Ana Arjona

I am a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University. I am also co-editor-in-chief of the journal Perspectives on Politics and Founding Director of the Network of Studies on Drugs in Latin America (REDESDAL). I obtained my PhD in political science from Yale University (with university distinction), and have been a fellow at the Earth Institute at Columbia University and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame. I was the director of the Center for the Study of Security and Drugs (CESED) at Los Andes University in Bogota, Colombia (2018-2019), where I was a visiting professor at the School of Economics.

My research asks how institutions and individual choice change in violent settings, and how these dynamics continue to influence politics and development after the violence ends. I investigate these questions using qualitative and quantitative methods and empirical evidence collected through field-based research and the development of original datasets, primarily in Latin America. I am the author of the award-winning book Rebelocracy: Social Order in the Colombian Civil War (Cambridge University Press 2016), co-editor of Rebel Governance in Civil War (Cambridge University Press 2015), and author of several articles and book chapters, which have been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), The American Political Science Review, The Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Latin American Politics and Society, among others.

My work has been funded by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the SSRC, the United States Institute of Peace, Yale University, Columbia University, and Northwestern University in the U.S.; the International Development Research Centre in Canada; the Folke Bernadotte Academy in Sweden; and the Department for International Development, the Economic and Social Research Council, and the Global Challenges Research Fund in the U.K. 

Email: ana.arjona@northwestern.edu

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