Hola! My name is Nicolás Torres-Echeverry. I am a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago’s Sociology Department, a Neubauer Distinguished Doctoral Fellow, and a USIP 2024-2025 Peace Scholar Fellow. My research and teaching interests intersect political sociology, war and peace, political organization, internet and society, sociology of culture, and urban sociology, with a regional focus on Latin America.
My dissertation and book project, Between War and Peace: Political Organizing in Twenty-First Century Colombia in the Face of Party Decline, confronts the puzzle that in the past three decades, Colombia’s democracy deepened as political parties weakened. Despite the academic consensus that parties are indispensable to democracies and that institutional reforms are key to democratic deepening, the book centers its attention on the cultural dimensions of making peace and making war as ideological guides and in a civic associations’ perspective as organizers of politics. It argues that peace and war efforts structured ideological thinking and political organization as new actors entered the political field.
The dissertation and book project seek to make three contributions: first, to offer meso-level lenses to understand the organizational space in the Global South, building on but going beyond the prisms of social movements, political parties, and clientelism; second, to emphasize the importance of understanding the parallel dimensions of war and peace efforts, rejecting the separation of conflict and post-conflict as two distinct domains and emphasizing the cultural properties at their convergence; and third, to push for an intertwined exploration of the cultural implications and political organization within these war-and-peace contexts, beyond institutional and rational choice approaches, showing the potential of the peace and war coexistence for organizing politics and even strengthening democracy as political parties weaken. You can find more about the project here.
My research has been supported by the United States Institute for Peace, the Institute for Humane Studies, the University of Chicago Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS), The Center for International Social Science Research (CISSR), The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts (Pearson Institute), and The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University, among others. In addition to other venues, I have been invited to present at Brown’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs and Stanford’s Handa Center for Human Rights and International Justice.
I am also on the Editorial Board of Análisis Político (Universidad Nacional de Colombia) and affiliated with the Knowledge Lab at the University of Chicago. During 2024-2025, I will be Associate Editor of the American Journal of Sociology and a Doctoral Fellow at the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights.
Before coming to Chicago, I worked as a researcher at the Center for the Study of Law, Justice, and Society (Dejusticia) in projects of state building tied to the 2016 peace negotiations between FARC and the Colombian government, as a consultant for the Colombian Ministry of Justice, and as a research consultant for the Digital Policy Incubator at Stanford University.
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