Hola! My name is Nicolás Torres-Echeverry. I am a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago’s Sociology Department and a Neubauer Distinguished Doctoral 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, Between War and Peace: Political Organizing in Twenty-First Century Colombia, explores the political organization of the Colombian left amid coexisting realities of war and peace efforts in the past three decades. By employing a comparative study of four intermediate cities and the capital city, Bogotá, the dissertation argues that these coexisting contexts have molded the organizational landscape for the Colombian left. The dissertation seeks to make three contributions: first, it shows the importance of understanding the parallel dimensions of war and peace efforts, and not conflict and post-conflict as two separate domains; second, it argues for an intertwined exploration of the cultural implications and political organization within these war-and-peace contexts; third, it offers new lenses to understand the organizational space in such contexts, often viewed through the prisms of social movements and clientelism.

My research has been supported by 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.