From police modernization to security policy: Public problems, police reform and security policy making in post-authoritarian Chile

PAUL HATHAZY

Amsterdam

Workshop; "Violence, Crime, and Public Security in Latin America"; 2016

Centro de Estudios y Documentación Latinoamericanos, Universiteit van Amsterdam

In this paper I present the theoretical approach and preliminary findings of a comparative study of the reconfiguration and institutionalization of security as a category of public policy in post-authoritarian Chile and Argentina. I conceive that the categories and components of security policies are determined by relatively independent processes involving primarily struggles related to authority over the penal sector of the state (policing, criminal justice and penitentiary subfields) combined with processes in the greater political field as well as in academic and journalistic arenas. Here I analyze how struggles over doctrine an deployment modalities of policing by the militarized Carabineros and the Investigations Police in Chile impacted in the emergence of a new consensus in the security policy field in democratic times. The analysis in terms of subfield´s struggles converging in their effects in the symbolic and material structures of the security policy field encompasses institutional and structural determinations along agency and specific power positions interests. This perspective allows to account for a multiplicity of categories and ationalities evolving and coexisting and to determine the relevance of different causal mechanisms. As I show, in the Chilean case, democratic transitions, fights over police and justice reforms and public attention to security converged, facilitating both police reform and the consolidation of a new security policy field doxa. I close discussing how this approach dialogues with theoretical alternatives.