Sicherheitssektorreform und Gender in der Türkei

Since the 1990s, Security Sector Reform (SSR) constitutes a concept of the international community to address deficient security governance. Social anthropological perspectives have only recently started to find their ways into the academic debate on the issue. With her study, the author emphasizes the need and shows the value of researching the complex field of SSR interactions with the methods and conceptual approaches of ethnography.
The study shows that the fieldwork based reconstruction of local actors’ perceptions gives valuable insight into the dynamics of how they understand and co-shape the SSR programs of international donors. Furthermore, with its focus on women’s organizations, it is concerned with a social group which is – despite its rich repository of knowledge and experience with “human security” challenges, and despite glossy declarations that stress the relevance of gender aspects in reforms – not yet adequately perceived as a security actor and reform partner.