Community Security: a vehicle for peacebuilding and statebuilding

Since the 1990s donors and other actors have increasingly recognised that security and development are mutually dependent. While most policy frameworks, both within the EU and globally, stress the need to take into account and address people’s security needs and concerns, and more broadly the governance aspects of security, this has proved difficult to translate into practice. As a result, many security-related interventions in the last decade have failed to make a real difference to local people.

This briefing explains the concept and practice of ‘community security’, an innovative and effective approach that builds security from the bottom up by empowering communities, authorities and security providers to work together to find local solutions to the security problems they face. It sets out how this approach can contribute to broader peacebuilding and statebuilding dynamics by strengthening the conditions for sustainable peace (for example, reducing inter-ethnic tensions or improving provision of security) and by supporting the establishment of sound state–society relations. The briefing also highlights how impact at a local level can be scaled up by embedding community security into national level security policies and initiatives.