Migration and organized crime
My most recent project (2023-2025) is titled Young Venezuelan Migrants in Colombia’s Urban Peripheries: Criminals, Criminalised or Change-Markers?. It is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (CHF 266,310) and hosted at the Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding of the Geneva Graduate Institute. The project seeks to ethnographically explore the experiences of young Venezuelans who have settled in the peripheries of Medellín, Colombia’s second biggest city, and their relationship with the criminal gangs that operate in these areas. Theoretically, the project illuminates connection between South-South migration and organized crime. Practically, it seeks to inform better reception and protection mechanisms for young migrants in Global South urban peripheries.
Youth engagement in narco-gangs
Between 2014 and 2019 I completed my doctoral research following the lives of adolescents involved at the low-ends of criminal hierarchies in and around Medellín, Colombia. My ethnographic research, based at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies of the University of Oxford and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (£39,000), shows that modern Colombian gangs are nothing like the the old-days, family-like protective groups. Rather, they are governed by an exploitative economy whereby they take all of the risk and enjoy none of the gains. Adolescents join gangs under the illusion ‘becoming someone’, but they soon realise they are not getting anywhere, and start looking for alternatives. I am now working on a book project on this topic.
Youth-led activism at the urban margins
Between January and April 2019 I conducted a visual ethnography project on the lives of young people who seek to build urban peace in marginal Medellín neighbourhoods. The project, funded by the Higher Education Innovation Fund (£14,381) and hosted at the Department of Politics and International Relations of the University of Oxford, sought to investigate why and how some youth manage to develop alternatives to criminal engagement, and to showcase their demands for social justice. The project employed a series of creative audiovisual techniques, and resulted in five participatory films co-produced with young people on the ground, which were then used by them as advocacy tools.