Security policies, in particular access control, are fundamental elements of computer security. We address the problem of authoring and analyzing policies in a modular way using techniques developed in the field of term rewriting, focusing especially on the use of rewriting strategies. Term rewriting supports a formalization of access control with a clear declarative semantics based on equational logic and an operational semantics guided by strategies. Well-established term rewriting techniques allow us to check properties of policies such as completeness and the absence of conflicts. A rich language for expressing rewriting strategies is used to define a theory of modular construction of policies in which we can better understand the preservation of properties of policies under composition. The robustness of the approach is illustrated on the composition operators of XACML.