Ana Arjona

This profile was current as of 2016, when she was part of the on-campus Kellogg community.

Ana Arjona (PhD, Yale University), a spring 2016 Kellogg visiting fellow, is assistant professor of political science at Northwestern University, where she conducts research on political violence and conflict, the foundations of political order, local governance, and the links between crime and politics.

Based on extensive fieldwork in her native Colombia, her Kellogg project explores civilian choice in contexts where non-state armed groups operate. In particular, the project investigates the effects of armed groups’ behavior on civilians’ decisions to flee and become refugees or displaced persons, join armed groups, cooperate with combatants, or resist them. The work is informed by a survey Arjona is conducting in different regions of Colombia with residents of conflict zones as well as with displaced persons and former members of non-state armed organizations. She is the author of the forthcoming Social Order in Civil War: Rebelocracy in Colombia and the coeditor (with Nelson Kasfir and Zachariah Mampilly) of Rebel Governance in Civil War (2015), both from Cambridge University Press.