How community policing and peacekeeping intertwine in Ghana

While several studies have shown that peacekeeping has shaped Ghana’s security institutions and sense of role in the world, it has not been able to chip away at or counteract the deep and deepening control that security institutions in the country are subjected to by politicians.

As part of a special issue of the Contemporary Journal of African Studies, Peter Albrecht has written a paper that explores how peacekeeping experiences manifest in the Ghana Police Service’s community policing strategies and practices in often inconspicuous and individualized ways.

The article emphasizes that the shape of community policing in Ghana is conditioned by a wide range of discourses beyond peacekeeping. Global and national policies and strategies relating to policing, including the Ghana Police Service’s own transformation agenda, local and individual interpretations and translations of peacekeeping experiences and what community policing means, all play a transformative role.

In this way, the article disentangles the effects of peacekeeping and puts it in the context of broader policing in Ghana, based on in-depth interviews and observations with police officers, mainly from the Ghana police’s community policing headquarters in Tesano, Accra.

Arguing that the peacekeeping experience may have a profoundly transformative effect on individual police officers, yet little if any impact in terms of depolitising the police and policing more broadly, is a less sweeping, but empirically more accurate, conclusion.