| Summary: | As the Cold War ended, the international development establishment turned its attention to the challenges of protracted conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa, among other underdeveloped regions of the world. The realities of the Cold War had ruled out the engagement by multilateral and bilateral donors with the armed forces of aid-dependent countries. Following the East-West rapprochement, the armed forces were singled out as the major driver of conflict and insecurity and as an obstacle to economic development. In order to engage with the governments of those countries, donors demanded that the professionalism and cost of maintaining armed forces be addressed through an initiative called as ‘Security Sector Reform’ (SSR), part of a normative agenda that marked a steady shift from project-focussed, to ‘sector wide’ approaches. It is argued that SSR remains a re-embodiment of civil-military relations (CMR) theories of the 1960s and 1970s and like them, it is equally beset by the normative bias towards liberalism and the disregard for the realities in pre-liberal and transitional political systems or countries whose historical experience differs from the Western setting which initially influenced the formulation of CMR theory. It is further argued that the post-Cold War turmoil in the conceptualisation of security adds to the haziness of SSR both as a policy and as an analytical tool, in addition to the limits imposed by its normative orientation. It is argued that SSR is premised on a problematic conception of security that conflates it with immunity to violent attack or physical safety. A conception that views security as a state of affairs in which groups and individuals are assured of sustainable and stable existence is suggested as the approach capable of capturing the development challenges at the heart of the security predicament of Sub-Saharan African countries as a specific category of the Third World.
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