Variations in Police Performance in United Nations Peacekeeping Operations and Domestic Policing in Ghana

This article contributes to understanding local security practices in urban Africa by examining links between international peacekeeping and local policing in Tamale, the capital of Ghana’s Northern Region. It uses the concept of assemblage to suggest that while experiences, skills and lessons gained from consistent engagement in United Nations peacekeeping may be detected in local policing in Tamale, their effects on everyday policing are in practice limited. This is due to the central role of traditional authorities in local security and general political interference in police matters. Local policing in Tamale is an assemblage of formal (police and military) and informal (chiefs and community leaders) security arrangements, with the latter, especially, dictating how crimes should be dealt with. This makes it next to impossible for the police to do their job without interference. The article examines how non-state or traditional actors shape policing and security provision in Tamale, and what space is available for police officers to use the skills they believe they have learned in peacekeeping missions. The paper shows through empirical analysis how local policing is shaped more by kinship and politics than international principles of human rights and democracy.

Section: Translating Peacekeeping Experiences and Practices Into Loca...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Domestic Peacekeeping Practices in the Tamale Metropolis

Abdallah¹,

Aning²

2022

“…Despite this context of blurred claims to internal order-making, and the GAF's growing role within it, police officers are still the ones who interface with the population on a daily basis, doing patrols, investigating crimes and conducting traffic control. This is one of the reasons why the police remain more susceptible to criticism in comparison to military personnel, disliked and seen as "politicized, too powerful, too brutal, and too corrupt," as Atuguba suggests (2007:5; see also Ayee, 2019;Aubyn, 2022). Osei-Adubofour (2017) suggests that Ghana's post-colonial history of "political meddling" in policing affairs (Aning, 2015; see Adu-Amanfo, 2014) has resulted in the non-investigation of politically motivated crimes by ruling party affiliates, and usage of the GPS to target members of the opposition (see also Sowatey & Atuguba, 2015:88).…”

Section: The Context Of Policing (Before And) After Peacekeepingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: Assembling Peacekeeping and Policing in Ghana

Albrecht¹

2022

By exploring the case of Ghana, this special issue provides two perspectives on UN peacekeeping that until now have been underdeveloped in the literature. First, rather than taking a mission and its host country as the analytical point of departure, the contributions in the special issue focus on how peacekeeping has shaped domestic security in Ghana – a consistent contributor of security personnel to peacekeeping since 1960. Second, instead of focusing on the military component, attention is paid to the link between peacekeeping and law enforcement, and thus how policing – as carried out by the state-sanctioned Ghana Police Service, Ghana Armed Forces and a range of non-state actors – intertwines with and is partially shaped by practices, ideas and discourse that can be traced back to mission deployments. Theoretically, the concept of assemblage is used to frame how peacekeeping stretches across state boundaries and intersects with the politics and practices of domestic security provision. Both at a state institutional level, and in day-to-day policing by individual police officers, order-making practices and discourses are constituted by the assembling of a multitude of logics and historicities that integrate and assimilate as well as contradict and oppose one another. It is how the experience of peacekeeping becomes part of and shapes these ever-evolving assemblages that the contributions to this special issue investigate. Changes may be institutional and macro-political but are as often deeply personal and individualised, with implications for how security personnel perceive and practice their roles.

“…The involvement of the military as well as the police in internal security operations is bound to reveal both positive and negative security practices. Soldiers and police officers engaging in operations such as Vanguard and Cow Leg might display professional behaviour because of international peacekeeping, but the opposite is certainly also the case, as discussed below (see also Aubyn, 2022). Furthermore, many military and police personnel have not been deployed in international peacekeeping operations, which brings into question the all-encompassing transformative effect that can be expected from deploying troops abroad (see Albrecht, 2022b).…”

Section: Context Of International and Domestic Peacekeeping Operationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Addressing Conflicts over Resource Use in Ghana: The case of Operations Vanguard and Cow Leg

Alhassan¹,

Asante²

2022

Ghana is endowed with natural resources including forests, minerals, water and grazing lands which have made significant contributions to national development. At the same time, competing demands for these resources have created many conflicts that have proven difficult to manage. This paper seeks to further understand the challenges associated with resource use in Ghana, in particular the nature of conflicts and conflict resolution mechanisms under two joint police-military operations: Operation Cow Leg, which deals with long-running conflicts between Fulani herdsmen and local farmers over grazing rights; and Operation Vanguard, which addresses conflicts between the state and those involved in illegal small-scale mining popularly known as galamsey. Drawing on the literature on international peacekeeping, and using data collected via qualitative methods, the paper argues that while joint police-miliary operations such as Cow Leg and Vanguard are necessary, their implementation has failed to involve local people, and paid insufficient attention to the ways that local conflicts follow traditional processes of resolution.