The European Union and Security Sector Reform

The EU has emerged in the last few years as a key player in security sector reform in many countries struggling with instability or emerging from conflict or authoritarian regimes. This reflects its twin role as the world’s largest source of development assistance and, ever increasingly, a major partner in international peacekeeping and police operations. In this new study a team of specialist authors: explain the origins of SSR as a concept and the EU’s embrace of it, culminating in the adoption of an overall EU framework for SSR in 2006; show how SSR relates to the EU’s development, enlargement, justice and home affairs and other key policy concerns; look at the multiplicity of resources, financial and human, the EU brings to bear to support SSR around the globe; discuss the tensions between the Commission’s and Council’s concepts and engagement in SSR and the efforts being made to coordinate action; show how the EU works in partnership with other international players such as the OECD and NATO; and, provide a series of detailed case studies of EU support for SSR in action – in the Balkans, former Soviet Union, Congo, the Middle East and North Africa and Indonesia Published in association with DCAF – the Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces