![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
Abstract
This article challenges the tendency to understand local ownership of statebuilding processes chiefly as a product of how international donors plan and implement reforms rather than of how such efforts are appropriated by local actors. Local ownership is typically described as a quality which is ‘supported’, ‘fostered’, ‘granted’ or ‘stifled’ by foreigners rather than something which is simply taken by the hosts of such interventions. Drawing on the case of British-led police reform in Sierra Leone, the article argues that local authorities exercised ownership by actively drawing their former colonizer into the security sector, thus deepening and prolonging the intervention. This contradicts two common assumptions about local ownership: (i) it is aimed at reducing international influence and (ii) it will be scarcer and more difficult to achieve the weaker the host state. Rather than to control how the police reform was designed and implemented, the principal function of local ownership was to secure a powerful ally in the ongoing civil war and to achieve an outward reorientation of national security.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Odd-Inge Fjeldstad, Christopher Hood, David Anderson, Jonny Steinberg, Phil Clark, Astri Suhrke, Ingrid Samset, Anders Haahr Rasmussen, Morten S. Andersen, as well as the journal's editors and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions to previous versions of this article. Financial support from the Chr. Michelsen Institute and The Research Council of Norway is gratefully acknowledged.
Notes on Contributor
Erlend Grøner Krogstad is with the Ministry of Climate and Environment, Norway.
He earned his DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2012. ([email protected])
Notes
1 This kind of ownership is not well captured by the otherwise helpful distinction between ‘maximalist’ and ‘minimalist’ approaches proposed by Eirin Mobekk (Citation2010). A maximalist approach to local ownership would advocate that reforms of the security sector be ‘designed, managed and implemented by local actors’ (Nathan Citation2007), whereas a minimalist approach would ‘defin[e] owners as governments and the security sector leadership, and ownership as buy-in and occasional consultation’ (Mobekk Citation2010, 231). While this article focuses on the agents of ownership described in the minimalist approach, the minimalist approach does not capture how these actors appropritate and shape the reform agenda according to domestic political calculations in a way that goes far beyond ‘buy-in and occasional consultation’.
2 Particularly damning from a donor perspective are so-called “inside spoilers’: an actor that “signs a peace agreement, signals a willingness to implement a settlement, and yet fails to fulfill key obligations to the settlement’ (Stedman Citation1997, 8).
3 Christopher Clapham (Citation1994) criticized this view for reducing politics in Africa to a static game of rent-seeking and for glossing over the vast differences between states and politics across the continent. However, Clapham also praised the concept for transcending an image of Africa's leaders as ‘neocolonial puppets’ and for capturing their skilful manipulation of foreign states and aid agencies.
4 UNAMSIL succeeded the United Nations Observer Mission in Sierra Leone (UNOMSIL), which deployed in June 1998 and comprised 40 military advisors.
5 For a fuller account of the character and significance of this colonial nostalgia, see Krogstad (Citation2012a).
6 Former Vice President of Sierra Leone, Solomon Berewa, personal interview, Freetown, 12 June 2010.
7 Assistant Inspector General of the SLP, Richard Moigbe, personal interview, Freetown, 8 April 2010.
8 Assistant Inspector General of the SLP, Morie Lengor, personal interview, Freetown, 1 December 2009.
9 Major with the International Military Army Training Team, Dave Thomas, personal interview, Freetown, 28 May 2010. It must be noted that the influence exercised by British reformers over the SLP was not all soft. British Inspector General Keith Biddle was by all accounts a very strong leader, and was described by his successor (a Sierra Leonean) as a man you did not want as an enemy: ‘He … pushed [a lot of people] out of the organization before he left. A lot of them’. Despite his forceful style at the helm of a national security institution, Biddle was no doubt very popular in the SLP and in the country in general (Former Inspector General of the SLP, Brima Acha Kamara, personal interview, Freetown, 7 April 2010).
10 Inspector General of the SLP, Francis Munu, personal interview, Freetown, 3 June 2010.
11 Assistant Inspector General of the SLP, Richard Moigbe, personal interview, Freetown, 8 April 2010.
12 ‘Historical Background of the Sierra Leone Peacekeeping Operations Department’. http://www.police.gov.sl/content.php?p=21&pn=PeaceKeepingOperations (accessed 15 April 2012).
13 Keith Biddle, personal interview, Crewe, 27 October 2009. Former British High Commissioner in Sierra Leone, Peter Penfold, who was also firmly of the opinion that Britain needed ‘executive authority to push advice through’, recalled that Kabbah ‘had meetings with Clare Short, [where] he made the point that he wanted a British person to head the police force’. Penfold, personal interview, Oxford, 19 October 2010.
14 This position of Kabbah's was referred to by former British High Commissioner in Sierra Leone, Peter Penfold. Penfold, personal interview, Oxford, 19 October 2010.
15 Address by President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah to the Nation, 27 April 1999. http://www.sierra-leone.org/Speeches/kabbah-042799.html (accessed 1 November 2011).
16 Those who argue it is necessary to suspend the sovereignty of ‘weak’ or ‘rogue’ states in neo-imperial fashion in order to solve global problems emanating from them also pay little attention to the agency of such states (see for example Ferguson Citation2004).