Description
Existing academic and policymaking literature tells us that security sector reform (SSR) has operated effectively in very few conflicts globally: there is a dearth of ‘success stories’ and interventions have overwhelmingly failed to deliver on the SSR vision. Yet around the world international staff are dedicated to implementing a failed model: the EU continues to prioritise SSR in its interventions. This article looks to the everyday level to explain the attachment of peacebuilding staff to the ‘reform’ of foreign security forces, despite their full awareness that these efforts have been unable to deliver their intended results. Through interviews and field observations of EU personnel in Mali and Niger, this paper argues that personnel have invested in the idea of ‘productive failure’ whereby lessons are learned in one conflict to improve SSR in another conflict, in an endless learning process where judgements of failure can be deferred. Staff create meaning out of micro-level practices and routinised relationships with Sahelian security forces, which enable them to carry on implementing demonstrably ineffective policies. I move beyond judgements of how to make SSR more effective, but rather ask how it is possible for failed policies to be sustained by agents on the everyday level.
