Introduction to special section on ‘police reform and human rights in the Western Balkans’

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Acknowledgements

The guest editors are grateful to all the contributing authors for their patience and understanding in the rather lengthy germination process of this Special Section; to Denisa Kostovicova for her initial collaboration in this project; and to Tobias Flessenkemper for helpful suggestions on an earlier version of this Introduction to the Special Section.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Gemma Collantes-Celador (PhD Aberystwyth, International Politics) is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for International Security and Resilience, Cranfield University at the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom. She previously held a lectureship at City, University of London and a post-doctoral fellowship at the Barcelona Institute of International Studies (IBEI). Gemma's research interests and expertise fall within the area of conflict, security and development, with particular attention to the following themes: post-conflict peacebuilding/statebuilding processes, security sector reform/security governance, transitional justice and human security. Much of her research and publications have focused on the Western Balkans. Through a CREST-funded project she has recently been working as part of a team led by Dr Christopher McDowell on issues related to diasporas, refugees, migrants and political activism.

Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers (PhD London, Social Anthropology) is a Principal Academic and the Programme Leader of the BA (Hons) Sociology and Anthropology at Bournemouth University, where she founded the conflict-transformation-studies research team and co-directs the Centre for Seldom Heard Voices: Marginalisation and Societal Integration. Her ethnographic research among and with Albanian citizens in post-socialist Albania, post-war Kosovo and Albanian migrants in translocal context, have led to numerous publications focused on questions of local identity constructions and resistance, including to international intervention aims, in recourse to contested pasts. She currently leads the ‘Kosovo-Strand’ of the 2017–2021 AHRC (Global Challenges) project ‘Changing the Story’ in five post-conflict countries.

ORCID

Gemma Collantes-Celador http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4282-4871

Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3173-0586

Notes

1. See, for example, Roland Paris, At War’s End: Building Peace after Civil Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Paul Jackson, ‘Security Sector Reform and Peace Building’, Third World Quarterly 32, no. 10 (2011): 1803–22.

2. Florian Bieber, ‘Policing the Peace after Yugoslavia: Police Reform between External Imposition and Domestic Reform’, Discussion Papers 10-07 (Tokyo: GRIPS, 2010), http://www.grips.ac.jp/r-center/en/discussion_papers/10-07/ (accessed 19 February 2016).

3. See, for example, Christoph Bleiker and Marck Krupanski, ‘The Rule of Law and Security Sector Reform: Conceptualising a Complex Relationship’, SSR Paper 5 (2012), The Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF), https://www.dcaf.ch/rule-law-and-security-sector-reform-conceptualising-complex-relationship (accessed 1 May 2017); David Bayley, Changing the Guard: Developing Democratic Police Abroad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

4. Wanda Vrasti, ‘The Strange Case of Ethnography and International Relations’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 37, no. 2 (2008): 279–301.

5. Mary Kaldor, Human Security: Reflections on Globalization and Intervention (Cambridge: Polity, 2007); Barry Buzan, People, States and Fear: An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post-Cold War Era, 2nd edn (Boulder, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991).

6. Roger Mac Ginty and Oliver P. Richmond, ‘The Local Turn in Peace Building: A Critical Agenda for Peace’, Third World Quarterly 34, no. 5 (2013): 763–83.

7. Richard A. Wilson, ‘Afterword to Anthropology and Human Rights in a New Key: The Social Life of Human Rights’, American Anthropologist 108, no. 1 (2006): 38–51; Damien Short, ‘Sociological and Anthropological Approaches’, in Human Rights: Politics & Practice, ed. Michael Goodhart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 92–108.

8. Richard A. Wilson, Human Rights, Culture & Context: Anthropological Perspectives (London: Pluto Press, 1997), 23.

9. Mark Goodale, ‘Toward a Critical Anthropology of Human Rights’, in Human Rights: An Anthropological Reader, ed. Mark Goodale (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 379.

10. See, for example, Mariella Pandolfi, ‘From Paradox to Paradigm: The Permanent State of Emergency in the Balkans’, in Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interventions, ed. Didier Fassin and Mariella Pandolfi (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 153–72. See also various indications of this debate in the contributions that form this special section.

11. BiEPAG, ‘The Crisis of Democracy in the Western Balkans. Authoritarianism and EU Stabilitocracy’, Policy Paper, European Fund for the Balkans and Centre for Southeast European Studies of the University of Graz, 2017, http://www.biepag.eu/publications/the-crisis-of-democracy-in-the-western-balkans-authoritarianism-and-eu-stabilitocracy/ (accessed 13 April 2018).