Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE)

This study provides groundbreaking analysis of the challenges faced in security and justice service delivery. More importantly, it proposes an innovative solution for development agencies engaging in supporting security and justice development. A multi-layered approach to security and justice programmes is a methodology that is highly context specific, targeting donor assistance to those providers – state and non-state actors simultaneously – at the multiple points where actual day-to-day service delivery occurs. A multi-layered strategy recognises that unorthodox solutions and partnerships may be necessary to respond to the severe challenges of fragile states. The primary objective is to develop and strengthen the relationship between service providers (state and non-state) and the users of those services in the marketplaces where they work, in the neighbourhoods where they live and on the roads they travel, while fostering greater performance accountability.

Security System Reform (SSR) and Armed Violence Reduction (AVR) share the same objective: to contribute to stability, safety and security as an enabling environment for development. As such, “SSR and AVR are highly complementary and mutually reinforcing” (OECD, 2009, p. 111). Building on the recent OECD policy paper, Armed Violence Reduction: Enabling Development (2009), this note describes how the linkages between AVR and SSR programming can be used effectively in programme design and implementation for donors, policy makers and practitioners, as well as programme managers, practitioners and civil society staff at headquarters and in the field.

Civilian crisis management has long been considered the EU’s forte. Recent research however has questioned the EU’s claim to this specialization. I will interrogate how the EU has fared in building civilian capabilities for CSDP through a case study of the impact of the Europeanization of CCM norms in one of the newer EU member states - Poland. I investigate the domestic reverberations of an EU-level CCM governance – conceptualized as a vertical diffusion of norms - and a horizontal diffusion in the realms of policy setting, institutional adaptation, as well as in recruitment and training. I hypothesize that the European cognitive constructions and policy designs are the more likely to impact upon Polish security policy the more they resonate with the ideas embedded in the national security identity.

Another intervening variable affecting the ‘translation’ of EU policy into the domestic context is state capacity. Due to weaknesses
in the supply side of CCM and the refracting impact of national security identity and state capacity, I find that Europeanization has had a limited impact on the civilian response capability-building in Poland. Europeanization has been shallow, featuring adjustments
on the margins rather than the core of the security policy.

The report analyzed the failure to bring to justice many of those responsible for the violence in March 2004. Key factors included: the failure of a special international
police operation disconnected from the rest of the justice system, and ineffective policing generally; an insufficient response to allegations of Kosovo Police Service
misconduct during the riots; passivity on the part of prosecutors; poor case management and lenient sentencing practices in the courts; and inadequate oversight.