Hola! My name is Nicolás Torres-Echeverry. I am a political sociologist researching how people connect their individual lives to perceived systemic causes, and the organizational forms that resistance and oppression take in recent political transformations throughout Latin America.
My dissertation and book project, Between War and Peace: Orthogonal Organizations and the Urban Remaking of Colombia’s Twenty-First-Century Left, examines how a political ideology, closely associated with unfolding violence, becomes part of institutional political life. It builds an explanation from studying Colombia, a setting where the left was framed and perceived as too close to violence, as some left-wing groups remained in arms and others didn’t. In a path overlooked by the literature, it finds that the left gained political space and electoral support through orthogonal organizations—organizations that were not understood through dominant ideological dividing lines and particularly not as “left.” In this sense, orthogonal organizations allowed for the cultivation of new identities and ideologies in ways that were decoupled from public perceptions.
I am a Social Science Postdoctoral Researcher and Teaching Fellow at The University of Chicago. During 2024-2025, I was an Associate Editor of the American Journal of Sociology, a USIP 2024-2025 Peace Scholar Fellow, and a Doctoral Fellow at the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights. I received my Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago in 2025 and my masters in empirical legal studies from Stanford University.
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.
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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