Zoltan Barany, Frank C. Erwin, Jr. Centennial Professor of Government at the University of Texas and Distinguished Scholar at the Strauss Center, co-edited and published a collection of studies entitled “Security Sector Reform in Constitutional Transitions.”

Security sector reform (SSR) is a key aspect of state-building and the transition to democracy, especially in societies that have undergone political upheaval. A diverse range of countries grapple with how to transform militias, tribal forces, and dominant military, police, and intelligence agencies into democratically controlled and accountable security services. SSR will be a key element in shifts from authoritarian to democratic rule for the foreseeable future, since abuse of the security sector is a central technique of autocratic government. This edited collection advances solutions to these issues.

Barany and his co-editors Sumit Bisarya, Sujit Choudhry, and Richard Stacey, lend their extensive expertise and experience in both the academic and NGO worlds to their analysis of several case studies on emerging democracies. Specifically, they analyze defense-security sector and constitutional-legal reform experiences across the world in military dictatorships (Spain, Chile, Argentina), police states (Kenya, Ghana, South Africa) and post-authoritarian transitions in Iraq, Indonesia, and the Arab Spring region.