Criminal social orders in Chile: A social-spatial theory of criminal governance in low-intensity violence societies

Abstract

Why, in some communities, do drug trafficking organizations interact with residents to produce one type of social order, while in others, they do not? Or, more broadly, under what conditions does criminal social order assume different forms? Building on recent insights on civil war literature, criminal governance, and ethnographic data collected during two years of fieldwork, I propose that to explain this variation, it is necessary to unpack the social structure of the communities within which criminal organizations operate: density of social organization and the embeddedness of criminal gangs into the community. By conditioning the social order on the structure of the community, social and criminal actors can interact in multiple ways, more or less ritualized, to collaborate to pursue mutual or interdependent goals. To test these hypotheses, I use a natural experiment approach and within-case process tracing in four neighborhoods in Chile. In addition, I propose four ideal types of criminal social orders that emerge from the interplay between community social density and DTO embeddedness.