Policy and Research Papers
Security System Reform. France's Approach
Security system reform is an essential factor in conflict prevention and peacebuilding. It plays a direct role in establishing democratic governance that respects human rights.
Insecurity obstructs development and poverty upsets security: SSR contributes to creating a development and reconstruction-friendly environment. Further upstream, it helps
prevent crisis and conflict.
The Challenges of Building the African Peace and Security Architecture
The 2013 French White Paper on Defence and National Security states that “support for establishment of a collective security architecture in Africa is a priority of France’s cooperation and development policy”. The nonAfrican stakeholders’ support mechanisms for the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) are a strategically important topic of study, given the extent to which they tend to modify power relationships between the various actors – African and non-African, institutions and states.
This paper does not aim to analyse the international support practices for the APSA, but rather the reasons that push African states to accept a dependency relationship on exogenous actors in terms of crisis management. This analysis is essential to understand the current structure of the collective defence system that is emerging in Africa. The aim of this paper is to analyse this relationship by referring to the concept of extraversion, defined by Jean-François Bayart as “the fabrication and capture of a true dependence income” or the “mobilisation of resources derived from their (possibly unequal) relationship with the external environment”.
Security Strategies Today : Trends and Perspectives
There have been considerable developments in security-policy thinking since the end of the Cold War, and a complex set of transnational threatsand challenges necessitates new security policies and strategies. Not only the attacks of 11 September 2001, but also the dark side of globalisation such as climate change, the global spread of dangerous technologies and international organised crime have changed the security perspective and policy procedures in recent years. Consequently, new
national-security strategies, white papers and security-policy documents have been drafted in order to take into account the changing security landscape.
On 6 April 2009, the Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP) welcomed a group of leading security experts for a seminar entitled “Security Strategies Today : Trends and Perspectives”. The goal of the seminar was to provide a forum for experts from different European states, major international powers and regional and international organisations to take stock of current security polices in the European region and beyond. The participants had an opportunity to assess the direction of security-policy thinking by analysing a number of key security-policy documents such as national-security strategies, defence concepts and white papers, among others. Assumptions regarding future threats were considered, as were a variety of drafting processes and methodologies.
More than 30 participants attended the seminar, including representatives of the Defence Ministries of Finland, Germany and Sweden, as well as representatives of the United Nations (UN), the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). In addition to faculty members from the GCSP, regional and international experts from a range of academic and policy institutions participated, including speakers from PricewaterhouseCoopers, the International Affairs Institute (Rome), the Institute for International Strategic Studies (Beijing), the Royal Institute of International Relations (Brussels) and the Foundation for Strategic Studies (Paris).