My research examines armed conflict and peace-building through a critical international political economy perspective, with a particular focus on Colombia and Latin America, attentive to how class relations combine with gendered and racialised forms of domination and exclusion. I am interested in how conflict and peace are shaped by broader transformations in global capitalism, state formation, and processes of uneven development, and how these dynamics are experienced, contested, and navigated by social actors.
Methodologically, my work combines theoretical and historical analysis with archival research and sustained qualitative fieldwork, including interviews, ethnography, and participatory action research (PAR). Bringing these approaches together allows me to link macro-level political-economic transformations to the lived realities of conflict, peace-building, and post-conflict transition on the ground.
Beyond the Battlefield: The Political Economy of Colombia’s Armed Conflict and the 2016 Peace Agreement
Monograph (under review)
This book develops a critical political-economic reinterpretation of Colombia’s long armed conflict and the 2016 peace agreement. It challenges dominant accounts that reduce the conflict to state weakness, economic opportunities, or immediate grievances, arguing instead that it must be understood in relation to the Colombian form of state’s uneven integration into global capitalism, and the classed, gendered, and racialised relations through which this process has unfolded. Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews with a wide range of actors, the book analyses how transformations in the international political economy conditioned the trajectory of war and peace-building.
Death From Above: How the Sky Fell on Colombia’s FARC
Journal article (in preparation)
This article examines the role of aerial warfare, intelligence-led targeting, and military-technological escalation in reshaping Colombia’s insurgency during the later stages of the conflict. It analyses how air power and surveillance helped transform the strategic balance of the war, drawing on interviews and testimonies to reconstruct these dynamics from the perspective of the insurgents themselves.
Emerging Research Agenda
My emerging research agenda builds directly in two directions.
First, I am developing a project on the political economy of post-accord Colombia. This research examines the uneven implementation of the 2016 peace agreement and its entanglement with neoliberal development strategies, extractivism, militarisation, and political-economic reconfiguration in key regions.
Second, I am pursuing a set of collaborative and participatory projects focused on peace-building, memory, and political education. These projects explore how knowledge can be co-produced with communities affected by conflict rather than extracted from them, and how engaged research can contribute both to scholarly debates and to practical forms of political education.
My research is grounded in long-term fieldwork in Colombia conducted over multiple periods. This includes semi-structured interviews, archival research, ethnographic work in conflict-affected areas, and sustained participatory engagement with a wide range of political and civil society actors.
I do not treat fieldwork as a purely technical exercise in data collection. Instead, I approach it as a relational and interpretive process, attentive to power asymmetries, researcher positionality, and the material and political risks faced by research participants. This commitment to non-extractive and ethically grounded research practice informs both my academic outputs and my teaching, including my engagement in voluntary and community-based education initiatives.