Civil society: A broad range of non-state actors, including religious
groups, academics, policy researchers, the media, women?s groups, professional
associations such as the bar association, community-based organisations, labour
unions, and interested citizens. Civil society has three critical roles to play
in increasing the accountability of the security sector: demand change, act as
watchdog, and provide technical input.
Democratic security-sector accountability: The security organisations
are subordinate to the civil authorities in democratically constituted states,
are obliged to explain their actions to the civil authorities and civil society,
and are subject to sanctions for inappropriate actions or inadequately explaining
their actions.
Direct security-sector accountability: Members of the security
organisations answer directly to all or some portion of the population of a country.
Indirect security-sector accountability: Politicians and bureaucrats
are held accountable for the actions of the security organisations by defining
a set of democratic governance criteria against which the security organisations
are to be measured. Most security-sector accountability is indirect.
International financial institutions (IFIs): International Monetary
Fund, World Bank Group, and regional development banks, including the African
Development Bank.
Mano River Union: Intergovernmental ministerial committee comprising
Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone with a Council of Ministers, a Joint Security
Committee, a Technical Committee and a Secretariat (located in Freetown, Sierra
Leone) and regional offices in Monrovia, Liberia, and Conakry, Guinea. The MRU?s
original focus was on promoting regional economic and trade co-operation. In 2000,
a consultation process was established to address the area of security and the
objective of restoring trust between the three countries.
Security community: All actors influencing the quality of democratic
governance of the security sector ? security sector plus non-state security organisations;
and non-statutory civil society actors.
Security sector: All the institutions of state responsible for
securing the state and its population from fear of violence. In this handbook,
the security sector is taken as consisting of the armed forces, the police and
intelligence services, the related ministries and departments, paramilitary forces,
and governmental oversight organisations.
Security-sector organisations: The organisations that can legally
use force to protect the state and its population.
Security-sector oversight: Independent scrutiny of the governance
and operational issues relating to the security sector by the elected authorities,
independent institutions of accountability, and civil society.
Security-sector reform: Piecemeal, stand-alone changes to the
security sector, often limited to doctrinal changes, operational effectiveness
and cost-cutting drives, occurring as by-products of other state reform initiatives
and often without ?buy in? from critical stakeholders and thus subject to reversal
depending on power structure of the state. Can seek to affect relations of power
like security-sector transformation, but lacking an holistic approach to change,
such reforms tend to have limited effect.
Security-sector transformation: A holistic change to the security sector,
aimed at altering the relations of power within the sector in the direction of
civil/constitutional control ? to transform institutional culture, promote professionalism,
improve resource utilisation and operational effectiveness (on the side of the
security forces, better policy management (on the side of civil authorities),
in tandem with accountability and respect for human rights and international law
and involving inputs from a wide-range of stakeholders and role-players. Implementing
a security-sector transformation process involves a series of reforms, but with
SST, the reforms are embedded in a broad transformation process. With SSR, the
reforms are generally not part of an holistic process.
White paper: In some countries, a white paper is a policy paper.
In other countries, it can refer to annual policy implementation plans.
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