa?’, Global Society, vol. 21., no. 4 (October 2007), pp. 553-566.
4 F. Stepputat and L. Engberg-Pedersen, Fragile States: Definitions, Measurements and Processes, DIIS
Report 2008:11 (Copenhagen: Danish Institute for International Studies, 2008).
5 R. Paris, At War’s End: Building Peace after Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); S. D.
Krasner, ‘Sharing Sovereignty: New Institutions for Collapsed and Fragile States, International Security,
vol. 29, no. 2 (2004), pp. 85-120; Fukuyama, State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st
Century.
6 Department for International Development, Building the State and Securing the Peace (London:
Department for International Development, 2010) (unpublished draft).
7 Department for International Development, Building the State and Securing the Peace.
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around twenty of them being characterised by violence.8 Notably, even though Sierra Leone had
been subject to Indirect rule and, it was estimated at the time (Baker), that around 80% of justice
was actually provided by non-state actors, the UK intervention ignored the non-state actors,
particularly the chiefs, once they were reinstated, and concentrated on state security institutions.
This sent a strong signal itself that power would be located in Freetown rather than locally and
policing was now a state responsibility.
Central to these efforts was the reconstruction of the police, military and intelligence institutions
(the ONS). The Sierra Leone Police (SLP), where they were present, had lost the trust of the
population and had, along with the intelligence organisations, become a repressive arm of the state.
Corruption was a common survival tactic for SLP posted in the field and for promotion. Good officers
were routinely discriminated against.9 In addition, police stations were in disrepair and there was no
equipment or vehicles let alone training available. In short the SLP had more or less ceased to exist
as an effective policing structure.
The new structure that was then created, had a small team of senior UK police advisers at the top
levels of the force, including a British IG and a British adviser to the armed wing of the SLP, the
Operational Support Division. Virtually all senior officers were ejected from the force, particularly if
they had rather patchy records, and a new cadre of younger officers were appointed. This in itself
created a number of issues, not least that some of these officers were loyal to the British advisers.
Whilst not a problem in itself, the police reforms had become associated by some people with a
degree of ‘capture’, i.e. the embedded advisers and the senior police officers becoming loyal to their
own police structures rather than the broader reform process. This may, of course, have been a
result fo a particularly successful reform. Reform also created a Criminal Investigation Division and a
Special Branch, integrated in to the overall intelligence structure of the ONS. This structure is
important because it mirrors British colonial structures and they were formed for a specific purpose
(which I will come on to).
This structure also mirrors colonial approaches in its assumed ability to play an important dual role
in terms of providing internal security and also external relationships to the wider world in which the
police deny safe havens for terrorists or criminal gangs and make the global order of states a safer
place. As Gutteridge states about colonial police forces: ‘The European powers in Africa raised local
colonial military forces to fit their world wide strategic needs; and their criteria, therefore, rested
inevitably on imperial rather than on local policy’ (1970: 316).
The colonial police force was, above all, an expression of the power of the colonial empire itself.
Whilst indirect rule gave the responsibility for day to day policing to chiefs and chiefdom police, the
responsibility for serious crime and state security very much lay with the state police and the District
Officer, who were expected to exercise the wisdom of Solomon whenever required. Whilst there is a
huge over-simplification in many analyses of continuity from colonial to ‘neo-colonial’ rule, one
aspect that did remain to some degree was that the police represent a legitimate view of the state
justice and security – however illegitimate the state may have become. It is also worth noting that
many regimes have chosen to create non-state actors of their own as paramilitaries to carry out
political activities, rather than using the police. This doesn’t illustrate the power of the police but it
does show that the police itself has some degree of power as an institution, even if it becomes
corrupt and deliberately run down. The belief that the police are the legitimate guardians of the rule
8 Note that the international community intervention was led primarily by the UK, even though the UN
and World Bank, amongst others, were present. The World Bank, for example, took the view that they
would support UK-led programmes on decentralisation and the establishment of justice in the
countryside rather than run its own programmes. The author worked on the initial Chiefdom Restoration
Programme immediately following the war and then on subsequent DFID and World Bank programmes.
9 Albrecht and Jackson, Security System Transformation in Sierra Leone, 1997-2007.
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Paul Jackson
University of Birmingham Colonial and contemporary policing
of law is the source of political power for it as an institution as well as being a prerequisite for
international funding. SSR is very much built on construction of legitimate state monopoly of the use
of force and this has extended to an inherent bias against non-state providers who are held to be
unaccountable both locally and international. A core problem with this, however, is that many
African police forces, including the SLP is that they have no capacity. There are around 9,000 police
for a population of around 6.3m, giving a police to population ratio of 1:744 against a UN
recommendation of 1:40010. In the colonial era, this problem was even more acute and a report in
1949 by the British Inspector of Colonial Police, W.C. Johnson, expressed his concern at the patchy
coverage of the police and the consequent ‘very limited jurisdiction’ and almost non-existent
communication between the colony and the protectorate. In fact this colonial bifurcation remained
a serious problem and the two legal systems were only officially united in 2005. The SLP’s post-
conflict strategic plan (2009) still had ‘ensuring that police presence is felt everywhere’ as a key aim,
illustrating that it still clearly isn’t.
The process of police reform
In this section, I propose to follow Krogstad (2009), who identifies four core areas that deserve close
attention. These are all process issues and reflect the similarities – sometimes surprisingly –
between the two eras we are looking at.
Spreading the state through policing
As the analysis of Johnson (1949) above, and also of other analysts (me, Bruce Baker), the SLP
remains subject to a significant urban bias. In part, this reflects the pattern of the war that
depopulated areas of the countryside as civilians fled to urban areas, particularly Freetown.
However, this is part of a long-term trend within Sierra Leone that is exacerbated by a strong cultural
and legal divide between Freetown and the rest. Penetration of the countryside was weak in colonial
times and remains so. Indirect rule was primarily upheld by chiefs who controlled Native Authority
Police (later Chiefdom Police). Towards the end of the colonial period there was an effort to merge
the NAP with the SLP, but this was never followed through and the fact that native administrative
law continued to hold sway in the protectorate area until 2005 reinforced this separation (Killingray
and Anderson, 1992). As the capacity of the SLP became reduced and the demand for urban postings
increased as a means of generating corruption, the countryside further depopulated.
In the post-conflict environment, the state had completely collapsed and the SLP had been a target
of the RUF. Around 250 police officers had been killed in the 1999 attack on Freetown alone and one
senior officer, Kadi Fakondo stated that the SLP were a ‘spent force’ and were extremely
unprofessional’ (2009). This came on top of decades of non-penetration by state institutions,
including the police. The reformers of post-2002 thus inherited more or less a similar issue to that of
the colonial police force.
The response was typical SSR logic of incorporation, i.e. the reason that earlier reforms were
struggling was that they had not gone deep enough. Furthermore, there was a complementary
decentralisation programme that would reinforce reform in the countryside and re-establish local
governance and the SLP needed to be part of that. The approach – a variation on community
policing known as ‘Local Needs Policing’ – actually predated this reform, but had no framework to
collaborate with and so the establishment of the Justice Sector Development Programme in 2005
brought policing in to line with state building policies more fully. This was part of the logic of state
building, whereby the core problem was that the SLP just weren’t there and solving this problem of
police absence was the rationale of local state building and incorporation of local structures through
10
Ethiopia (S) 1:3333; Rwanda 1: 1100; Liberia 1: 857; DRC 1: 545+ ; Eng & Wales 1:402
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Paul Jackson
University of Birmingham Colonial and contemporary policing
Local Police Partnership Boards. Whilst this has had partial success, there is much evidence to show
that penetration remains partial and local structures remain paramount in the countryside – a
colonial issue that remains an issue.
State-building and transition
Whichever way one looks at it, state building of any type is a temporary phenomenon. As such,
much of the activity that is carried out is therefore temporary and transitional, which begs a series of
questions (not least transition to what?). In many ways, late colonisers and contemporary
international staff operate under a similar understanding of their role as being one of handing over
control to local staff. IDD, which shares its 50th birthday with CWAS this year, was established by a
collection of former district officers and a district commissioner who all knew, when they joined the
colonial service, that their role was to transfer power to local people – at least eventually. At the
same time, this was not a clean or quick process. The foundation of IDD (and also CWAS) was partly
founded on the idea that this would be a continuing partnership, with ‘localization’ requiring
significant amounts of quick training, facilitation in to the Commonwealth on good terms, and
providing a functioning police to new governments.
Ironically, whereas the Colonial Police were formed into a single entity in 1936, there was no real
effort to unify command structures until the immediate lead up to decolonisation. This was partly
driven by a common set of institutional forms (see below), but also a desire to provide standard
levels of policing over the Commonwealth as a whole. In 1948 the office of Inspector General of the
Colonial Police was appointed and in 1951 this was supplemented by the Conference of
Commissioners of Colonial Police. The main aim of this was to align the colonial police to a more
‘British’ form of policing and a less military one.
This has strong echoes in contemporary approaches to policing. Many contemporary approaches are
criticised for being a peculiar mixture of standard approaches and ad hoc programming. What I
mean by this is that there is an idea, or set of ideas about what ‘policing’ looks like (usually termed
‘community policing’ but not always conforming to the same model), but that opportunities for
running programmes vary considerably in country, are not always systemic and also have a tendency
to take on a life of their own. Specifically, there is very little lesson learning across programmes and
several instances where British police appear to assume that they are in Norfolk rather than
Freetown. The best police interventions (of which there are many) do not do this, but it remains a
serious issue.
Capacity and what constitutes capacity
This issue of foreign support is a critical issue when it comes to capacity and capacity development.
The issue of training has been an issue since colonial times and the note above regarding the
foundation of IDD and other departments at this time is symptomatic of a general approach to
providing training across the UK government, including the police. In many ways, training is not the
problem except in so far as training is assumed to increase capacity – something that is not always
very clear, particularly when trained personnel are put back in to dysfunctional systems and can’t
use their training.
The more pressing issue is one of overseas professionals taking command roles. At the time of
decolonisation, it is striking just quite how many British police officers stayed on to continue running
many aspects of African police well in to the 1970s. This provided a degree of professionalization
that meant the police forces remained functional, but reduced sustainability of the new force. It was
perhaps problematic to expect that local officers could just take over the day after independence.
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Paul Jackson
University of Birmingham Colonial and contemporary policing
Sierra Leone, for example had just four gazetted non-European officers in 1949 and thus the colonial
police faced significant difficulties in training sufficient officers.
This was an issue that was extremely difficult in the contemporary period. When the international
police programme started in the late 1990s and then expanded after peace in 2002, there were
almost no police officers who had been trained in any form of police work. This led the international
police to take control over almost every senior management role within the SLP, at least until the
‘bad apples’ were pensioned off or prosecuted and a new cadre of young and effective SLP officers
could be trained. This temptation to take command was actually very well handled within the SLP
(compared to the military, for example), but it represents a broader issue that international staff
tend to take over key roles because it is quicker and they speak the right language for donors. Whilst
Keith Biddle was IG of the SLP, Adrian Horn and others took on senior policing roles and for a time
the British more or less recreated the colonial police in Sierra Leone. This was further exacerbated by
the intelligence services where there actually was a meeting where the British adviser sat around
with the Sierra Leonean officials with a series of models of intelligence organisations and very
explicitly chose the colonial British model, along with the police and special branch structure.
Political technologies and police structures
This last point raises a series of questions about the nature of the police as a political technology
designed to create a certain type of behaviour. It further raises issues of who is the police
protecting? However, the structure of the police probably says far more about the overarching
tension about maintaining the overall tension between controlling ‘blank spaces’ on the map whilst
also protecting a global system, than it does about providing justice to local people.
Essentially, the fundamental characteristic of African policing systems has remained relatively
consistent across both the imperial and the current period of time. African police forces are
essentially paramilitaries designed to support and protect regimes rather than providing security to
citizens.
We have mentioned above the idea that there was a move to shift towards a more ‘British’ mode of
policing within colonial police forces as decolonisation loomed. However, this never really happened
and in fact many colonial police forces became more powerful and more militarised in response to
potential threats of communist or nationalist insurgency, rather that more ‘British’.
What this meant in practice was an intensification of colonial practices based on the Royal Irish
Constabulary (RIC) and also the Palestine Police. Colonial police were trained in both areas, but
notably rarely in the UK. The approaches they used were essentially quasi-military in nature and
designed partly for counter-insurgency. This meant that colonial police foces were designed for
control. As Charles Jeffries stated:
‘There is a real dilemma here. Fundamentally the British police tradition has grown out of
the Northern European idea of the law as the will of the people, and of the responsibility of
every freeman to maintain the law. This idea has been taken overseas by the British
colonists and settlers; but a large part of the territories which are now called ‘colonial’ are
not settlements but countries with indigenous populations which the British have been
called upon to administer and govern, imposing upon them an alien law until they have
developed to the point of being able to legislate for themselves and manage their own
affairs. In such conditions, the tradition – that is to say, government needs to have an
organised force at its disposal to keep order and maintain the law.’ (1952: 24-25)
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Paul Jackson
University of Birmingham Colonial and contemporary policing
The decolonisation process itself strengthened this controlling power and ability to use force and
bequeathed successor post-colonial governments with powerful bodies of control who were well
trained and capable of exercising significant force in defence of the regime. The problems arose
when those regimes started to misuse that power. There are several examples of this, but an
interesting one was the position of the British South African Police in Rhodesia where they
effectively transferred back in to military organisation and even camouflage for the duration of the
Bush War. Known as ‘Black Boots’ they were essentially almost entirely counter-insurgency troops
along the lines of police tracker units deployed during the Mao Mao and other insurgencies.
At the same time, there have been a number of comments about the colonial police not being as
coherent as one might expect. However, the training of colonial police in Ireland and in Palestine did
have the effect of generating commonalities across institutional structures across Africa and
elsewhere. At its most basic form this consisted of locally deployed units backed up by extremely
powerful ‘support units’. These support units were a specific form of COIN unit that had been
deployed in Palestine as a rapid reaction force. Armed to the teeth, frequently with armoured cars,
machine guns, etc, these were pretty much military in organisation and in nature and they appeared
in virtually every colony in some way, shape or form. The political technology was a military one
rather than one based on justice.
Contemporary police programmes have inherited several of these issues. The structures of the SLP,
for example, were basically colonial, including a special branch and also an armed support unit.
There was, however, very little capacity and the structures had become degraded. What the
programme did was not to change the shape of the institutions, but to rebuild the colonial police
structure, complete with ASU (the subject of nightmares for their main adviser), reproducing the
political technology of control.
At the same time, the introduction of ‘softer’ forms of British policing like community approaches
vies with this political technology in a form of balance/conflict that remains in question.
The core question remains of what that balance is and how it may be maintained in such a way as
not just to provide hard security for the international community and institutional control over
space, but also provide some degree of local security and justice for the population.
i D Garrasi, S Kuttner &P E Wam, The Security Sector and Poverty Reduction Strategies, Washington: World Bank, June 2009
ii World Bank, „Voices of the poor‟, available at: http://go.worldbank.org/NKOX512JJO
iii Jackson & Albrecht, Sierra Leone
iv D Hendrickson, „Reframing the SSR debate‟, 2009, available from www.ssrnetwork.net.
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Paul Jackson
University of Birmingham Colonial and contemporary policing
v M Brzoska, „Introduction: criteria for evaluating post-conflict reconstruction and security sector reform in peace support operations‟,
International Peacekeeping, 13 (1), 2006, pp 1-13.
vi See G John, Liberalism, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986.
vii M Doyle, Ways of War and Peace: Realism, Liberalism and Socialism, New York: W. Norton, 1997
viii Lemay-Hebert, „The empty-shell‟.
ix M Fischer, & B Schmelzle (eds), Building Peace in the Absence of States: Challenging the Discourse on State Failure, Berlin: Berghof
Dialogue Series, 8, 2009.
x W Heinrich, & M Kulessa, „Deconstruction of States as an Opportunity for New Statism: The Example of Somalia and Somaliland‟, in J
Hippler (ed), Nation-Building: A Key Concept for Peaceful Conflict Transformation?, London, Pluto Press, 2005.
xiW L Susan, „A Case for Shifting the Focus: Some Lessons from the Balkans”, in Fischer & Schmezle (eds), Building Peace.
xii See Berger T Mark, From Nation-Building to State-Building, Routledge, 2007.
xiii F Fukuyama, State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004, and F
Fukuyama, Nation-Building: Beyond Afghanistan and Iraq, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006.
xiv Hippler, Nation-Building.
xv See Jackson & Albrecht, Sierra Leone, but also A Mehler, „Hybrid Regimes and Oligopolies of Violence in Africa: Expectations on
Security Provision “From Below”‟, in Fischer & Schmezle (eds), Building Peace.
xvi See A Bellamy, &P Williams, „Introduction: thinking anew about peace operations‟, International Peacekeeping, 11(1), 2004.
xvii D Chandler,„The responsibility to protect? imposing the „Liberal peace‟‟, International Peacekeeping, 11 (1), 2004.
xviii See Berger, From nation-building
xix Lemay-Hebert, „The empty shell‟; P Jackson,„Military Integration from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe and Beyond‟, in R Licklider,(ed)
Military Integration, Routledge, forthcoming, Winter 2011.
xx C Hodes & M Sedra,„The search for security in Post-Taliban Afghanistan‟, Adelphi Books 391, London: Routledge, ***year
xxi Jackson & Albrecht, Sierra Leone.
xxii See P Jackson, „Reshuffling an old deck of cards? the politics of decentralisation in Sierra Leone”, African Affairs, 106, 2007, pp 95-
111.
xxiii See B Bruce,„Beyond the tarmac road: local forms of policing in Sierra Leone and Rwanda‟, Review of African Political Economy,
35(118), pp 555-570, 2008.
xxiv This is not a new argument. It stems from work by Mancur Olsen on the difference between static and mobile bandits, the theory being
that one wishes to be ruled by a static bandit since they have an interest in keeping you alive – basic feudalism. See: M Olsen, „Dictatorship,
democracy, and development‟, The American Political Science Review, 87(3), 1993, pp 567-576; see also P Jackson,„Warlords as
alternative forms of governance system‟, Small Wars and Insurgencies, 14(2), 2003, pp 131-150; A Mehler,„Hybrid Regimes and
Oligopolies of Violence in Africa: Expectations on Security Provision “From Below”‟, in Fischer & Schmezle (eds), Building Peace.
xxv See R Luckham, „Introduction: transforming security and development in an unequal world”, IDS Bulletin 40, Number 2, 2009.
xxvi Bellamy & Williams, „Introduction‟.
xxvii See Duffield, M. Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples, Polity, 2007
xxviii K Liden, „Whose peace? Which peace? on the political architecture of liberal peacebuilding, International Peace Research Institute,
Oslo, 2005.
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