The Kellogg Institute announced Thursday that Doctoral Student Affiliate Isabel Güiza-Gómez has received the 2025 Kellogg Institute Award for Outstanding Doctoral Student Contributions. She is expected to defend her dissertation this month, with its focus on the role of unarmed civilian peasants in Colombia during peace negotiations and post-conflict economic and land use talks. Güiza-Gómez then plans a two-year postdoctoral position she’s accepted at Tulane University.
“Isabel is a brilliant scholar of conflict and peace studies,” said political science professor Guillermo Trejo, director of Notre Dame’s Violence and Transitional Justice Lab (V-TJ Lab) and a Kellogg Institute Faculty Fellow. Güiza-Gómez was active with V-TJ Lab for more than three years, including high-impact work with the families of disappeared persons in Mexico.
“Isabel’s background as a lawyer, her skills as a brilliant social scientist and a peacebuilder, and her profound commitment to help victims of gross human rights violations was crucial for the early years of the V-TJ Lab’s policy and practice projects,” Trejo said.
Trejo also cited Güiza-Gómez’s key role in the more recent launching of the Eliminating Violence against Women Lab, directed by Kellogg faculty fellow Abby Córdova, and in the development of the Kellogg Institute podcast series, Global Stage.
The Kellogg prize, awarded annually since 2017, honors an outstanding doctoral student for the caliber of their contributions to the Kellogg Institute community and its shared academic and intellectual life. Trejo said the sharp, constructive feedback offered by Güiza-Gómez was a benefit to anyone who attended weekly seminars or workshops with her.
Bill Kakenmaster, a PhD fellow of the Kellogg Institute who also successfully recommended Güiza-Gómez for the award, emphasized the significance of her Kellogg-supported research work as well as her generosity in sharing her time and attention with others.
“Her dissertation looks at an overlooked actor in civil wars: non-violent social movements,” Kakenmaster said. “Most scholarly work focuses on states and armed rebel groups but underplay the role of non-armed civilians, except in their role as victims.”
The focus on non-violent rural movements offers insight into how communities resist state pressure and armed group activity while advocating for peace. “Her analysis of two episodes of peace negotiations, in which armed and non-violent groups followed different strategies, will be a major contribution to our understanding,” he added.
Kellogg’s award winners also must demonstrate significant and influential achievement within the broader discipline. Güiza-Gómez has more than a decade of peacebuilding and transitional justice experience in Colombia, and is widely published in well-regarded journals that include Comparative Politics, Revista de Ciencia Polítics, and Studies in Comparative International Development.
A 2021 book co-authored with Ana Jimena Bautista-Revelo, Ana María Malagón-Pérez, and Rodrigo Uprimny-Yepes received an honorable mention for the Alejandro Angel Escobar Prize, a prestigious Colombian human rights award. All authors of the book, La Constitución del Campesinado. Luchas por Reconocimiento y Redistribución en el Campo Jurídico, were affiliated with the Colombian-based organization Dejusticia.
“Her collaboration with scholars outside Notre Dame, at institutions like the US Institute for Peace and Dejusticia, clearly demonstrate that the outstanding contributions Isabel has already made to political science extend beyond the university,” Kakenmaster said.
Trejo said her expertise on Colombia will establish Güiza-Gómez as a rising star in multiple disciplines, including conflict and peace studies, law and politics, and the political economy of rural mobilization in post-conflict democracies.
“In all her scholarly and policy and practice engagements, Isabel’s deep commitment to human rights, democracy, peace building, and social justice is her main driver,” he said. “I am sure that Isabel will always be one of the most distinguished ambassadors of our Kellogg community.”