For the past decade, international donors have made efforts to reform the security sector in Guinea-Bissau – yet success has been elusive. Why have international reform concepts largely failed? By exploring reform attempts in the police sector, Christoph Kohl investigates the causes which led up to this situation. He identifies a number of problems concerning among others the communication or the course of action between the International Community and Bissau-Guinean institutions and gives advice on how to improve the solutions to security sector related issues. Dr Christoph Kohl is a senior researcher in the research group “The Cultural Dynamics of Political Globalisation”. His main areas of research are: security sector reform, ethnicity and creolization, and nation- and state-building processes, particularly in Africa.