Security Sector Reform and the Disfiguration of Local Security Landscapes: The Case of the Occupied Palestinian Territories

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A European brainchild, Security Sector Reform (SSR) and its derivative packaging of demobilized, demilitarized, reintegrated, rehabilitated and restructured security programming, illustrates the phenomenon of aid securitization in development. Its rationale is to motivate donors to go beyond mere capacity building of security forces and move towards entrenching principles of democratic governance and the rule of law. However, its operational success has been limited. Analysis seeking to improve its operational capability has largely focused on the discrepancy between concept and implementation. Yet while the current discourse on SSR acknowledges its political dimension, it has ignored its mutually constitutive and relational power implications. This project therefore, aims to offer a more comprehensive understanding of the preoccupation of SSR analysts and practitioners pertaining to the discrepancy between its stated policy objectives and the flawed outcomes actualized through its implementation. It does this by reorienting analysis within the realm of politics and critical scholarly engagement and away from its policy-oriented technocratic focus. This shift in the framework of analysis conceives of SSR as something more than just a mere political instrument to shape and implement specific policies or a rhetorical tool to justify their adoption. Instead of creating a centralized monopoly and hierarchy of violence, SSR instead creates oligopolies of violence that have often intensified societal fragmentation and the creation of new elites dependent upon outside actors. This occurs when objects of SSR interventions engage and seek to appropriate securitized development aid. New securitization configurations then emerge. This fracturing of securitization creates numerous local, regional and international groups and actors. As these actors emerge, their identification, modes of agency and power depend upon their positionality within an interconnected chain of interaction that significantly shapes the interests and agency of each of its interlocutors. This project, therefore, focuses on the ways in which SSR becomes a pivotal programmatic process in the political (re)construction of space, creating actors, structures and processes. The myriad ways in which its benefactors internalize and respond to these processes within the different spheres of socio-economic, political and geographical locales in which SSR is applied, produces the outcomes that run contrary to the paradigm's stated objectives. The implications of such modes of international assistance in conflict and post-conflict settings has become all the more pressing as SSR projects continue to expand across the Middle East and North Africa,- and where the consequences of SSR are so far only proving to worsen instability and fragmentation.The proposed research begins with expanding on the case of the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt), which provides for an apt case study as the state-building project there has become synonymous with SSR and where the implementation of liberal rule is predicated on the reform of the security sector. SSR in the oPt has failed to achieve stability, instead catalyzing the further polarization of Palestinian politics and the division of the oPt into two separate political entities, one of which has been denied international recognition. SSR has created a paradox on the ground, whereby the Palestinian Authority and to a certain extent the de facto government of Hamas are in control of a territory, but not a territorial entity resembling a state in the Weberian sense. The research then moves to analysing similar unfolding processes in Yemen and Jordan, and establishes advanced data and network analysis models that will assist academics and practitioners in mapping out and understanding the dynamics of SSR projects and aiding their success.