The emergences of democratic security in Argentina: Public problematizations and security policies in post-dictatorship (1982-1992)

Abstract

This paper, from a structural and constructivist sociology of policies and experts, dissects the emergence of security against crime as a central public problem, the interrelated policies of the national government and the provinces of Córdoba and Buenos Aires and the development of new knowledge and expert positions and institutions in the first decade of democracy. Based on documents, interviews and secondary literature it reconstructs the successive political-journalistic waves focused on the problem of security (1985 and 1987), the developments of new government discourses and knowledge on security, and the pluralization of actors involved and of legitimate options, giving rise to the structuring of the space for disputes over security in the late 1980s. This knowledge, conditioned by government and campaign strategies of political actors and reconversion strategies of experts, will be institutionalized in policies and organs inside the state and outside in the academy and private organizations. Advancing an alternative to impersonal and deterministic macro-narratives about security policies centered on political or economic regime change, this study reconstructs and accounts for the conformation of the system of actors, legitimate modes of intervention and institutions that will structure the basic consensuses and the space for disputes in the 90s and beyond.