Arab Police Reform: Between Citizens and Security - Regional Programme Political Dialogue and regional Integration in the Southern Mediterranean
Event Reports
Against this backdrop, the KAS Regional Program South Mediterranean in cooperation with the European Union Institute for Security Studies (EUISS) organized a conference on December 7, addressing the state of the police forces in the region, asking the question of how to comprehensively improve the relationship between security forces and the citizenry, and discussing the outlook for police modernization.
During the conference "Arab Police Reform: Between Citizens and Security," experts as well as police and civil society practitioners from various countries of the region were brought together in Tunisia to exchange about local and international interest in modernization processes, the relationship between serving the community and serving the state, best practice examples from the region as well as the approaches for policing in crisis and during violent conflicts.
Caught up in the tension between a suspicious population that considers them as an arm for authoritarianism and, on the other side, overwhelmed authorities that neglect them financially and staff-wise, times are difficult for internal security forces in the Arab world. To make matters worse, the police has been itself routinely the target of violence. In addition, after the popular uprisings that occurred from January 2011 all over the region, police forces in the Middle East and in North Africa have witnessed a growing deterioration of their conditions with burned-out stations, increased terrorist activities, severe resource constraints and highly volatile political environments. Political and international actors can make an important contribution to improving this situation by establishing national dialogue formats and furthering the public debate.
