Peace Keeping Summit: Post Conflict Security Sector Reform and Democratic Policing

The workshop entitled “Peace Keeping Summit: Post Conflict Security Sector Reform and Democratic Policing” was held on March 27, 2008 at Rutgers University’s Law School. The workshop was organized jointly by the Turkish National Police (TNP), Rutgers School of Criminal Justice, and the Division of Global Affairs at Newark.

The keynote speech of the summit was given by the Turkish Permanent Representative to the United Nations (UN), H.E. Baki Ilkin. Among summit participants were eminent social scientists, representatives of the international missions to the UN, as well as managers and practitioners from the UN, who had previously served, or are still serving, on numerous UN missions.

In the first session, moderated by Professor Norman Samuels, who served as Provost of Rutgers University-Newark campus for 20 years, speakers from the UN and US Army War College discussed the restructuring of the post-conflict security sector.

In the second session, the difficulties encountered and successes obtained by the UN, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and the Council of the European Union (EU) which share responsibility for the implementation of post conflict democratic policing were presented by the speakers from The Center for Democratic Policing, UN, OSCE and Council of the EU.

In the third session, ‘lessons learned’ from the peacekeeping work in the post conflict zones were debated. Speakers from the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), the US Congress and the RAND Corporation Center offered their opinions. The last speaker in this session, Ertugrul Bozdag, a Police Manager at the TNP, who served in Kosovo for over 3 years and in Sudan for 2 years as a representative of the TNP, was applauded by the participants for his presentation entitled “What we learned from the Sudan mission, what we succeeded at, and what we didn’t” in which, with a unique perspective and instructive examples, he explicated the reasons for the successes and the failures of the particular UN missions.

The summit ended with a presentation made by Police Captains Fevzi Altun and Mehmet Afacan, who talked about the contributions of the TNP to world peace.

Interested in the summit were representatives from international organizations such as the UN, the Council of the EU, and the OSCE, local and federal security associations, international missions, academies and universities. The candidacy of Turkey to the UN Security Council in 2010 was also highlighted during the summit.