Donald Feaver

The politics of security sector reform in ‘fragile’ or ‘post-conflict’ settings: a critical review of the experience in Timor-Leste

Security sector reform (SSR) policy has, for the better part of a decade, been viewed as instrumental to the larger international project of improving and strengthening the ‘capacity’ of post-conflict and ‘fragile’ states. The current policy approach, which represents a merging of security and development agendas in the post-Cold War era, is based on the premise that fragmented, ineffective, poorly managed and politicised state security institutions threaten political stability and undermine poverty reduction and sustainable development goals. The objective of this article is to examine aspects of what has been described as the ‘SSR policy-practice gap’ that arose in the course of implementing SSR policy in Timor-Leste by analysing the systemic basis of the gap. An analytical framework that untangles the relationship between SSR policy objectives, targets and outcomes is presented in concert with a discussion of the social and political circumstances that confronted international organisations and donor countries when they sought to implement SSR policy in Timor-Leste. By using the analytical framework to assess the policy coherence between SSR objectives and the SSR programme contained in UN Security Council Resolution 1704, the ubiquitous disconnect between SSR ‘Gospel and Reality’ is pulled more sharply into focus.

The Shifting Balance of Power in the Regulatory State: Structure, Strategy, and the Division of Labour

The objective of this article is to examine the structural change in government that has enabled the politically strategic changes in governance seen in many OECD countries over the past several decades. In so doing, the legal structures and political strategies underlying the regulatory state are explained. Drawing upon classical theories of the division of labour, two distinct divisions of labour – one legal, the other political – are identified that provide insight into the relationship between the legal structure and political strategies underpinning the emergence of the regulatory state. The implications of this article are that it provides a description of how the executive branch has been able to shift the balance of power significantly in its favour while at the same time divesting itself of its core constitutional tasks of governing the administrative arm of government.