Making Liberia Safe: Transformation of the National Security Sector

Abstract

The security institutions, forces, and practices of the regime of Charles Taylor, Liberia's former president, met none of the essential criteria for a sound security sector: coherence, legitimacy, effectiveness, and affordability. Yet even under new, able, and decent leadership, the old structures and ways are unworkable, wasteful, and confused, and they enjoy neither the trust nor the cooperation of the Liberian people at this critical juncture. It follows that Liberia must make a clean break, adopting a new security architecture, forces, management structure, and law. The government of President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has made security sector transformation a high priority, and the United Nations, the United States, and others are helping Liberia build new forces. What has been done and planned so far to transform the Liberian security apparatus is valid and important. At the same time, Liberia and its partners need an overall security architecture, accompanied by a strategy to create it. Without an architecture and strategy, setting priorities will become increasingly difficult; gaps, redundancies, confusion, and political squabbling over forces are likely. In offering an architecture and strategy, this study identified additional measures, including additional capabilities, that would make Liberia's security sector more coherent, legitimate, effective, and affordable. This report is the final component of the RAND Corporation's research project with the U.S. government under which RAND was asked to advise the Liberian and U.S. governments on security sector transformation in Liberia. By agreement with the U.S. and Liberian governments, and by RAND's own tradition, the analysis and findings of this report are independent.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2007
Accession Number
ADA468476

Entities

People

  • Brooke Stearns
  • David C. Gompert
  • K. J. Riley
  • Keith Crane
  • Olga Oliker

Organizations

  • RAND Corporation

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical
  • C4I
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Human Systems
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Congress
  • Department Of State
  • Employment
  • Ethnic Groups
  • Governments
  • Intelligence Collection
  • International Organizations
  • Law
  • Management Personnel
  • Military Science
  • National Security
  • Personnel Management
  • Security
  • Security Personnel
  • Surveillance
  • Unified Combatant Commands
  • Warfare

Readers

  • Economics
  • International Relations, focusing on Korea-Africa and North Korea-South Korea relations, and Nigeria-Latin American Relations.
  • Strategic Security Studies