For over a decade, Saferworld has been addressing insecurity and conflict in a variety of contexts through innovative ‘community security’ programmes. The result has been positive change at the community level and examples of the potential wider relevance of this approach to build sustainable peace and improve state-society relations beyond the community itself.
‘Community security’ is an approach which focuses on people’s interlinked peace, security and development needs. It aims to build more positive relationships between communities, authorities and institutions – creating opportunities for these groups to identify security concerns together and plan collective responses. At its core is the idea that this gradual trust-building process can enable communities to be their own agents of change, empowering them to hold to account their security providers.
Saferworld has implemented community security programmes and built up experience in Bangladesh, the Caucasus, Kenya, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, South Sudan, Tajikistan, and Yemen. The evidence from this growing body of work is that community security programmes can help to increase trust, reduce local levels of insecurity, and build more proactive and resilient communities. For example, in South Ossetia one community initiated the building of a youth centre as a way to prevent young people becoming disaffected and potentially disruptive; in Muthafar, Yemen, a community group developed an advocacy campaign to pressure police to respond to the rape and murder of a 10-year old boy; and in South Sudan community action prompted the County Commissioner to introduce a weapons ban in the market in Tonj North.
More widely, community security has enabled communities, authorities and security providers to work together to find solutions to security problems such as political violence, harassment and violence against women, poor policing, and access to resources – helping to strengthen the conditions for sustainable peace from the bottom up. In Kisumu, Kenya, collaboration between community members, police and authorities ahead of the March 2013 presidential elections helped prevent violence around election time by establishing mechanisms to share early warning information and enabling a rapid response to increased tensions. In Nepal, communities identified a lack of women police officers as a key barrier to tackling gender-based violence. As a result of taking this issue to the authorities, the community contributed to more women police officers being posted in project locations, leading to an increase in women prepared to report cases of violence, and the beginning of behaviour change among men. And in Central Asia, as trust has grown between communities and the police, community security working groups have started to discuss and tackle more sensitive issues. This year they felt confident enough to bring-up the issue of religious radicalisation – something that would have been unthinkable previously.
These examples also illustrate that in many contexts local systems are the main way that people experience the state. Transforming dysfunctional relationships into mechanisms for collaboration and building accountability at this level can be the key to resolving many underlying security issues. By developing more responsive and legitimate institutions and security providers, empowering constructive citizenry, and reinforcing accountability and transparency mechanisms, community security processes help to improve state-society relations.
Finally, the evidence from our programme in Kosovo indicates it is also possible to achieve broader change by providing a framework through which the local and national levels can connect. Although it is challenging, it is possible to use community security to inform the design of security policies and initiatives at the national level, and then support their effective implementation at the local level. Indeed, Saferworld and local partners in Kosovo have regularly used community security frameworks to conduct consultations to feed into national policies on arms, community safety, and community policing. They have also played a supportive role to ministries at the national level and to local actors in charge of implementation by providing guidance, expertise and capacity building on effective ways to put these policies into practice.
By giving people a voice to express and address their safety and security concerns, and a channel through which to build relationships with authorities, community security can increase trust and confidence between state and society. Ultimately, this can mean the difference between violent conflict and the path to peace.
