Policing the Peace after Yugoslavia:Police Reform between External Imposition and Domestic Reform

Since the mid-1990s, a plethora of international organizations—from the UN and OSCE to the European Union and NATO—have been extensively involved in the reform of police forces across the post-conflict regions of former Yugoslavia. The various international actors have employed a diverse tool kit of police reform, from creating new police forces from scratch to reforming existing, ethnically divided forces. This paper will trace the different efforts in post-conflict settings by discussing policing by international actors, efforts at imposing police reform, post-conflict police assistance and change to policing through conditionality, drawing on the rich empirical record from Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo and Macedonia. Despite these extensive efforts, the results have been modest. Lacking clear international or European standards, police reform has been the subject to uneven and changing expectations and contradictory demands. This work was supported in part by Global COE Program "The Transferability of East Asian Development Strategies and State Building", Mext, Japan.