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NEWSLETTER

July 1, 2025

 

MEET OUR NEWEST POSTDOCS

 
Isabel Guiza-Gómez

Isabel Guiza-Gómez

Received her PhD in Political Science and Peace Studies from the University of Notre Dame, affiliated with the Kellogg Institute’s Eliminating Violence Agains Women and Violence and Transitional Justice Labs.

Her research focuses on how marginalized actors can promote development and democracy in violent and unequal contexts, particularly in Latin America. In collaborative projects, she examines grassroots actors’ connections to leftist political parties, public attitudes towards violence against activists, and conflicts between reparation programs and development projects.

A USIP Peace Scholar and a Graduate Women in Science National Fellowship, she has over a decade experience of working on peacebuilding, transitional justice, and land policies in Colombia.

 

Luis Ruben González Márquez

Recently earned his PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Merced. Before coming to the US for graduate school, Rubén – as he likes to be called – completed his undergraduate studies in El Salvador and a Master’s in Ecuador. His research focuses on environmental and labor mobilization in marginalized territories. He is working on a book about the political outcomes of opposition campaigns against renewable energy megaprojects in Central America. He has conducted research on popular and labor mobilization in contemporary El Salvador, environmental mobilization in California’s Central Valley, and protest music in Central America.

In his free time, Rubén is a music aficionado and looks forward to exploring the rich music scene in New Orleans. An outdoor and sports enthusiast, he is excited to visit natural sites and state parks in Louisiana.

Luis Ruben González Márquez
 
Paolo Sosa Villagarcía

Paolo Sosa Villagarcía

His research focuses on authoritarian legacies and new patterns of democratic erosion outside executive aggrandizement.

He is a senior researcher at the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos (IEP). He has a PhD in Political Science from the University of British Columbia (UBC) and a licenciatura and bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences with a major in Political Science and Government from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP). He was a Fox International Fellow (2019-20) at Yale University, a Public Scholars Initiative Fellow at UBC (2020), the Human-Centric Cyber-Security Fellow with the Electoral Integrity Project (2024), and the country coordinator for Peru at the Varieties of Democracy Project V-Dem (2014-21). In 2024 he was granted the international and interdisciplinary prize Social Contract XXI from the Maison Rousseau et Littérature in Geneve, Switzerland.

 

CIPR POST-DOC & AFFILIATE UPDATES

 

Congratulations Josephine

Post-doc Josephine Lechartre was awarded the 2025 Gabriel A. Almond Award by the American Political Science Association for the best dissertation in the field of comparative politics, to be presented in Vancouver at the next APSA meeting.

Congratulations Anna

Post-Doc Anna Callis’s co-authored paper: Balancing Bossism: Education Expansion in the Face of Elite Capture, received the 2025 Founders Award Honoring Peri Arnold for the Best Paper on Executive Politics from the Presidents and Executive Politics section of APSA.

Congratulations Isabel

Incoming CIPR post-doc Isabel Guiza-Gómez received the 2025 Kellogg Institute Award for Outstanding Doctoral Student Contributions. “I am honored to receive this award for my research examining the role of unarmed rural movements ins haping land ownership in civil war peace processes in Latin America.”

 

Lustig appointed to prestigious panel by UN Secretary-General

CIPR Affiliate and Professor Emeritus Nora Lustig was named co-chair of a 14-member independent group tasked with elaborating a conceptual framework that identifies key dimensions of progress, and developing an initial list of corresponding country-owned, universally-applicable indicators of sustainable development to form a dashboard that equips governments with the information they need.

 

CIPR POST-DOC & AFFILIATE PUBLICATIONS

 

New Paper by Castro

CIPR affiliate and Tulane Professor Arachu Castro’s co-authored paper “The Persistence of the Hegemonic and Patriarchal Healthcare Model during Women-Centered Reforms of Costa Rica’s Public Health System was published in Social Science & Medicine. Their study examines how hegemonic medical models and patriarchal structures persist within healthcare reforms ostensibly designed to promote women-centered maternity care.

New Publication by Oliveros and Díaz

CIPR affiliate and Tulane Professor Virginia Oliveros and former CIPR post-doc Gustavo Diaz were both co-authors of a paper entitled Women’s Performance: A Survey Experiment on Policy Implementation in Argentina, published in the British Journal of Political Science. It answers the question: How does a politician’s gender shape citizen responses to performance in office?

New Paper by Feoli, Arce, et al.

CIPR Director Ludovico Feoli, CIPR affiliate and Tulane Professor Moises Arce were both co-authors of a paper entitled Climate Change, Vulnerability, and the Propensity for Climate Migration: Evidence from Guatemala, published in the Global Encironmental Politics. They show that firsthand experience with extreme weather—rather than economic hardship or government response—significantly increases individuals’ intentions to migrate, highlighting climate vulnerability as a primary driver of migration.

 
 

UPCOMING PROGRAMMING

 

CHALLENGES FACING PERUVIAN DEMOCRACY

November 14: This workshop will bring together scholars and analysts working broadly on democracy and Peruvian politics for one day of discussions and presentations. Participants will address four broad themes – old and new problems for democratic consolidation, democratic governance and regime change, the 2026 presidential elections, and comparative perspectives – from a variety of theoretical, substantive, and methodological approaches. The workshop will set a new research agenda for studying challenges to democratic consolidation and pathways for democratic resilience going forward.

REVOLUTIONARY GOVERNANCE AND CONTESTATION IN VENEZUELA

Oct. 23-25: This conference will bring together scholars who are interested in efforts at change that seek to redress long standing inequalities and improve democratic representation–in other words revolutions–yet are soberly attuned to the real conflicts and consequences generated by these efforts. All of them have carried out scholarship that avoids flattening portraits of actors, practices and situations through multiple methods. The discussion will focus not on revolutionary movements but on issues of revolutionary governance and contestation. That is to say, we will not focus on how Chavismo came to power, but on how it sought to change the Venezuelan state, economy, and society once it was in power, the processes of opposition this generated, and the consequences of these processes. It will build upon the idea of “revolutionary governance” that Smilde, Zubillaga and Hanson developed in their 2022 book on violence, but will include a broad range of participants who have analyzed similar dynamics.

 

PAST EVENTS

 

Research Group MEGA: Mobilization, Extractives, and Government Action

On the eve of its 10th anniversary, RGM held its third major international workshop titled “New Horizons in the Extractive Debate: Movements, Policy, Impacts on Environmental Protection, and Beyond,” hosted by Ludovico Feoli, Director, Center for Inter-American Policy and Research, April 16-17, 2025. Eduardo Silva, Friezo Family Foundation Chair in Political Science, Tulane University, convened and directed the workshop, assisted by Cristian Sena, PhD student, Political Science Scholars from Latin America, Europe, Canada, and the United States, met over two days to discuss new trends in the debates over mega-project development, community responses, policy advances and setbacks, and their effects on their effects on environmental outcomes. Past workshops had focused on the policy impacts of conflicts over extractive development. This workshop explored new problems. What are the consequences of community-corporate tensions for energy transition and climate mitigation policy? Is “green extractivism” any different from previous extractive dilemmas? What are the politics of policy rollback, where hard fought social movement and community protections from predatory corporate and government actions are currently under pressure for reversal? A third line of inquiry examined the impact of migrant/informal worker extractive activities on the environmental integrity of protected areas. Papers also explored the possibilities for corporate-community co-construction of territory to mitigate conflicts.

Research Group MEGA Photo

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