A Genealogy of Security Sector Reform: Biopolitics and Sovereign Power

This paper adopts a Foucauldian genealogical governmentality framework to explore the interlinked assemblages of biopolitics and sovereign power that underpin Security Sector Reform (SSR). SSR is an International Development-led set of processes targeting “fragile states” with the explicit aim of democratizing security forces for the benefit of the populations under their control. While the concept’s consistent failure in practice has been the object of scholarly critique, critical literature is largely limited to challenging SSR practice while taking its theory and underlying biopolitics assumptions for granted. Through the use of genealogical governmentality, this paper moves beyond and challenges these perspectives by calling into question not only SSR practice but also its conceptual and ontological underpinnings. The emergence of SSR can be traced to a post-Cold War shift in security debates which facilitated the inclusion in security thinking of notions of democratising societies, good governance, accountability, and human security programmes. At first glance, SSR therefore aligns with a biopolitical turn which shifted the referent object of security from states to their populations. The lack of any clear SSR “success stories” spurred critical scholarship attempting to explain the concept’s failure in practice. Some have problematically linked SSR’s failure to achieve its democratic reform objectives in practice to an essentialist or cultural incompatibility of recipient states with democratic values. Another perspective traces the failure of SSR in practice to its “militarisation” as a result of a post 9/11 trend of implementing Counter-Terrorism driven SSR programmes. Within this framework, this militarising trend represented the backsliding into Cold War era style security assistance prioritizing hard security interests over issues of democratic governance and rule of law, which we are told SSR came to reverse. This paper argues that the failure of these perspectives to unsettle SSR’s theoretical underpinnings results in the implicit and uncritical acceptance of the notion that SSR is conceptually underpinned by a biopolitical impetus placing the populations under undemocratic security structures as its referent object. This paper highlights the inextricable sovereign power and biopolitics links characteristic of the SSR concept that critical SSR literature overlooks. This paper’s genealogical governmentality analysis locates SSR as the product of power/knowledge configurations which resulted in, and were further reinforced by, a regime of truth around a new “discourse of danger”, namely that of undemocratic security structures in “fragile states”. However, SSR’s discourse of danger does not only involve the safeguarding of the populations under undemocratic security structures. Rather, a central referent object in SSR’s regime of truth is the security of Western states. SSR’s problematization of so-called fragile states is therefore equally entrenched in sovereign power which frames fragile states as a threat to global- read Western states- security.