Reshaping the Forces of (Dis)Order: US-Sponsored Security Sector Reform in Colombia and Mexico

The inability of governments to deliver human security to their citizenries has often driven ambitious programmes of security sector reform (SSR). SSR programmes hold effectiveness and accountability of the security sector (military, police, and judicial agencies) as the central pillars of their design, and Colombia and Mexico represent two recent instances of SSR in Latin America. In both cases, national governments and their top international donor, the US government, invested considerable resources into military, police, and judicial agencies to reform and professionalise security sectors struggling to contain formidable threats to security. Notwithstanding similar challenges and programme designs, however, the Colombian effort, known as Plan Colombia, contributed to an increasingly professional security sector that demonstrated improved capabilities to deliver enhanced citizen security, whereas the Mexican government, via the Mérida Initiative, struggled to improve the effectiveness and accountability of its security sector. This study explores that disparity in outcomes. Employing the comparative method, the author identifies three independent variables that exhibit a positive relationship with improvements on the dependent variable of this study, security sector governance, in Colombia but negative values in Mexico. Specifically, the study points to private sector support, inter-party consensus, and the centralisation of security bureaucracy as key factors. In doing so, the author highlights both successes and failures in the design of reformed security regimes and considers how other governments might learn from these lessons

Resilience, Conflict-Related Sexual Violence and Transitional Justice

This interdisciplinary book constitutes the first major and comparative study of resilience focused on victims-/survivors of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV). Locating resilience in the relationships and interactions between individuals and their social ecologies (including family, community, non-governmental organisations and the natural environment), the book develops its own conceptual framework based on the idea of connectivity. It applies the framework to its analysis of rich empirical data from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Colombia and Uganda, and it tells a set of stories about resilience through the contextual, dynamic and storied connectivities between individuals and their social ecologies. Ultimately, it utilises the three elements of the framework – namely, broken and ruptured connectivities, supportive and sustaining connectivities and new connectivities – to argue the case for developing the field of transitional justice in new social-ecological directions, and to explore what this might conceptually and practically entail. The book will particularly appeal to anyone with an interest in, or curiosity about, resilience, and to scholars, researchers and policy makers working on CRSV and/or transitional justice. The fact that resilience has received surprisingly little attention within existing literature on either CRSV or transitional justice accentuates the significance of this research and the originality of its conceptual and empirical contributions