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Security Sector Reform (SSR) has developed into a key component of international peacebuilding agendas. However, there is a lack of sufficient knowledge of the advantages and drawbacks of different reform processes. This study offers a comparative analysis of two post-war states with diverse approaches to the reconstruction of the national armed forces after a civil war: Sierra Leone after the 1999 Lome Peace Accord, where the competing warring parties were integrated into a single force; and Liberia following the 2003 Accra Peace Agreement, where the old army was disbanded and a new force was recruited and built from scratch. The findings show that each approach was associated with distinct benefits and risks during the implementation process. However, the outcomes are also similar in many important respects, and raise questions about the long-term sustainability of these reforms.

In a seminal article, Stedman (International Security, 22, 1997, 5) suggested that the greatest source of risk to civil war peace processes comes from so-called spoilers, leaders, and groups that perceive peace as threatening and use violence to undermine attempts to achieve it. The spoiler concept has since gained significant ground and widespread legitimacy both in the academic literature and in critical policy circles. In the footsteps of this development, however, we suggest that the spoiler concept has been stretched beyond its original meaning and given raise to a number of ambiguities concerning its definition and empirical applicability. This lack of clarity in regard to some of the key aspects of the spoiler concept does not only risk undermining the usefulness of the concept itself, but also risks hampering the accumulation of valuable research on this pertinent topic. This article presents a reflection on a burgeoning research field and aims to contribute to the same by attempting to offer greater conceptual clarity in regard to a number of issues that are the core of the spoiler debate and by presenting a conceptual framework for analyzing spoilers in future research.