The emergence of the democratic citizen security policy in the Dominican Republic

Democratic security policies have become a major innovation in the last decades in Latin America and the Caribbean. This article analyses the Dominican Republic's recent attempt to address the escalation of violence and complex criminality through the Plan for Democratic Security (Plan de Seguridad Democratica), launched in 2005. The Plan emerged from a complex process that involved multiple and overlapping reforms, innovative social and political strategies and the concertation of public and private actors with contradictory interests. To implement the Plan over the past five years, the government confronted an unfavourable environment of crisis, disenchantment, mutual distrust and precarious institutionalisation. Not surprisingly, the Plan has had mixed results, yet for that reason offers many lessons to be learned. Three major lessons are: (1) basing security policies on a clear understanding of the social, political and cultural contexts that foment crime and violence; (2) obtaining firm support from ...