Biography

Camilo Nieto-Matiz is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Inter-American Policy and Research (CIPR) at Tulane University. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Notre Dame in 2020.

His main research interests include the causes of political and criminal violence, the political consequences of land inequality, state capacity, and subnational democratic institutions in Latin America. His book project Integrating Subnational Peripheries: State Building and Violent Actors in Colombia studies why and how political elites differentially build state capacity in a country’s peripheral and marginalized areas in the midst of violent conflicts.

In particular, his research studies how elections and democratic reforms may prevent political and criminal violence in some cases while producing violent outcomes in other cases. He is also interested in understanding how land and conflict affect state capacity- across its fiscal, coercive, and legal dimensions- across space and time. Lastly, his research explores how and whether states are able to establish the rule of law after decades of conflict. He has employed a variety of methods to answer these questions with evidence from Colombia, Brazil, and Guatemala.

His research has been funded by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, and has been published in Journal of Peace Research and Democracy and Security.