My Research
I am interested in how the everyday experiences of people affected by violence enable or limit transformative solutions toward peace and justice. This interest spans disciplinary boundaries and geographies, putting me in touch with diverse fields like human rights, law, political science and peace studies in both war-affected countries and peaceful democracies. I bring to this work my training in social theory and mixed-methodologies as well as my experience working in international organizations like the United Nations and International Criminal Court.
My current research is supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, United States Institute of Peace, Inter-American Foundation, Humanity United and UC Berkeley Possibility Lab. My previous research has been supported by the Jacob K. Javits Foundation, the International Studies Association, the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation and the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center.
research streams
Peace, Conflict and the Everyday: In this research stream, I seek to understand how people affected by violence experience and define peace and conflict in their daily lives—and what makes these grounded, everyday understandings more or less relevant for broader policy processes. I am also interested in methodological and ethical questions about how to center affected and researched communities so that the research process can be less extractive and more productive for those involved.
Measures of Justice: Relatedly, my research focuses on how justice is perceived, defined and enacted in transitional and restorative justice processes. I am interested in what makes justice processes meaningful for those affected by violence at both individual and community levels, and in why institutions adopt certain visions of justice over others. This stream anchors my current book project, Measures for Justice: Building Community in Conflict.
indicators & Community voice (WEBINAR)
In this 2023 webinar at the Negotiation and Conflict Resolution program at Columbia University, I explain my work with colleagues from EPI and Possibility Lab on harnessing community indicators for change in the US and Colombia.
Current Projects
community SAFETY & Justice in the united states
I am working on various projects with colleagues from the Santa Clara University Department of Political Science, the UC Berkeley Possibility Lab, the Columbia University Center for Justice on a project to assess how urban U.S. communities across define and experience public safety and wellbeing in their daily lives. Central to the ongoing conversation about policing and security in the United States is an understanding that in order to actualize meaningful reforms, those most impacted by public safety systems must play a key role. In this project, I am testing the ability of community-driven indicators to inform policy development and assess policy implementation by sourcing and measuring bottom-up, everyday indicators of key outcomes and then feeding these data back into policy discussions and evaluations.
In addition, I am using in-depth interviews and focus groups to explore the relationship between local courts and their various stakeholders in community justice processes. Community courts offer a non-adversarial alternative to traditional criminal proceedings, but less is known about the roles that communities play or the contributions these courts make to their communities. This project is assessing community courts as community-building institutions to draw broader conclusions about the role of restorative justice in building community and fostering wellbeing.
2024 “Safety is a system, and reducing crime is just one part of it.” The Fulcrum.
2024 Measures of Justice: A Symposium in Honor of Sally Engle Merry. Editor of Accepted Symposium in Law and Social Inquiry.
2023 “Americans do talk about peace − just not the same way people do in other countries.” The Conversation.
2023 “Reimagining Public Safety: Defining ‘Community’ in Participatory Research.” Law and Social Inquiry.
Working paper @ Possibility Lab
2023 “How to Measure the Impact of Community Justice in Brooklyn.” Columbia University MA Program in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution
2022 “Everyday Peace Indicators: An effective tool for measuring hard to measure social concepts.” Open Philanthropy Effective Altruism Forum.
2020 “U.S. cities and states are discussing reparations for Black Americans. Here’s what’s key.” The Washington Post.
everyday justice after conflict
Together with the team from Everyday Peace Indicators, I am co-leading research in several sites in Colombia to assess how the country’s historic peace process coincides with the everyday, lived priorities of affected communities. With support from diverse foundations, we are collecting everyday indicators of justice and coexistence in rural communities throughout the country to answer a number of questions about the implications of local experience for sustainable peace in Colombia. These data are informing our analyses of how different mechanisms mediate community-level effects of international and national transitional justice efforts, including reparations, truth processes and criminal and restorative justice proceedings. I am also supporting the growth of the Everyday Peace Indicators NGO, providing strategic leadership around organizational issues, supporting fundraising efforts and contributing to ongoing research in other conflict-affected countries, including Bosnia and Sri Lanka.
2023 “The Paradox of Justice: From Transitional to Everyday Justice.” Law and Social Inquiry.
2023 “From Transitional to Everyday Justice: Understanding Justicia and Convivencia in Daily Life.” Reconciliation: Experiences in Colombia and the World
2022 “Images and indicators: mixing participatory methods to build inclusive rigour.” Action Research Journal.
Blog post @ Action Research +
2022 “Collective Justice: Ex-Combatants and Community Reparations in Colombia.” Journal of Human Rights Practice.
2022 “Opinion: To build peace in war-torn Colombia, we need to think smaller”. DevEx.
2020 “Trash is Piling up in Rural Colombia. That’s a Bad Sign for Peace.” Political Violence at a Glance.
2020 “Dabeiba (Antioquia), más allá de la fosa común.” El Espectador Colombia 2020.
Completed Projects
Reparations, Responsibility and Victimhood in Transitional Societies (2017-2022)
I was an international co-investigator on this UK-based project comparing reparations programs in seven transitional countries around the world. This collaborative effort, based out of Queens University Belfast, produced several international guidelines and handbooks on lessons learned and best practices for the provision of reparations after conflict.
2023 “Transitional Justice and Development.” Research Handbook on Transitional Justice
2022 Belfast Guidelines on Reparations in Post-Conflict Societies. Queen’s University, Belfast.
2022 Handbook on Civil Society Organizations and Donors Engagement on Reparations. Queen’s University, Belfast.
2019 Alternative Sanctions before the Special Jurisdiction for Peace: Reflections on International Law and Transitional Justice. Belfast: Queens University Belfast.
2019 “Postconflict Reparations.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies.
2017 “Transitional Justice and Development.” Research Handbook on Transitional Justice.
Evaluation of Colombia’s national reparations program (2014-2015)
This project brought together an interdisciplinary team of researchers from Harvard University to conduct a multidimensional evaluation of Colombia’s national Victims’ Unit, established through the historic Law 1448 of 2011. Law 1448 set in place the world’s largest national reparations programs to date, with almost 20% of Colombia’s population registered as victims of the armed conflict. The evaluation assessed the work and impact of the Victims’ Unit on three levels: (1) cross-nationally, in comparison with other national, administrative reparations programs (focusing on Indonesia, Peru, and Guatemala), (2) institutionally, through an in-depth analysis of the Unit’s internal organizational structures and external relationships, and (3) on the ground, through nationally representative surveys of victims of the armed conflict and the national population.
2016 “Evaluating Transitional Justice: The Role of Multi-Level Mixed Methods Datasets and the Colombia Reparation Program for War Victims.” Transitional Justice Review.
2015 “Evaluation of Integral Reparations Measures in Colombia: Executive Summary". Harvard Kennedy School Carr Center for Human Rights.
Press coverage @ Harvard Gazette
dissertation (UC Berkeley 2012-2015)
The International Criminal Court is a deeply divisive international organization. To some, it is the political pawn of neocolonial states; while for others, it represents hope for millions of victims of the world’s gravest crimes. The autonomy and authority of international justice, however, remain poorly understood. In this dissertation, I examined the social conditions of power in the international justice field. Contrary to notions of victims as a mere rhetorical or symbolic concern of global governance, I argue that victims have been central to the ICC’s struggles to consolidate its autonomy and overcome fundamental sources of illegitimacy, both from the states whose sovereignty it threatens and the communities whose interests it claims to represent. To manage these threats, the ICC has come to depend on a variety of victim-centric practices, the majority of which ultimately serve its institutional interests while reinforcing local cycles of violence. At the same time, the ICC has displayed remarkable flexibility in crafting creative responses to victims that can serve as models for the practice of justice in the future. Ultimately, this analysis clarifies the social conditions of autonomy in fields of global governance, highlighting the productive practices that shape their authority and their relationship to vulnerable populations.
2017 “The Role of Reparations in the Transition from Violence to Peace.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics.
2016 “Reparations, Assistance and the Experience of Justice: Lessons from Colombia and the Congo.” International Journal of Transitional Justice.
Blog post @ Beyond The Hague
2015 “Reparations and the Politics of Recognition.” Contested Justice: The Politics and Practice of International Criminal Court Interventions, edited by Carsten Stahn, Christian de Vos, and Sara Kendall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2015 Constructing Humanity’s Conscience: Violence, Victims, and the Practice of Justice in the Congo. University of California, Berkeley.
2014 Le Droit de Connaitre: Vérité et Reconciliation en Ituri. Amsterdam: IKV Pax Christi.
2013 "International Criminal Justice as a Transnational Field: Rules, Authority and Victims." International Journal of Transitional Justice.
Blog post @ Justice in Conflict
2011 Reviewing Rehabilitation Assistance and Preparing for Delivering Reparations. The Hague: International Criminal Court, Trust Fund for Victims.
Banner Photo: Peter Dixon, Bunia, Democratic Republic of the Congo