Ana Arjona, Ph.D., Yale University, 2010, is Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University. Her academic interests include violence and conflict, the foundations of political order, and state building. She is also interested in the philosophy of social sciences. Her current research projects investigate the causes and consequences of institutional change and individual agency in contexts of violence. Her first book mansucript, entitled "Social Order in Civil War", proposes a theory to explain order and disorder in war zones, as well as the form order takes when it emerges. She derives and tests implications on the strategies of non-state armed groups towards local communities, civilian cooperation with, and resistance to, armed groups, recruitment, and institutional change in the midst of war. She is currently also investigating the local dynamics of drug trafficking. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in Colombia and is currently working on different collaborative projects on individual and collective behavior in civil war, as well as on the links between wartime dynamics and post-conflict phenomena in Latin America, Lebanon, and Kosovo.
Her work has been funded by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, SSRC, the United States Institute of Peace, Yale University, and Columbia University in the U.S.; IDRC in Canada; the Folke Bernadotte Academy in Sweden; and the Department for International Development and the Economic and Social Research Council in the U.K.
Email: ana.arjona@northwestern.edu
Department of Political Science
Northwestern University
601 University Place
Evanston, IL 60208