Journal of Human Security

An analysis of Community-Oriented Policing (COP) in 12 post-conflict cases suggests that while the concept of COP holds promise of representing a more sustainable approach to conventional post-conflict police reform, among our cases, there are limited examples of successful COP. Rather, our cases reveal that COP is often perceived as much as a surveillance tool to legitimise harsh policing tactics, as promoting human security or serious reforms. The more robust finding, unsurprisningly, is that the levels of trust between the police and communities, and thus the viability of COP, is closely linked to whether the police act more as a service or a force. While the principles of COP are connected to a police service, in the ideal-typical sense, the post-conflict cases we have analysed are closer to the ideal-typical police force. A number of challenges and what seem to make COP more viable across cases are identified, which should be taken into account when COP is implemented in societies where a police force is the predominiant way of policing.

This article examines the construction of gender agendas in left-wing populist movements that mobilise for armed struggle, by focusing on the case of the Maoist movement in Nepal. Feminist scholarship has highlighted how left-wing populism, when appealing to a generalized “people”, tend to produce homogenizing discourses that erase inequalities and difference, even when such movements integrate a gender dimension. Examining the trajectory of the Maoist movement over time, we argue that this ‘sameness’ may become contested and utilized by women participating in the lower echelons of the movement, as the political reality shifts from conflict to post-conflict context. As our main contribution, we develop a bi-directional approach that employs the concept of collective identity and allows us to examine the construction of populist agendas as a two-way interaction between the leadership of a movement and its grass roots supporters. Through this approach we show how the gender dimension was not merely a bi-product but central to both the construction of the Maoist movement’s war time ‘progressive’ identity, and the fragmentation of this identity and the movement’s populist appeal in the post-conflict context.

Latin America has seen significant advances in both women’s rights and gender equality in the last three decades thanks both to external pressures (since the Beijing conference in 1995) and the strength of the women’s movements in the continent. However, these advances are being threatened by populist regimes and strong conservative and reactionary groups within civil society, especially among Catholic and Protestant churches. This kind of anti-‘gender ideology’ reactions is part of a backlash that slides in a scale from constant and structural discrimination to open reversals of gender equality previous gains. This chapter will try to illustrate how left and right-wing populism in the case of Mexico and Brazil, limit or setback gender equality gains in several areas, particularly regarding political parity and the fight against gender-based violence (GBV). We chose these two cases as we think they represent two sorts of backlashes, but also because they represent two examples of populism, different in their ideological positioning but not so different in their defence of patriarchal structures and support of family values.