Gaining and Maintaining Public Trust: A Deeper Look into the Security Sector Reform (SSR) of Liberia

More than two decades after the 2003 Accra Comprehensive Peace Agreement, Liberia’s Security Sector Reform (SSR) is widely regarded as a qualified structural success, yet public confidence in the country’s reformed security institutions has diverged sharply. This article examines the gap between institutional stability and public trust, using the Armed Forces of Liberia (AFL) and the Liberia National Police (LNP), two institutions reformed under the same peace agreement and the same United Nations mission, as a comparative lens. The study is designed as a structured qualitative literature review and comparative content analysis of thirty secondary sources, comprising official United Nations and Liberian government documents and legislation, nationally representative Afrobarometer survey data, anti-corruption and human rights assessments, and peer-reviewed scholarship, interpreted through the Security Sector Governance framework and procedural justice theory. The evidence shows that in 2022, 62% of Liberians trusted the AFL compared with 26% who trusted the LNP, and that more recent survey evidence records continued trust in the AFL alongside widespread perceptions of police corruption. The divergence is associated both with structural factors, notably the AFL’s statutory exclusion from domestic law enforcement and its centralized reform pathway, and with citizen-facing drivers within the LNP: corruption at the point of contact, politicized leadership appointments, and weak external accountability. The article concludes that SSR success should be measured by public confidence as well as by technical capacity. It recommends granting the Independent National Commission on Human Rights compulsory-process powers backed by a statutory duty of response while treating community policing and decentralization as reforms to be rigorously tested rather than as validated pathways to trust.