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Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Freie Universität Berlin, Global Security Programme, University of Oxford, University of Oxford

My DFG-funded research project focuses on the unfolding peace process with Colombia’s formerly strongest guerrilla organization, FARC-EP (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarios de Colombia-Ejercito Popular). The peace accord ended the longest-running armed conflict in recent global history with more than 7 million victims. The current peace process with the FARC—an armed insurgency group that had vowed to overthrow the Colombian government—offers the opportunity of a systematic comparison with the past peace process (2005-2010) between the Colombian government and the AUC paramilitaries (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia)—an umbrella organization of non-state counterinsurgency groups that vowed to defend the Colombian government against the guerrilla. In most general terms, the question is: How do the transitional justice processes of the FARC and AUC differ? Central are two claims arising from the civil war literature: 1) in the context of civil war, transitions are liminal spaces, in which existing systems of order are disrupted and new patterns of order have not yet emerged; 2) transitional justice affects political actors at, both, the micro and macro institutional level, and rearranges the political economy of armed actors vying for domination over territory and important sectors of an illicit economy (Boesten 2016). By systematically analysing the effects of the two demobilization processes, which entails contrasting the normative framework, comparing the transformation of local and national political actors over time, and mapping the resulting restructuration of non-state armed actors at the local level, my research contributes to understanding the sources of order during armed conflict, the potential of uncertainty during transitions, and the effects of transitions on systems of order at the national and sub-national level. This research project will benefit from my membership in the CONPEACE programme at the University of Oxford. We (with Prof. Sérgio Costa) have also designed an OX|BER project together with CONPEACE that explores transitions in Colombia as well as the effects of the triple crisis (peace process in Colombia, political upheaval in Venezuela, Covid-19) on border regions between Colombia and its neighbouring countries. Finally, my interests involve comparative democracy studies. I participate in a book project put together by Maxwell A. Cameron (UBC) that thematizes the persistence of strong-man politics in the Andes and the survival of defective democracy.

Experience

  • –present
    Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of Politics & International Relations, University of Oxford