Living with the Dead: Organisational Change after Conflict

This paper explores the experience of transformational change of a police service located
within an extreme context generated by long running ethno political conflict. Despite an
extensive literature on security sector reform processes after conflict, there is little
recognition that peacebuilding is an organisational, as well as a political endeavour. We
contend that despite significant investment and change such legacies of conflict have the
potential to trap organisations within change processes and prevent transformation from
completing. Drawing on a growing body of work on liminality as a theoretical lens, the paper
investigates the concept of ‘permanent’ liminality - to help us to understand how a change in
an extreme environment can get ‘fixed’ in transitional space. The paper makes three
contributions. First it adds to and extends the literature around organisational processes in
risky environments. Secondly, it illuminates change as a particularly vulnerable activity in
such environments, and thirdly, it introduces liminality as a useful frame for organisations
stuck in conflict paradigms. In doing so it contributes to and extends literature around risky
contexts, change in extreme environments and liminality in management and organisational
studies.