Welcome! I am a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Inter-American Policy and Research (CIPR) at Tulane University and project coordinator and research affiliate at the Notre Dame Eliminating Violence Against Women (E-VAW) Lab. I am a scholar of the political economy of redistribution, social mobilization, and institutional reform in post-conflict democracies, with a regional focus on Latin America and an emphasis on class, racial, and ethnic politics.

My research investigates the conditions under which marginalized actors can forge democracy and redistribution in contexts marked by large-scale violence and extractive development. I employ a mixed-methods approach that combines immersive fieldwork and archival research with causal inference techniques, natural language processing, network analysis, and experiments.

My book project, tentatively entitled “Landing Peace. Rural-Poor Mobilization and Land Redistribution in Civil War Political Transitions,” examines the conditions under which unarmed opposition actors—particularly rural social movements such as Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and peasant organizations—leverage collective action to secure land redistribution in civil war peace processes. I conduct a comparative historical analysis of land reform commitments in peace settlements and the allocation of property rights to the rural poor in Colombia, El Salvador, and Guatemala. The bulk of the empirical work focuses on two major peace processes in Colombia (1982–1991 and 2012–2016), which serve as primary cases for theory development. I extend the analysis to El Salvador and Guatemala as secondary cases to assess the external validity of the argument. My dissertation was selected for the 2025 Kellogg Institute Distinguished Dissertation Award.

My work has appeared in Journal of Comparative Politics, Studies in Comparative International Development, Perspectives on Politics, Latin American Law Review, Revista de Ciencia Política, Revista de Estudios Socio-Jurídicos, and in co-authored books and collaborative volumes published by university presses. My work has been funded by the United States Institute for Peace through the Peace Scholar Fellowship, the Graduate Women in Science National Fellowship, the Fulbright Program, and University of Notre Dame’s Kellogg Institute for International Studies and Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. In 2023-24, I was awarded a Graduate Women in Science National Fellowship and I was a USIP Peace Scholar for the 2024-25 academic year.

I hold a PhD in Political Science and Peace Studies from the University of Notre Dame. I also serve as an associate researcher at the Bogotá-based think tank Dejusticia.

You can contact me at iguizagomez@tulane.edu or disabelguizag@gmail.com.