Statebuilding and Police Reform

The space between: negotiating the contours of nodal security governance through ‘Safer Communities’ in Bosnia–Herzegovina

“…Aspects of this analysis appear rather fatalistic. Notably, the implication that projects like Safer Communities are structurally predisposed to the interests of external benefactors and stakeholders echoes concerns expressed by Bowling and Sheptycki (2012) regarding the legitimacy of global and transnational forms of policing while the sociological character of these pressures for alignment echoes Ryan's (2011) Foucaultian analysis of policing reforms as a form of liberal governmentality. While these critiques do not preclude the prospect that domestic stakeholders may ultimately benefit from the outputs generated by these policing reforms, they suggest that the governmental process is itself problematic due to its inaccessibility and lack of responsiveness to local interests.…”

“…Contact zones denote the convergence of various actors and interests working, either actively or passively, to assert their preferences over the conceptual and programmatic contours of mantras and policies associated with security governance and policing reforms in weak and structurally dependent societies. With reference to recent literature that focuses on structural and post-structural critiques of the problematic relationship between liberal statebuilding projects and policing reform initiatives (Bowling and Sheptycki 2012;Ellison and Pino 2012;Ryan 2011), I examine the power politics of the 'Safer Communities' project to highlight the potentially coercive and undemocratic influence of non-core development aid structures on policy prescriptions that affect the work of mediatory and localised security nodes. Of particular concern was the tendency for the SCP team to attempt to align the project with locally perceived interests of powerful supranational donors, in this instance the European Commission, rendering this translational process largely inaccessible to domestic policy makers and practitioners.…”

“…Applying these concepts to a meso-level analysis of policing reforms in Bosnia and Herzegovina complements existing structural critiques of the relationship between liberal state-building and police reforms in weak and structurally dependent societies (eg. Ellison and Pino 2012;Ryan 2011). Contact zones offer a valuable framework for analysing the politicised character of relationships between security nodes while the nodular approach advocated by Johnston and Shearing (2003) allows us to analyse these 'spaces' as part of a wider networks of governance.…”

Reflexivity and Participatory Policy Ethnography: Situating the Self in a Transnational Criminology of Harm Production

“…The example illustrates that a researcher's awareness of the reflexive praxis described by Cain (2000) can foster the realisation of a particular variant of Bowling's (2011, 374) transnational criminology of harm production that involves limiting the impact of one's presence unless it is clear that it will not exacerbate structural asymmetries or generate what Cohen (1988, 190) describes as 'paradoxical damage, that is, the possibility that even a 'benevolent' criminal justice policy transfer can inadvertently generate harms due to cultural and structural differences between the context of origin and the recipient society (Cohen 1988, 190). To this effect, the chapter highlights how a researcher's direct immersion in an active policy node 2 can create unique opportunities for this individual to move beyond ex post facto critiques of ethnocentrism and the structural inequalities associated with international police development assistance programmes (Ellison and Pino 2012;Ryan 2011) by addressing these issues on a continuous basis as a participant.…”

Community policing from the ‘bottom-up’ in Sarajevo Canton

“…Over the past two decades, 'community policing' has emerged as a popular template for police capacity-building in developing and transitional societies [(see Brogden and Nijhar 2005;Ellison 2007)]. Implicit in a growing body of scholarship on transnational policing is a recognition of the fact that the policy transfers associated with police reform projects constitute complex processes, the outputs of which are shaped by an interplay between structure and agency as well as international and local influences [(see Blaustein 2014;Ellison and Pino 2012;Ryan 2011)]. This article argues that local police officers represent important policy mediators who play an important part in determining the nature of policy outputs generated by police development assistance projects related to community policing.…”