Peter Albrecht
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 77081 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Peter Albrecht |
| NOMBRES | Peter |
| APELLIDO | Albrecht |
| FIRMA | ALBRECHT P |
| AFILIACIONES | Danish Institute for International Studies |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0942-7628 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 30 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 102 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 29 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1984 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
Making the Case for Peacekeeping as Proxy Intervention
Since the end of the Cold War, peacekeeping has shifted from impartial mediation toward militarised intervention, a trend accelerating after 9/11. The article develops the concept of proxy peacekeeping to argue that peacekeeping can function as a form of proxy intervention, enabling troop-contributing countries (TCCs) to advance national security interests and manage regional threats under multilateral cover. Drawing on cases from Mali and Somali…
From Religion to Kinship
This article examines Somali diaspora humanitarianism by comparing mosque and kinship-based associations in Eastleigh, Nairobi. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Eastleigh and Mogadishu – including fifty-seven interviews, four focus group discussions, and participant observation – it explores how aid is shaped by moral obligations, political loyalties, and communal expectations. Using Mauss's gift theory, the article argues that acts of giving…
Beyond war and politics
Scarcity reimagined
Reframes resource conflict debates with the concepts: global green scarcity imaginaries, greening frontiers, and green conflicts. • Argues how climate and biodiversity crisis narratives justify accelerated interventions in Africa, reshaping land rights and governance. • Shows how green projects can reproduce the same exclusion and conflict that are associated with traditional extraction of e.g. oil. • Demonstrates that if equity and justice are s…
Peacekeeping, policing and politics
While much of the peacekeeping literature fixates on mission deployments, associated challenges and the escalating violent contexts they navigate, this article underscores the transformative reverberations of peacekeeping on troop-contributing countries. Drawing from the Ghana Armed Forces (GAF) case, our main focus is to elucidate how international peacekeeping shapes domestic security procedures, but we also point out that they are reciprocally…
From peacekeeping missions to global peacekeeping assemblages
How does the experience of peacekeeping shape the countries that contribute troops and the troops themselves, individually and collectively? Most of the peacekeeping literature's focus has traditionally been on field missions, the countries that host them and the challenges of attracting sufficient and appropriately trained troops. We suggest that more emphasis should be put not only on the locations where missions deploy, but also on the individ…
Assembling Community Policing
This article shows how peacekeeping experiences manifest in the Ghana Police Service’s (GPS) community policing strategies and practices in often inconspicuous and individualized ways. Peacekeeping constitutes an important element of what the article refers to as the community policing assemblage. However, the article emphasises that the shape of the community policing assemblage is conditioned by a wide range of discourses and practices beyond p…
Introduction
By exploring the case of Ghana, this special issue provides two perspectives on UN peacekeeping that until now have been underdeveloped in the literature. First, rather than taking a mission and its host country as the analytical point of departure, the contributions in the special issue focus on how peacekeeping has shaped domestic security in Ghana – a consistent contributor of security personnel to peacekeeping since 1960. Second, instead of f…
Trembling city
While divided cities are characterized by spatially cemented segregation and polarized divisions, the trembling city is organized around transient and transformative borders. We conceptualize this notion of urban space to capture Freetown’s war-peace transition in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Ex-combatants settled on the city margins, bringing with them spatial strategies from war-fighting into the city by recreating a system of bases. The Sie…
Dissolving the Internal-External Divide
This article explores Sierra Leone’s trajectory from host of the world’s largest peace-support operation to post-conflict provider of peacekeepers elsewhere. Building on the authors’ previous research, it aims to nuance contemporary theoretical discussions of why states contribute peacekeepers, arguing that existing frameworks are unable to fully explain such developments in the Sierra Leonean case. A key reason is that these frameworks principal…
Interventions since the Cold War
Through the lens of security sector reform, this article explores shifts in international interventions since the Cold War. Identifying three phases, it traces the global North's failure to transform fragile states into liberal democratic polities and changes to intervention practices in response to that failure. Immediately after the Cold War, an unfettered belief in the liberal peace thesis, and its global applicability, drove interventions tha…
National Interests as Friction
The concept of friction is applied to challenge the assumption that the main goal of peace support operations is to permanently stabilise a country. By exploring missions in Somalia and Mali, where neighbouring states are the main troop contributors, we suggest to focus on the interaction among troop-contributing countries within missions. They express how national interests play out in the framework of international organisations. Even when a mi…
Non-Linearity and Transitions in Sierra Leone’s Security and Justice Programming
This article explores how transitions produce non-linearity in Sierra Leone’s security and justice programming, as it unfolded from the late 1990s and onwards starting in open conflict. Transitions have received limited detailed analytical consideration in the literature on interventions because they are mundane and inevitable, and therefore taken for granted. However, they definitively condition how programmes evolve. We show that transitions ca…
Urban borderwork
This special issue introduces a conceptual framework for ethnographies of urban policing that foregrounds how defining features of the city produce police work, and in turn, how police work produces the city. To address how the mutually productive relationship of policing and the city shape current transformations in the ordering of urban space, the notions of borders and bordering are invoked. In contemporary cities across the global North and S…
Hybridization, Intervention and Authority
This book explains how security is organized from the local to the national level in post-war Sierra Leone, and how external actors attempted to shape the field through security sector reform. Security sector reform became an important and deeply political instrument to establish peace in Sierra Leone as war drew to an end in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Through historical and ethnographic perspectives, the book explores how practices of secur…
Power, Politics and Hybridity
The interplay of interventions and hybridisation in Puntland’s security sector
Hybridisation is often conceptualised as a ‘liminal’ occurrence, a ‘contact point’ or the product of an ‘interface’. This tends to invoke the very binaries that the concept seeks to overcome, because it assumes that a meeting between separate entities must occur for hybrid orders to emerge. Instead, this paper argues that processes of hybridisation and how they assemble disparate types of authority lie at the very core of how social processes evo…
Hybridisation in a Case of Diamond Theft in Rural Sierra Leone
Drawing on cultural studies, the concept of hybridity has emerged in peace and conflict studies as an important critique of the fragile failed/state discourse, and the binaries whereby the modern state is often contrasted with traditional or non-state actors. The concept is also challenged for reproducing the very binaries that it seeks to overcome and lacking analytical vigour. The paper addresses these critiques by exploring a case of diamond t…
Separation and positive accommodation
This paper addresses an important critique of hybridity as it has been applied in peace and security studies. On the one hand, it has assumed separation and otherness, because of its point of departure in understanding what occurs in the meeting between international and national (or local) actors in peacebuilding processes. At the same time, there is a danger of overemphasising positive accommodation, while not detailing what processes of hybrid…
The Hybrid Authority of Sierra Leone's Chiefs
On the basis of a historical and ethnographic analysis, this article shows how the concept of hybridity can be used analytically to explore the emergence of paramount and lesser chiefs in Sierra Leone and their role as figures of authority at the local level and in national politics. At the same time, it critiques the ahistorical applications of the concept that are prevalent in peace and conflict studies. The article offers insight into the proc…
Secrets, strangers, and order-making in rural Sierra Leone
This paper explores the Poro, a male secret society in rural Sierra Leone, and how it conditions access to security and justice. It critiques dichotomies between state and non-state and substantiates the networked quality of order-making as dispersed among a multitude of actors who intertwine disparate rationalities and registers of authority. The secret nature of the Poro, the ‘sons of the soil’, and the ‘stranger’ are explored as central figure…
Hybridity and simultaneity in the Global South
This chapter explores and furthers the debate on hybridity, analysing the enactment of authority rather than interactions between things and entities. We introduce the notion of simultaneity of discourse and practice to articulate the process through which seemingly contradictory sources of authority are played out to constitute political order. This model, built up around the enactment of authority, suggests a model for reading dialogically conc…
Securing Sierra Leone, 1997-2013
Between 1991 and 2002, Sierra Leone was wracked by a devastating civil war and the complete collapse of state institutions. Since then, however, the UK’s contribution to post-war reconstruction has been widely held up as an example of successful stabilisation and state-building – particularly of the country’s security and justice institutions. Securing Sierra Leone, 1997–2013 examines how the process of state-building through security-sector refo…
The Chiefs of Community Policing in Rural Sierra Leone
This paper argues that when police reform in Sierra Leone was instituted to consolidate a state system after the country's civil war ended in 2002, it reproduced a hybrid order instead that is embodied by Sierra Leone's primary local leaders: paramount and lesser chiefs. In this sense, policing has a distinctly political quality to it because those who enforce order also define what order is and determine access to resources. The hybrid authority…
Policing and the Politics of Order-Making
The simultaneity of authority in hybrid orders
This article adds to current debates on hybridity by shifting attention from interactions between entities to the enactment of authority. The notion of hybridity has helped move debates on peace and state-building beyond a normative focus on failure and fragility. However, it also remains a contested and evolving concept. This article aims to theorise further the process of hybridisation. By introducing the concept of simultaneity of discourse an…
An uneasy marriage
This article looks at the inclusion of non-state actors in security sector reform (SSR) programming, specifically when efforts are made to strengthen local-level security through police reform. It explores how the role of non-state actors has been conceptualised vis-à-vis the role of states as providers of security and justice in fragile state settings. It is argued that even though the central role of non-state actors in SSR in general and polic…
Urban borderwork
This special issue introduces a conceptual framework for ethnographies of urban policing that foregrounds how defining features of the city produce police work, and in turn, how police work produces the city. To address how the mutually productive relationship of policing and the city shape current transformations in the ordering of urban space, the notions of borders and bordering are invoked. In contemporary cities across the global North and S…
The Hybrid Authority of Sierra Leone's Chiefs
On the basis of a historical and ethnographic analysis, this article shows how the concept of hybridity can be used analytically to explore the emergence of paramount and lesser chiefs in Sierra Leone and their role as figures of authority at the local level and in national politics. At the same time, it critiques the ahistorical applications of the concept that are prevalent in peace and conflict studies. The article offers insight into the proc…
The Chiefs of Community Policing in Rural Sierra Leone
This paper argues that when police reform in Sierra Leone was instituted to consolidate a state system after the country's civil war ended in 2002, it reproduced a hybrid order instead that is embodied by Sierra Leone's primary local leaders: paramount and lesser chiefs. In this sense, policing has a distinctly political quality to it because those who enforce order also define what order is and determine access to resources. The hybrid authority…
National Interests as Friction
The concept of friction is applied to challenge the assumption that the main goal of peace support operations is to permanently stabilise a country. By exploring missions in Somalia and Mali, where neighbouring states are the main troop contributors, we suggest to focus on the interaction among troop-contributing countries within missions. They express how national interests play out in the framework of international organisations. Even when a mi…
Interventions since the Cold War
Through the lens of security sector reform, this article explores shifts in international interventions since the Cold War. Identifying three phases, it traces the global North's failure to transform fragile states into liberal democratic polities and changes to intervention practices in response to that failure. Immediately after the Cold War, an unfettered belief in the liberal peace thesis, and its global applicability, drove interventions tha…
Hybridisation in a Case of Diamond Theft in Rural Sierra Leone
Drawing on cultural studies, the concept of hybridity has emerged in peace and conflict studies as an important critique of the fragile failed/state discourse, and the binaries whereby the modern state is often contrasted with traditional or non-state actors. The concept is also challenged for reproducing the very binaries that it seeks to overcome and lacking analytical vigour. The paper addresses these critiques by exploring a case of diamond t…
State-building through security sector reform
UK support to the reconstruction of the Sierra Leonean state has been widely held up as an example of successful state-building with the development of basic capacity and trust in public institutions, particularly security. This article examines security sector reform (SSR) in Sierra Leone, how Sierra Leone affected SSR and what implications that has for international interventions. Despite being hailed as a success, the sustainability of a state…
The interplay of interventions and hybridisation in Puntland’s security sector
Hybridisation is often conceptualised as a ‘liminal’ occurrence, a ‘contact point’ or the product of an ‘interface’. This tends to invoke the very binaries that the concept seeks to overcome, because it assumes that a meeting between separate entities must occur for hybrid orders to emerge. Instead, this paper argues that processes of hybridisation and how they assemble disparate types of authority lie at the very core of how social processes evo…
Secrets, strangers, and order-making in rural Sierra Leone
This paper explores the Poro, a male secret society in rural Sierra Leone, and how it conditions access to security and justice. It critiques dichotomies between state and non-state and substantiates the networked quality of order-making as dispersed among a multitude of actors who intertwine disparate rationalities and registers of authority. The secret nature of the Poro, the ‘sons of the soil’, and the ‘stranger’ are explored as central figure…
From peacekeeping missions to global peacekeeping assemblages
How does the experience of peacekeeping shape the countries that contribute troops and the troops themselves, individually and collectively? Most of the peacekeeping literature's focus has traditionally been on field missions, the countries that host them and the challenges of attracting sufficient and appropriately trained troops. We suggest that more emphasis should be put not only on the locations where missions deploy, but also on the individ…
Separation and positive accommodation
This paper addresses an important critique of hybridity as it has been applied in peace and security studies. On the one hand, it has assumed separation and otherness, because of its point of departure in understanding what occurs in the meeting between international and national (or local) actors in peacebuilding processes. At the same time, there is a danger of overemphasising positive accommodation, while not detailing what processes of hybrid…
Peacekeeping, policing and politics
While much of the peacekeeping literature fixates on mission deployments, associated challenges and the escalating violent contexts they navigate, this article underscores the transformative reverberations of peacekeeping on troop-contributing countries. Drawing from the Ghana Armed Forces (GAF) case, our main focus is to elucidate how international peacekeeping shapes domestic security procedures, but we also point out that they are reciprocally…
Trembling city
While divided cities are characterized by spatially cemented segregation and polarized divisions, the trembling city is organized around transient and transformative borders. We conceptualize this notion of urban space to capture Freetown’s war-peace transition in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Ex-combatants settled on the city margins, bringing with them spatial strategies from war-fighting into the city by recreating a system of bases. The Sie…
Ausgleich im Kollektiv und Prämienprinzipien
The Extraordinary Life of a Retired Sexton on the Brink of Poverty
When European society was still divided into estates, rules of behavior covering all essential aspects of life were in effect for (and were expected to be observed by), even the smallest social group. Knowledge of the often quite subtle differences in the behavior expected and their strict observation within ones personal sphere determined the position of every individual. The adage, “Schuster bleib bei deinem Leisten” (shoemaker, stick to your l…
An uneasy marriage
This article looks at the inclusion of non-state actors in security sector reform (SSR) programming, specifically when efforts are made to strengthen local-level security through police reform. It explores how the role of non-state actors has been conceptualised vis-à-vis the role of states as providers of security and justice in fragile state settings. It is argued that even though the central role of non-state actors in SSR in general and polic…
Policing and the Politics of Order-Making
State-building through security sector reform
UK support to the reconstruction of the Sierra Leonean state has been widely held up as an example of successful state-building with the development of basic capacity and trust in public institutions, particularly security. This article examines security sector reform (SSR) in Sierra Leone, how Sierra Leone affected SSR and what implications that has for international interventions. Despite being hailed as a success, the sustainability of a state…
The simultaneity of authority in hybrid orders
This article adds to current debates on hybridity by shifting attention from interactions between entities to the enactment of authority. The notion of hybridity has helped move debates on peace and state-building beyond a normative focus on failure and fragility. However, it also remains a contested and evolving concept. This article aims to theorise further the process of hybridisation. By introducing the concept of simultaneity of discourse an…
Hybridity and simultaneity in the Global South
This chapter explores and furthers the debate on hybridity, analysing the enactment of authority rather than interactions between things and entities. We introduce the notion of simultaneity of discourse and practice to articulate the process through which seemingly contradictory sources of authority are played out to constitute political order. This model, built up around the enactment of authority, suggests a model for reading dialogically conc…
Securing Sierra Leone, 1997-2013
Between 1991 and 2002, Sierra Leone was wracked by a devastating civil war and the complete collapse of state institutions. Since then, however, the UK’s contribution to post-war reconstruction has been widely held up as an example of successful stabilisation and state-building – particularly of the country’s security and justice institutions. Securing Sierra Leone, 1997–2013 examines how the process of state-building through security-sector refo…
The Chiefs of Community Policing in Rural Sierra Leone
This paper argues that when police reform in Sierra Leone was instituted to consolidate a state system after the country's civil war ended in 2002, it reproduced a hybrid order instead that is embodied by Sierra Leone's primary local leaders: paramount and lesser chiefs. In this sense, policing has a distinctly political quality to it because those who enforce order also define what order is and determine access to resources. The hybrid authority…
Secrets, strangers, and order-making in rural Sierra Leone
This paper explores the Poro, a male secret society in rural Sierra Leone, and how it conditions access to security and justice. It critiques dichotomies between state and non-state and substantiates the networked quality of order-making as dispersed among a multitude of actors who intertwine disparate rationalities and registers of authority. The secret nature of the Poro, the ‘sons of the soil’, and the ‘stranger’ are explored as central figure…
Separation and positive accommodation
This paper addresses an important critique of hybridity as it has been applied in peace and security studies. On the one hand, it has assumed separation and otherness, because of its point of departure in understanding what occurs in the meeting between international and national (or local) actors in peacebuilding processes. At the same time, there is a danger of overemphasising positive accommodation, while not detailing what processes of hybrid…
The Hybrid Authority of Sierra Leone's Chiefs
On the basis of a historical and ethnographic analysis, this article shows how the concept of hybridity can be used analytically to explore the emergence of paramount and lesser chiefs in Sierra Leone and their role as figures of authority at the local level and in national politics. At the same time, it critiques the ahistorical applications of the concept that are prevalent in peace and conflict studies. The article offers insight into the proc…
Power, Politics and Hybridity
The interplay of interventions and hybridisation in Puntland’s security sector
Hybridisation is often conceptualised as a ‘liminal’ occurrence, a ‘contact point’ or the product of an ‘interface’. This tends to invoke the very binaries that the concept seeks to overcome, because it assumes that a meeting between separate entities must occur for hybrid orders to emerge. Instead, this paper argues that processes of hybridisation and how they assemble disparate types of authority lie at the very core of how social processes evo…
Hybridisation in a Case of Diamond Theft in Rural Sierra Leone
Drawing on cultural studies, the concept of hybridity has emerged in peace and conflict studies as an important critique of the fragile failed/state discourse, and the binaries whereby the modern state is often contrasted with traditional or non-state actors. The concept is also challenged for reproducing the very binaries that it seeks to overcome and lacking analytical vigour. The paper addresses these critiques by exploring a case of diamond t…
Hybridization, Intervention and Authority
This book explains how security is organized from the local to the national level in post-war Sierra Leone, and how external actors attempted to shape the field through security sector reform. Security sector reform became an important and deeply political instrument to establish peace in Sierra Leone as war drew to an end in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Through historical and ethnographic perspectives, the book explores how practices of secur…
National Interests as Friction
The concept of friction is applied to challenge the assumption that the main goal of peace support operations is to permanently stabilise a country. By exploring missions in Somalia and Mali, where neighbouring states are the main troop contributors, we suggest to focus on the interaction among troop-contributing countries within missions. They express how national interests play out in the framework of international organisations. Even when a mi…
Non-Linearity and Transitions in Sierra Leone’s Security and Justice Programming
This article explores how transitions produce non-linearity in Sierra Leone’s security and justice programming, as it unfolded from the late 1990s and onwards starting in open conflict. Transitions have received limited detailed analytical consideration in the literature on interventions because they are mundane and inevitable, and therefore taken for granted. However, they definitively condition how programmes evolve. We show that transitions ca…
Urban borderwork
This special issue introduces a conceptual framework for ethnographies of urban policing that foregrounds how defining features of the city produce police work, and in turn, how police work produces the city. To address how the mutually productive relationship of policing and the city shape current transformations in the ordering of urban space, the notions of borders and bordering are invoked. In contemporary cities across the global North and S…
Dissolving the Internal-External Divide
This article explores Sierra Leone’s trajectory from host of the world’s largest peace-support operation to post-conflict provider of peacekeepers elsewhere. Building on the authors’ previous research, it aims to nuance contemporary theoretical discussions of why states contribute peacekeepers, arguing that existing frameworks are unable to fully explain such developments in the Sierra Leonean case. A key reason is that these frameworks principal…
Interventions since the Cold War
Through the lens of security sector reform, this article explores shifts in international interventions since the Cold War. Identifying three phases, it traces the global North's failure to transform fragile states into liberal democratic polities and changes to intervention practices in response to that failure. Immediately after the Cold War, an unfettered belief in the liberal peace thesis, and its global applicability, drove interventions tha…
Assembling Community Policing
This article shows how peacekeeping experiences manifest in the Ghana Police Service’s (GPS) community policing strategies and practices in often inconspicuous and individualized ways. Peacekeeping constitutes an important element of what the article refers to as the community policing assemblage. However, the article emphasises that the shape of the community policing assemblage is conditioned by a wide range of discourses and practices beyond p…
Introduction
By exploring the case of Ghana, this special issue provides two perspectives on UN peacekeeping that until now have been underdeveloped in the literature. First, rather than taking a mission and its host country as the analytical point of departure, the contributions in the special issue focus on how peacekeeping has shaped domestic security in Ghana – a consistent contributor of security personnel to peacekeeping since 1960. Second, instead of f…
Trembling city
While divided cities are characterized by spatially cemented segregation and polarized divisions, the trembling city is organized around transient and transformative borders. We conceptualize this notion of urban space to capture Freetown’s war-peace transition in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Ex-combatants settled on the city margins, bringing with them spatial strategies from war-fighting into the city by recreating a system of bases. The Sie…
Peacekeeping, policing and politics
While much of the peacekeeping literature fixates on mission deployments, associated challenges and the escalating violent contexts they navigate, this article underscores the transformative reverberations of peacekeeping on troop-contributing countries. Drawing from the Ghana Armed Forces (GAF) case, our main focus is to elucidate how international peacekeeping shapes domestic security procedures, but we also point out that they are reciprocally…
Political science (23 obras) · Sociology (20 obras) · Peacebuilding and International Security (17 obras) · Law (15 obras) · Public Administration (12 obras) · Global Peace and Security Dynamics (11 obras) · Sierra leone (11 obras) · Politics (10 obras) · Law (8 obras) · Political Conflict and Governance (8 obras)