Coloniality and Security: discourses and practices of security sector reform in Liberia

• Ano de defesa: 2020
• Autor(a) principal: Dalberto, Germana
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Instituição de defesa: Biblioteca Digitais de Teses e Dissertações da USP
• Palavras-chave em Português: Liberia; Libéria; Pós-colonialismo; Post-colonialism; Reforma do Setor de Segurança; Security Sector Reform
• Link de acesso: https://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8132/tde-04112020-212829/

Between 1989 and 2003, Liberia went through two phases of a war that left Africa\'s oldest republic devastated. The war led to an estimated 250,000 deaths, displaced millions and shattered the country infrastructure. The resonance of the Liberia civil war in the neighbouring countries of Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast combined with the multiplicity of other conflicts that spread through the Sub-Saharan Africa at that time - including in Somalia, Burundi, Congo, Southern Sudan, Angola, Ethiopia, and Eritrea, Rwanda, Uganda, etc. - justified an wave of new international interventions in Africa. The traditional forms of colonialization evolved to new forms of interventions which, by the end of the Cold War, will often aim to promote the democratization and securitization of many global south countries, in particular those countries emerging from the decolonization movements or those which, having gained their formal independence in the previous century, such as Liberia, were undergoing internal conflicts and, therefore, were considered a threat to international peace and security of the West. Like many other African post-conflict nations, Liberia will initiate a process to rebuild its State institutions in 2003. This thesis approaches this post-conflict scene to understand the how international actors engaged in the process of reforming the country security sector apparatus. The first part analyses the formulation of the United Nations international policy on security sector reform. It begins with a genealogy of the rationalities that shaped its founding documents and the structures of the organization and recollects - the often forgotten - imperial context from which it emerged. It reveals how the Member States perceived the colonial problem since its early years; and how the coloniality permeated the political technologies established by the organization over the time. The second part describes the implementation of policy on security sector reform in Liberia. It analyses the challenges of such reforms and their contributions to the country post-conflict reconstruction.