Statebuilding and Police Reform

This book explores how and why police reform became an international phenomenon in the era of statebuilding that followed the end of the Cold War.

Police reform has become an indispensible element in the spread of liberal democracy. Policing is distinguished by its ability to combine reasonable and forcible methods to preserve and spread liberal values. The book examines the reason police reform was introduced as a method of building consensus in Latin America and the Balkans and documents the development of its use in Africa, the Middle East and the Caucasus region. It illustrates how police power binds the liberal value of freedom to the security needs of post-conflict regions and discusses its force as a strategy to bring law and order to a global security domain. Drawing on a multi-disciplinary approach to the subject, the book delves deeply into policing as a method to bring coherence to global security. It traces the presence of coherent police strategies in contemporary international relations through studies of the United Nations, the European Union and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. By contrasting police reform with security sector reform, the book explores how liberal peace is imagined by the international NGO sector, state aid agencies and international organizations.

This book will be of much interest to students of statebuilding, post-conflict reconstruction, critical security studies, development studies and IR in general.

Barry J. Ryan is a lecturer in the School of Politics, International Relations and Philospohy at Keele University.