Ethical Considerations in Security Sector Reform
necessary if they want to accept or change it. Through this collective international agreement, states greatly limited external
interference in internal affairs and assured more stable borders.
Such reliance on internal correction assumes people get the
governance, and thus the safety, security, and justice, that they
deserve, or at least that they are willing to accept. Whether an
abused or unprotected citizenry actually “deserves” what it gets
because it allows it to continue is a topic of 21st century debate.
However, from a practical standpoint the strength and inviolability of the principles of state sovereignty and non-intervention
have customarily set a very high threshold for legal intrusion.
Women take time to socialize and share experiences before the
Shafafiyat sponsored International Women’s Day event honoring the brave women of Afghanistan at International Security
Assistance Force headquarters, Kabul, Afghanistan, Mar. 7. Shafafiyat is an ISAF agency which works with community leaders to combat corruption. Shafafiyat is an Afghan word which
means “Transparency” in English. (Photo by ISAF headquarters
Public Affairs Office, Maitre Christian Valverde, French Navy.)
Legitimacy is an umbrella concept that covers a wide array of
more specific modern ethical principles and concepts. The ethical codes specific to individual elements of the security sector,
such as the professional ethical codes of the police force, the
military, the judiciary, the executive branch, and the legislature,
can be quite detailed, but they all reflect the larger ethical standards of the security sector as a whole. Legitimacy also ideally
encompasses enabling concepts like transparency – that the
people have a way of effectively monitoring the security sector,
and balance – that the people have effective mechanisms for
controlling it. The degree of recognized legitimacy the state’s
security sector achieves and maintains internally and externally
is thus a good general indication or measure of that state’s ethical stewardship and achievement of the objectives of a modern
security sector.
Ethics of Involvement: Sovereignty, Personal Responsibility, & “Responsibility to Protect”
Primary responsibility for the ethical nature and effectiveness
of a state’s security sector lies with the people of the state—it
is their security, after all, and their sovereignty that are at stake.
The idea of sovereignty is at the heart of the most basic principle
of international law—the belief that states are sovereign and
their internal affairs are not to be interfered in without grave
justification. The historical position is that what happens within a sovereign state, for good or evil, is an internal affair and it is
up to the people of that state to determine by whatever means
For external state and non-state actors, there are two potential
motivations for involvement. An actor might decide it is in its
own self-interest to intervene, believing that states with dysfunctional security sectors can both give rise to and serve as a
safe haven for bad things with regional or global reach, such as
terrorism, crime, disease, and uncontrolled migration. States
choose to act unilaterally or through intergovernmental organizations or other parties to prevent or preemptively mitigate
some of these effects, with or without the permission of the host
state. Alternatively, external actors might have a purely altruistic intent and become involved because they have the capacity,
and thus feel an obligatory responsibility to help. There is an
emerging international consensus that in at least some situations
this sort of “good Samaritan” responsibility exists, and that it
can sometimes be strong enough to override some prerogatives
of state sovereignty. The United Nations version of “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine was adopted in 2005 and used as
justification for recent actions in Libya, and the security sector
is intimately involved in the four crimes the doctrine addresses:
genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic
cleansing.
The dynamics of the international community and the increasingly globalized nature of society blur the distinction between
intervention for self-interest and altruism and make it more
abstract. In many ways there is a self-interest justification for
nearly any nation to work towards stability in any troubled
state, as the consequences of security sector failure and instability rarely respect borders. In addition, self-interest and altruism
are not mutually exclusive—action motivated primarily by selfinterest can still be ethical if it coincides with the interests of the
people of the troubled state, with their universal rights and the
choices they would make in a democratic process.
Emerging standards of expected human security may ultimately
create new accepted norms for ethical state behavior towards
citizens and others, which the collective international community will enforce. For the near-term, however, the ethical
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