Description
Security Sector Reform (SSR) has consistently fallen short of its stated objectives, despite more than two decades of policy innovation and sustained international investment. This paper argues that SSR’s recurrent failures stem not from implementation challenges, but from structural contradictions within the liberal security paradigm itself—between local ownership and external control, between governance reform and stability imperatives, and between normative aspirations and strategic utility. Rather than marking a break from these patterns, the current post-liberal turn in security governance represents their consolidation. Militarised and transactional logics have reframed SSR’s failures as acceptable trade-offs, embedding pragmatic and short-term approaches in place of transformative reform. Drawing on comparative insights from major donor policy trajectories, the paper conceptualises this evolution as a shift from liberal failure to post-liberal adaptation—a process through which SSR’s normative ambitions are redefined to align with geopolitical expediency. By theorising failure as both a product and a mechanism of global security governance, the paper offers a framework for understanding how post-liberal practices sustain rather than resolve the contradictions that have long undermined SSR.
