How important is the provision of

security for successful

peacebuilding?
What role should security sector
reform play in this context?
by Philip Conway

[www.circlingsquares.blogspot.com]
 How important is the provision of security for successful peacebuilding?
What role should security sector reform play in this context?

Table of Contents
1: INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................ 1
2: TERMINOLOGY .................................................................................................................. 2
SECURITY ................................................................................................................................ 2
PEACEBUILDING ...................................................................................................................... 5
SECURITY SECTOR REFORM ...................................................................................................... 8
3: QUESTION 1......................................................................................................................... 9
4: QUESTION 2 ...................................................................................................................... 10
5: CONCLUSION.................................................................................................................... 11
6: BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................ 12

1: Introduction

H
ow important the provision of security for successful
peacebuilding is depends upon how one defines those words.
While ‘peacebuilding’, “remains an amorphous term”1, ‘security’
has become “extraordinarily expansive and vague”.2 Indeed, security is
“an essentially contested concept”;3 however it is also “increasingly
influential in narrating the changing patterns of world order and
prescribing action within them.”4 An increase in usage correlates with
greater contestation, elevated importance and, unfortunately, less
analytical clarity.

The title questions beg the explication of three terms: security,

peacebuilding and security sector reform (SSR). Clarification of the role
these terms play in current political theory will simplify the task at hand.
Moreover, a critique of each will introduce the themes and theories
necessary to answer the title questions. Following the analysis of each
term, each question is answered in turn, utilising a critical postmodernist
perspective. It is found that security is indispensable for successful
peacebuilding but equally (and counter-intuitively) peacebuilding is
indispensable for the ideal of security in an environment where it is un-

1
Necla Tschirgi, "Peacebuilding as the Link between Security and Development: Is the Window of
Opportunity Closing?," (New York: International Peace Academy: Studies in Security and
Development, 2003), p.1.
2
R. Paris, "Human Security - Paradigm Shift or Hot Air?," International Security 26, no. 2 (2001):
p.88.
3
Matt McDonald, "Human Security and the Construction of Security," Global Society 16, no. 3
(2002).p.277.
4
M. De Larrinaga and M. G. Doucet, "Sovereign Power and the Biopolitics of Human Security,"
Security Dialogue 39, no. 5 (2008): p.517.

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realised. SSR must, in this context, aim to reduce violence while ceasing to
reinforce the unhelpful ideal of the infinitely securable liberal state.

2: Terminology
Security
It has been argued that:
Security works as a master signifier in much the same way as ‘God’
and other master signifiers do in an ideological discourse.5
In the context of a discourse theory that operates under a post-Saussurian,
relational (as opposed to representational) model of language,6 ‘master
signifier’ means: “the “empty” signifier which totalizes (“quilts”) the
dispersed field”.7 In other words, ‘security’ is a signifier that fixes
semantic slippage to form a stable symbolic order (“the real”)8 for the
discourse of the nation-state; it provides the point at which the discourse
(and thus the popular understanding of the state itself) can be enclosed,
encoded, determined and understood. It therefore serves, alongside such
concepts as ‘sovereignty’ and ‘self-determination’ as a necessarily defining
characteristic of the nation-state that must be policed and defended in
order for it to maintain the state’s signifying chain. It is an unavoidably
political term that functions not as a dispassionate, analytical instrument
but as a highly disciplined aspect of the discourse of statehood and world
politics. By no means, however, is this to suggest that its definition stays
still. In the last twenty years, the word has undergone significant
extension in its meaning.

At the end of the Cold War, history was supposed to have come to an
end.9 It was supposed that global security would now be concerned with
the technical administration of low-scale conflict – effectively civil war10
within the sovereign jurisdiction of a unipolar world order. Security
discourse thus required a substantial break with its traditional points of
reference. As Joseph Nye put it in the early 1990s:
5
Fabio Petito and Pavlos Hatzopoulos, Religion in International Relations : The Return from
Exile, 1st ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p.167.
6
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Co.,
1998).; Ernesto Laclau, "Politics and the Limits of Modernity," Social Text, no. 21 (1989): p.68-9.;
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
7
Slavoj Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom! : Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, Rev. ed. (New York:
Routledge, 2001), p.103.
8
Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 2001).
9
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York
Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1992).
10
e.g. :M. Duffield, "Global Civil War: The Non-Insured, International Containment and Post-
Interventionary Society," Journal of Refugee Studies 21, no. 2 (2008).

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Today … states must consider new dimensions of security.

National survival is rarely at stake, and most people want to feel
secure in more than just survival.11
What suited elements of security studies, the state security discourse and,
no less, groups within civil society (human rights groups, etc.), was an
expansion of ‘security’ to encompass hitherto un-securitised phenomena.
To some extent, the debate became one of ‘national security versus human
security’.12

Huysmans defines ‘national security’ as the defence of “the national

territory and the citizens of a state from external aggression.”13 Likewise,
Luciani defines it as “the ability to withstand aggression from abroad.”14
Similarly, Bellamy defines security as “a relative freedom from war,
coupled with a relatively high expectation that defeat will not be a
consequence of any war that should occur.”15 National security, therefore,
is not so much linked to an absence of violence as to the legalised,
organised, legitimised possession of the means of violence by which a state
may resist and overcome hostility from outside aggressors. As such,
security is never a self-representing state of being that can be
demonstrated without reference to any other entity – it is necessarily
defined with reference to an exterior (insecurity). It is the act of guarding
against that unremitting and fundamentally uncontrollable “constitutive
outside”16 that defines ‘security’. In other words, ‘security’ exceeds the
possibility of mastery.17 It is, therefore, not a static thing but rather a
continuing process. Like the process of capital accumulation that it
evolved to protect,18 the modern nation-state cannot stand still; it must
always be in a process of securitisation.19

This paradigm follows the Hobbesian tradition of political theory insofar

as, for Hobbes, the state, while ‘monstrous’, is the only entity capable of

11
Joseph S. Nye, Bound to Lead : The Changing Nature of American Power (New York: Basic
Books, 1990), p.179.
12
Jef Huysmans, The Politics of Insecurity : Fear, Migration, and Asylum in the Eu, The New
International Relations (Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York: Routledge, 2006), p.4-5.;
McDonald, "Human Security and the Construction of Security," p.277..
13
Huysmans, The Politics of Insecurity : Fear, Migration, and Asylum in the Eu, p.4.
14
Giacomo Luciani, "The Economic Content of Security," Journal of Public Policy 8, no. 2
(1988): p.151.
15
Ian Bellamy quoted in: C. Grey, "Security Studies and Organization Studies: Parallels and
Possibilities," Organization 16, no. 2 (2009): p.304.
16
Judith Butler and Joan Wallach Scott, Feminists Theorize the Political (New York: Routledge,
1992), p.379.
17
Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, p.337.
18
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York,: Harcourt, 1973), p.139.
19
Ole Wæver, "Securitization and Desecuritization," in On Security, ed. Ronnie D. Lipschutz
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).; M. C. Williams, "Words, Images, Enemies:
Securitization and International Politics," International Studies Quarterly 47, no. 4 (2003).

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providing “any prospect of living together in security and peace.”20

Hobbes’s monster was:
LEVIATHAN, or rather (to speake more reverently) … that
Mortall God, to which wee owe under the Immortal God, our
peace and defence.21
For Hobbes, Leviathan was the incorporated embodiment – the alter- and
the über-ego – of each and every one of the citizenry within its (absolutist)
borders.22 The late modern state is a rather more complex beast, as is the
means of its legitimation (representative democracy was anathema to
Hobbes), however the totalising pretensions of this “coldest of all cold
monsters”23 remains.

“In distinction to, and often actively critical of, the traditional state-centred
approach, human security stresses the multiplicity of ways in which such
security may be threatened.”24 This version of security is notoriously
flexible. In opposition to ‘national security’, Huysmans defines ‘human
security’ as “the protection of the individual from a wide range of dangers
potentially threatening a sustainable form of life.”25 For Hough, if any
people, whether public officials or private citizens, “perceive an issue to
threaten their lives in some way and respond politically to this, then that
issue should be deemed to be a security issue.”26 Human security, under
such conditions, may refer to anything from outright warfare to guarding
against flu pandemics.

Both these influential approaches have invited sustained critical attention.

Against the national security paradigm, Edkins argues that, far from
shielding its subjects from the inevitably vile and violent state of nature:
Sovereign power produces and is itself produced by trauma: it
provokes wars, genocides and famines. But it works by concealing
its involvement and claiming to be a provider not a destroyer of
security.27

20
Q. Skinner, "Hobbes on Representation," European Journal of Philosophy 13, no. 2 (2005):
p.179.
21
Thomas Hobbes and C. B. Macpherson, Leviathan, The Pelican Classics, Ac 2
(Harmondsworth,: Penguin, 1968), p.227.
22
Q. Skinner, "Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person of the State," Journal of Political
Philosophy 7, no. 1 (1999).
23
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche and Thomas Common, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Dover Thrift
Editions (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1999), p.30.
24
Ian Bellamy quoted in: Grey, "Security Studies and Organization Studies: Parallels and
Possibilities," p.304. Emphasis added.
25
Huysmans, The Politics of Insecurity : Fear, Migration, and Asylum in the Eu, p.4.
26
Peter Hough, Understanding Global Security, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: Routledge, 2008), p.10.
27
Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), p.xv.

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The state’s complicity in conflict is hidden, according to Edkins, by state-

centric “discourses of international security” as well as by the state
“claiming to provide security internally for its citizens.” By writing
trauma “into a linear narrative of national heroism … the state conceals
the trauma it has, necessarily, produced.”28 The state is, therefore, not a
benign being stood in opposition to the fearful outside, but is instead
active in the proliferation of violence. For Edkins, resistance to the
“rescripting” of state identity thus “constitutes resistance to sovereign
power”29 and is, therefore, the objective of critique.

Against the human security paradigm, much critical scholarship has taken
issue with the creeping securitisation of ever more aspects of life. As
Duffield notes, although human security “is often seen as a progressive”
paradigm because it “prioritizes the security of people rather than states”,
this is not all that new. From early modernity the “liberal rationality of
government has … taken the protection and betterment of the essential
processes of life associated with population, economy and society as its
object.”30 Human security, therefore, does not involve an escape from
statal demands; rather, it represents an expansion of state concerns from
matters of death to those of life (in Greek, bios, from which is derived the
concept of biopolitics31). For the likes of Dean, such developments are
typical of a “governmentality [which] seeks to enframe the population
within … apparatuses of security.” These apparatuses include “standing
armies, police forces, diplomatic corps”, as well “health, education and
social welfare”, etcetera.32 The modern biopolitical citizenry is thereby
fully and fundamentally enclosed within this “society of control”.33 From
this perspective, the ‘human’ in ‘human security’ refers to the “referent
object”34 of control rather than the subject for whose betterment the project
is undertaken.

Peacebuilding
“Peacebuilding has been variously and often confusingly defined.”35 As
Cousens argues, some definitions of peacebuilding “are so general as to
include virtually all forms of international assistance to societies that have

28
Ibid.
29
Ibid.
30
Duffield, "Global Civil War: The Non-Insured, International Containment and Post-
Interventionary Society," p.145.
31
L. Dubreuil, "Leaving Politics - Bios, Zoe, Life," Diacritics-a Review of Contemporary
Criticism 36, no. 2 (2006): p.84.
32
Mitchell Dean, Governmentality : Power and Rule in Modern Society (London ; Thousand Oaks,
Calif.: Sage Publications, 1999), p.20.
33
G. Deleuze, "'Pourparlers' - Postscript on the Societies of Control," October, no. 59 (1992).
34
M. Dillon, "Underwriting Security," Security Dialogue 39, no. 2-3 (2008): p.312.
35
Elizabeth M. Cousens, Chetan Kumar, and Karin Wermester, Peacebuilding as Politics :
Cultivating Peace in Fragile Societies (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001), p.5.

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experienced or are at risk of armed conflict”.36 Indeed, according to

Barnett et al., there may be as many definitions are as there are actors
engaged in the practice.37 One typically broad definition is supplied by the
United Nations:
Peace-building refers to activities aimed at assisting nations to
cultivate peace after conflict.38
Succinct and vague in equal measure, this definition, while not providing
much by way of specificity, nevertheless does imply the themes and
associations most commonly associated with the term.

The word came into widespread use when then United Nations Secretary-
General Boutros Boutros-Ghali announced his Agenda for Peace in 1992. It
was therein defined as:
[A]ction to identify and support structures which will tend to
strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid a relapse into
conflict.39
In this, as with much else, “Boutros-Ghali interpreted the collapse of
communism in 1989 as resulting in the dissolution of the classical realist
distinction between external security policies and internal stability and
peace.”40 This shift closely parallels the ‘end of history’ turn that redefined
security, as discussed above. In this intellectual and political climate,
“[p]eacebuilding became synonymous with statebuilding and
democratisation.”41

Prior Boutros-Ghali’s popularisation of the term, it had been argued that

peacebuilding was “concerned with changing the belligerent and
antagonistic attitudes that foster violent conflict at the grassroots level.”
The aim of this practice was “to overcome the contradictions which lie at
the root of the conflict”.42 By another definition:
Peacebuilding underpins the work of peacemaking and peacekeeping
by addressing structural issues and long-term relationships between

36
Ibid.
37
M. Barnett et al., "Peacebuilding: What Is in a Name?," Global Governance 13, no. 1 (2007).
38
UN.org quoted in: H. Born et al., Parliamentary Oversight of the Security Sector : Principles,
Mechanisms, and Practices, 3rd ed., Handbook for Parliamentarians No. 5 (Lausanne: Geneva
Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces : Inter-Parliamentary Union, 2003), p.119.
39
Boutros Boutros-Ghali, "An Agenda for Peace Preventive Diplomacy, Peacemaking and Peace-
Keeping," un.org, http://www.un.org/Docs/SG/agpeace.html. Accessed: 01/08/2009
40
Catherine Goetze and Dejan Guzina, "Peacebuilding, Statebuilding, Nationbuilding“ Turtles All
the Way Down?," Civil Wars 10, no. 4 (2008): p.319.
41
Ibid.
42
Ryan quoted in: Alex J. Bellamy, Paul Williams, and Stuart Griffin, Understanding
Peacekeeping (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2004), p.235.

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conflictants. … [P]eacebuilding aims to overcome the

contradictions which lie at the heart of conflict.43
From early on and throughout, therefore, the concept had been associated
with ‘structures’ (although just what this means has often remained
vague). Overwhelmingly the phrase is invoked to mean what one might
expect: turning violent physical conflict into an absence of such by
‘building’ (and as such connoting long term, structural development) the
means by which the given society can maintain the absence of such
conflict. It concerns, moreover, the lived daily experiences of the people
concerned; not just the presence or absence of weapons and fighting but
the social and cultural underpinnings of such. In short it concerns the
conditions of possibility for conflict, which may exceed the mechanics of the
state apparatus (although organisational and political reform is certainly a
concomitant consequence of this process).

In other words, peacekeeping is a systematic intervention in the everyday

and the institutional (wherever there can be said to be ‘structures’ that
maintain conflictive frictions). While it is distinct from the securitisation
regime of ‘human security’, it does operate on the same level of
governmentality, seeking to orient individuals and groups into such a
form that they may be governed by their freedoms ‘at a distance’44 (as is
the liberal ideal) rather than by force, ‘up close’. This is based on the
Foucauldian theory of governmentality, for which power is:
[A] mode of action that does not act directly and immediately upon
others. Instead it acts upon their actions: an action upon an action,
on possible or actual future or present actions.45
In other words, power in governmentality organises freedoms instead of
foreclosing them. This is consistent with Richmond’s argument that
peacebuilding, in its close associations (tempting synonymy) with
statebuilding, “is connected with neoliberalism and the liberal
peacebuilding praxis which has emerged in recent years.“46 Moreover, it is
consistent with the argument that it is more about socialising ‘control’ than
building better life for the citizenry.

43
Hugh Miall, Oliver Ramsbotham, and Tom Woodhouse, Contemporary Conflict Resolution: The
Prevention, Management and Transformations of Deadly Conflict (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell,
1999), p.22.
44
N. Rose, "Government, Authority and Expertise in Advanced Liberalism," Economy and Society
22, no. 3 (1993).
45
Hubert L. Dreyfus, Paul Rabinow, and Michel Foucault, Michel Foucault, Beyond Structuralism
and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p.219-20.
46
Oliver Richmond, "The Romanticisation of the Local: Welfare, Culture and Peacebuilding "
International Spectator 44, no. 1 (2009): p.149.

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Security Sector Reform

As with the above, security sector reform has no settled definition.47
Edmunds defines the security sector as: “those organisations that apply and
manage coercive force for collective purposes.” The reform of that sector is
correspondingly described as “the process through which security sector actors
adapt to the political and organisational demands of transformation.”48 For Jean,
the security sector refers to “state institutions and authorities that have a
responsibility to protect both the state and the communities within it”,
including “the army, the police, the judiciary, the correctional services and
the intelligence services, along with the respective oversight mechanisms
for those bodies”.49 Hendrickson and Karkoszka define SSR as “an
attempt to develop a more coherent framework for reducing the risk that
states weakness or failure will lead to disorder and violence.”50 A clear
theme connects these definitions: all explicitly link the organised potential
for physical violence with security; moreover, all suggest the co-
dependency of state and citizens in the achievement of security. Weber’s
definition of sovereignty as “the monopoly of the legitimate use of
physical force within a given territory”51 is clearly implicated across the
definitions above, as is, it must be said, the Hobbesian state. It is assumed
that security is created by the state by guarding from a hostile exterior.
Moreover, it is assumed that it is the state control of the means of violence
that provides this security.

In other words, SSR closely parallels the ‘national security’ paradigm of

security studies outlined above and is part of the same projects of control.
SSR involves orienting the coercive apparatuses of state in such a way that
it can intervene to protect its interests, which, in a liberal state, means its
citizens. Whereas peacebuilding is concerned with the everyday, SSR is
oriented more towards the exceptional. While for those involved
(policepersons, soldiers, bureaucrats, criminals) the reality of the security
sector is ‘every day’, the kind of power that it asserts is exerted only when
necessary. While other elements of the apparatus may function
symbolically ‘every day’ to remind the subject public of the state’s coercive
potentiality, the reform of the security sector is, in distinction, intended to
establish the sovereignty in the Weberian sense.

47
Timothy Edmunds, Security Sector Reform in Transforming Countries: Croatia, Serbia and
Montenegro (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), p.22. Original emphasis.
48
Ibid., p.25. Original emphasis.
49
S. Jean, "Security-Sector Reform and Development: An African Perspective," Security Dialogue
36, no. 2 (2005): p.249.
50
Hendrickson and Karkoszka quoted in: Stephen Blank, The Future of Transcaspian Security
(Darby, PA: DIANE Publishing, 2002), p.15.
51
Max Weber, Hans Heinrich Gerth, and C. Wright Mills, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology
(New York,: Oxford university press, 1946), p.78.

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3: Question 1
o How important is the provision of security for successful peacebuilding?
Peacebuilding, it has been established, is a process of social engineering
oriented towards ameliorating the long standing, deep rooted structural
causes of conflict. It is concerned with the everyday and micropolitical but
also the organisational and institutional. Successful peacebuilding is,
therefore, the successful amelioration of the structural tensions that risk
further conflict, which are presumed to be rooted within the society itself.

Security, as we have seen, is not a fixed state – it is not simply the absence
of violence or oppression. States (at least according the Eurocentric liberal
model that dominates policy discourse) are defined and recognised by
their ability to provide security, both from external threats (national
security) and contingency or risk (human security).

The state can only provide security by defining insecurity. This habitually
emanates from the outside: from rebels, outlaws or foreigners.
Peacebuilding can only function if the object of risk is defined as a
multiplicity of structural imbalances (determined by comparison with the
liberal ideal-type) embedded within the society itself. The notion that the
liberal (ideal-typical) state may itself cause violence is unconsidered.

The relationship between security and peacebuilding is, therefore, far

more complicated than simply whether the provision of one is important
for success of the other. Not wishing to seem evasive, however, the
question can be answered like this: security must be provided by the state
as a possibility (i.e. the state must promise the possibility of total security,
which is defined in opposition to total insecurity) in order to construct the
idea of the liberal state. The notion of peacebuilding is dependent upon
the idea of the liberal state as a goal, or ideal end. Because security as such
can only be properly attained in a liberal state, it can hardly contribute to
peacebuilding as, by definition, peacebuilding comes before the
achievement of this state (security as an objectively achieved condition is,
therefore, unimportant to peacekeeping on this reading). Nevertheless, the
idea of security drives the will for peacebuilding. It is the promise of
security that sustains the ideal-typical liberal state as the object of
(peacebuilding’s) desire – thus its provision is crucial. Peacebuilding is
not, however, simply the recipient of this benefit; it in turn sustains the
ideal (of security in the liberal state) by maintaining the perception that the
risk of violence is rooted in the illiberal, underdeveloped, unreformed
society and not in the liberal state itself.

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To put it simply: successful peacebuilding no less than necessitates

‘security’ as an ideal. Moreover, peacebuilding as a discourse in a not-yet-
liberal state sustains the ideal of this ideal-typical entity (and with it the
ideal of security) by consistently locating the causes of conflict within
society. In a sense, these social fissures are the ‘other’ to be securitised (to
have constructed around and through it the corrective state apparatus).

4: Question 2
o What role should security sector reform play this context?
Given the preceding argument, this question has become complicated.
Particularly problematic is the word ‘should’. Given the critical intent and
abstract frame of reference hitherto ascribed to, the prescription of a
particular course of action seems to be incompatible with the
methodology. The central premise of the above analysis is that state
complicity in violence is obscured by security discourse and that
examining the relationship between security and peacebuilding reveals a
microcosm of this. The aim is to explicate the ways in which discourses of
security are sustained so as to denaturalise the obfuscation of state
responsibility. The role SSR ‘should’ play in this context is thus complex.
Yet, consideration of this question brings to the fore the difficulty
associated with this more ‘postmodernist’ approach to the subject: while
the aim of analysis is to expose state responsibility for violence, other
actors are also responsible – not everything can be blamed on the state. A
typical reaction to this criticism might be that just because much violence
cannot be causally attributed to the state does not mean that such acts of
violence fall outside the state’s influence – after all, it structures the
security environment and thus must be complicit in violent events. This
defence is fair yet the rebuttal is incomplete – one must still account for
how non-state forces generate violence. The role SSR ‘should’ play in this
context can be answered, albeit in a manner lacking in specificity.

If we assume that the security sector must exist in some form (as surely, in
lieu of the most radically anarchistic propositions for political life, it must)
and if the problems we have identified are that security, as usually
defined, is a state of being that is unattainable and that peacekeeping is
sustained by (and in turn sustains) this idea, then, rather simply (if a little
uninformatively), the question can be answered thus: SSR must reform the
security sector in such a way that ceases to reinforce the notions that the
liberal state is the only possible peaceful form of political life, that
‘security’ is an attainable state of being and that conflict is rooted solely in
the structural misalignments of a society rather than the faults and
proclivities of the liberal state. As vague as this prescription is, the actual
form any security sector might take in accordance with it is even more so.

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A definitive answer is thus far beyond specification at this point; however,

on the basis of the above analysis, it is most definitely the course that SSR
‘should’ take.

5: Conclusion
The state’s complicity in violent acts is seriously obscured. A microcosm
of this obfuscation can be found in the relationship between discourses of
security and peacebuilding. While this critique should not be
reductionistic in its accusations (by blaming everything on the state), its
conclusions are much needed (the state has much to answer for). Indeed,
violence on a mass scale has only been possible with modernisation52 - a
process made possible by the Hobbesian state. An improved political
project must “abandon the model of Leviathan”53 by denaturalising
‘security’ from its understanding as an ideal condition and recognise it as a
procedure and a process. Peacebuilding would thereby be free to
scrutinise more than the failure of a particular society to conform to a
flawed ideal-type and turn its newly critical attention to wider (liberal
statal) issues (capital inequality, the military-industrial complex, etc.). A
security sector will be necessary so long as there is a state of any
recognisable form. Its reform must reflect the goal of reducing violence
and suffering without reinforcing the ideas of security as a possible state
of being and without reinforcing the notion that conflict is brewed through
misaligned social structure and not through the follies of the liberal state.
This is a challenging prescription, the consequences of which far exceed
the competencies of this essay; however, it is a necessary one.

52
Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989).
53
Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended : Lectures at the Collège De France, 1975-76 (New
York: Picador, 2003), p.34.

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6: Bibliography
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, 1973.

Barnett, M., H. Kim, M. O'Donnell, and L. Sitea. "Peacebuilding: What Is in a

Name?" Global Governance 13, no. 1 (2007): 35-58.

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