ABSTRACT
Modern states need the engagement of multiple public actors to counter the ever-evolving multi-nature of organised crime. This chapter introduces such security arrangements as the governance of organised crime. Different realities across the globe have empirically shown how organised crime can drive the state to lose its power over the delivery of security. What has been less researched, however, is that in some other cases, the state has held on to its capacity for steering and delivering policy. In Latin America, Chile is one of these cases despite many pitfalls in its security policies, most of them inherited from the previous authoritarian era. This introductory chapter provides a brief exploration of how Chile’s public security actors have engaged in policy action to control organised crime since the 1990 return to democracy. The chapter also explains the purpose of this book: to explore how these governing architectures have developed and what are the consequences for security policy-making after redemocratisation. In order to understand such a puzzle, the chapter introduces three explanatory frameworks: governance studies, policy networks and historical institutionalism.
