Over the past two decades, community security has come into focus as a lynchpin concept, helping to bridge the tandem goals of promoting security and development.‍[3] Moreover, it promotes this link at the level of citizens and their daily experiences. Deeply embedded in this approach is the notion that impediments to human development are likely to incite conflict and perhaps violence. Social, economic and political exclusion not only reduce marginalised groups’ opportunities for development. Inequality and the denial of certain societal guarantees can also rend societal cohesion, eroding social barriers to violence as a means of access to political voice, justice, basic needs or capital.‍[4] The community security approach thus promotes efforts to strengthen relationships among people, social groups, and public authorities and citizens, as a strategy to address both development obstacles and deeper drivers of insecurity.‍[5]

Shifting to ‘people-centred’ security

Community security programming currently sits at the core of many international engagement strategies.‍[6] Its emergence from the development community has shaped its founding principles and practical application in ways that distinguish it from national security reform models. Two aspects in particular set community security approaches apart from conventional security assistance, which operates primarily or exclusively through strengthening state structures.

First, and rather intuitively, community security is largely calibrated to the micro-level, locations that are sometimes inaccessible to or neglected by the state. In practice, this requires community security approaches to include systems and agents locally recognised as responsible for people’s security, regardless of their relationship with state authority.‍[7] As a complement or counterbalance to more state-oriented policy instruments, such as community policing or security sector reform, community security approaches often seek to involve a broader array of actors.‍[8] Foremost among these are the people residing in the community, often (imprecisely) referred to as ‘end-users’.‍[9]

Second, the community security approach frames security as an individual’s entitlement to safety and protection. This normative principle has provided a sharp critique of large international investments in building state capacity. While effectively managed and functioning state security structures are essential and deserve support, such reforms do not quickly or consistently increase people’s felt security.‍[10] Thus, the community security approach tends to assert function over form, championing interventions that effectively respond to citizens’ needs. In this way, community security programming has contributed to shifting the rationale and focus of interventions from strengthening the state toward the security of individuals.

The entitlement paradox

The ideal that security is an entitlement to be delivered as a basic public good resonates with similar working philosophies in development thinking. It has been a critical element in the campaign to prioritise people’s needs for development and security in lockstep with promoting the economic growth and stability of the state. However, this principle of ‘security as an entitlement’ reveals both a normative preference for, and a starting presumption of, ‘impersonal political orders’.‍[11] This is neither surprising nor unproblematic.

‘Impersonal political orders’ refer to systems that provide services on unbiased terms, regardless of a citizen’s social standing, political connections or identity markers.‍[12] In these contexts, uneven or inadequate responses to citizens’ needs are generally attributed to inefficiency or insufficient capacity and/or resources.‍[13] Yet, this is not generally an accurate description of the contexts where community security programmes are initiated. It is equally (or perhaps more) likely that intervening private interests or unchecked power structures are (also) responsible for inequitable and unresponsive public services. A concrete example: extortion and predation by police is often diagnosed as a result of low wages, which officers supplement with bribes extracted from the community. While underpayment may indeed be a part of the problem, the solution – to pay police better wages – does not address the power imbalances that make it easier for police to abuse communities than to collectively negotiate for better wages. This implicates power dynamics between community members and police, and between police and government administration.

Framing security as an entitlement is a valuable aspiration, but implicitly neglects how powerful actors‍[14] influence the distribution of public goods, like security, in their own favour.‍[15] This often means such entitlements are unequally distributed by design, to sustain certain systems of power. This notion has gained traction in development circles, but has not yet been fully seized in relation to security, specifically not at the community level, where it is arguably all the more relevant.‍[16]

Capturing ‘power’: actors and institutions shaping security

Asserting control over the organised use of violence is typically resource intensive. While a perfect monopoly on the use of force is rare, competition can be limited by the relatively high threshold of resources required to coordinate, manage and compel groups empowered with lethal force. Therefore, security arrangements are often sponsored by and organised according to the interests of actors controlling relatively high levels of capital.‍[17] This may be financial capital, for instance an elite business class that is able to pay private agencies to guard their homes and business assets. Powerful actors may also rely on their social capital. A religious or political leader or a traditional authority may be able to conscript local followers into enforcing a specific code of behaviour as a duty or social obligation, for little or no compensation.‍[18] What is more, powerful actors are likely to invest some of their capital and influence into reinforcing the institutions that underpin their power.‍[19]

‘Institutions’ refers here to norms, customs and laws that organise and regulate behaviour in a society and which are often enforced through the threat of social sanctions or violence.‍[20] For example, religion, economic systems, status associated with age, gender, ethnicity or other identity markers are all institutions that partially determine what is or is not ‘permitted’ behaviour. These patterns and rules are liable to give certain groups more access to opportunity and capital, empowering them and incentivising them to maintain the ‘status quo’. As such, upholding (or challenging) institutions of power is often part of the logic that shapes local security arrangements.

A recent Oxfam briefing paper details the way in which state police and justice authorities in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) use their position as ‘gatekeepers to a failed system’, extracting payments from local citizens wishing to issue complaints or report crimes.‍[25] This arrangement actually discourages the provision of security as an entitlement to protection. ‘This reflects a widely held view that officials have little incentive to improve the situation when people have to give corrupt payments to officials in order that they will agree to investigate complaints. A woman in Masisi said, “If [the authorities] protect people, they will not eat [receive bribes].”’‍[26]

In Beirut, neighbourhood-level security is often determined by the locally preponderant political party. One party representative described the ‘security’ provided by his association as ‘more of a propaganda’ than an effort to establish a safe environment. By convincing the local community that supporting the political party could guarantee their security, they would be able to gain credibility and demand allegiance. Such support was critical for the political party to continue its active ‘protection’ of local shops, a service for which they required ‘contributions’ to the party.‍[27]

In both of these examples, security was not provided as an entitlement, but was rather used to uphold a system that privileged some (e.g., the police, members of a political party) over others. Nor was it the case, in either situation, that insecurity was the result of actors’ low capacity and/or inadequate resources. In the Beirut example, there appears to be more opportunity to encourage and incentivise local security providers to become more responsive to citizens’ needs. While in the DRC case, the arrangement has created a perverse incentive for the police to allow low-level insecurity to persist in order to ensure their supplemented income. Identifying these actors and the institutions they uphold is crucial to understanding the incentives and power dynamics shaping local security provision.

The pitfall of prioritising needs

While community security experts and advocates may already acknowledge these power dynamics, addressing them has proven elusive in practice.‍[28] Remarkably, one reason for this may actually be the current emphasis on individual security and citizens’ needs. Community security programming models commonly encourage community members to identify their own security challenges and demands, and address these through collaborative interventions. Similarly, problem-driven approaches advocate designing programmes around locally identified (development) issues in order to enhance the salience of the initiative among a broad range of community members.‍[29] Thus, by virtue of its people-centred focus, community security is often portrayed in concrete terms of immediate security threats and direct mitigating responses, and programmes are shaped accordingly.‍[30]

Where successful, this typically results in concrete and visible achievements, such as establishing gun-free school zones, installing streetlamps or building toilets within a safe proximity to the community.‍[31] Such steps are undeniably meaningful to individuals’ sense of safety and for that reason should not be discounted. Yet these activities do not always move towards interrogating the relationship between security and the distribution of power.‍[32] Nor do they reliably add up to a transformative change in how and for whom security arrangements are organised and governed.

Here, a fissure emerges between the stated aims of community security – to work towards equitable relationships among citizens and authorities – and its typical modes of implementation, which focus on addressing people’s immediate and concrete experiences of insecurity.

The consequence: politics of security left unaddressed

With its developmental lens firmly in place, community security approaches emphasise the priorities, perceptions, anxieties and experiences of individuals both as the starting point and as the continual guiding input for programming. This report argues that such an approach may provide partial solutions, but is not an assured route to addressing the power structures that keep people insecure. This is because, though people may experience and describe insecurity at a personal or community level, it is often determined at various political levels.‍[33]

As part of this research, case studies were carried out in Afghanistan and South Sudan to explore how the programming strategies of locally based, international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) frame and respond to community security in conflict-affected countries. Though the case studies accessed only a small sample of (I)NGOs in each setting, these included large and notable agencies. Many programmes were designed explicitly to ‘empower’ local constituencies to identify, articulate and develop responses to their security and justice needs. These operated on the premise that local communities lack the capacity to express their security needs. One programme document made reference to the goal of changing the ‘passive mind-set’ of local communities.‍[34] Yet, such assumptions tend to obscure the relationship between security and the distribution of power. In both contexts, programme models were prone to focus on identifying and responding to specific ‘local security needs’, without carefully weighing the power dynamics implicated.

In one example, a programme in Afghanistan sought to educate women about the formal legal system, ‘empowering women to make informed choices’, particularly when local customary justice structures did not recognise women’s equal legal rights, for instance to inherit land.‍[35] However, the objective of ‘empowerment’ inevitably entails shifting power. Encouraging women to take cases out of the hands of local councils and refer them to district courts, particularly land tenure cases, was seen to directly threaten the authority of local council members. While programme staff were innately aware of gender and economic institutions disempowering Afghan women, they were less prepared to discuss the implications of challenging those institutions or promoting alternatives.

In South Sudan, a series of INGO-facilitated community dialogues with local police had led the commanding officer to request radio equipment for a local community policing initiative. With limited police units available, local youth had been mobilised to report on ‘security threats’ in the community, to enable uniformed services to take targeted action. The radio equipment was seen to facilitate more rapid response. However, at the risk of supporting a de facto intelligence network at the disposal of local power holders, the project required deeper contemplation on the incentives and motives of the police and the likelihood of such a system working in the public interest.

Successfully pursuing community security, therefore, means situating specific security issues within the local political context, and understanding how security actors may be incentivised or discouraged from addressing these issues.‍[36] In short, affecting how and for whom security is provided means negotiating the distribution of power; it means working politically.‍[37] This is where a strictly ‘service delivery’ approach inevitably falls short.

Addressing the politics underpinning security arrangements involves building a strategic network, knowing with whom to speak, what leverage they may have, and what ideas or incentives they may respond to favourably. The ultimate goal is to influence ‘standard’ or ‘customary’ practice to a point where the desired impact is no longer reliant upon a particular actor’s presence and sponsorship. In this way, change made is not only more sustainable, but also has the potential to be transferred to and replicated in other parts of the system.‍[38]

An example comes from a comparative study of community policing initiatives‍[39] carried out by The Asia Foundation and the Overseas Development Institute. In some of the cases, ‘community policing’ meant staffing a specific police unit with the explicit remit to engage communities in remote areas. Another, more systemic approach involved building a ‘community policing philosophy’ into police deployment strategies and the standard officer’s mandate. In this latter case, the hierarchical structure of the police force meant that, once the initiative took hold, it had stronger potential for broadly disseminated impact and institutional transformation.‍[40] So while the first option proved beneficial for a certain community, it remained stunted at the micro-level. The second example was more effective in making fundamental changes to how security is provided and authority is exercised, but required much more political engagement and negotiation.

Thus, to ‘scale up’ results it is necessary to be aware of and plugged into the political structures and institutions that are able to transcend local situations. In this way, political arrangements and institutions should not be considered only as a constraint on reform, or as inert structures. Indeed, they may provide the very lattice through which reform can spread.‍[41]