Congratulations to Kellogg doctoral affiliate Isabel Güiza-Gómez and former Kellogg visiting fellow Laura García Montoya (fall 2021) whose paper "Land Dispossession on Trial: Claim-Making and Judicial Behavior in the Colombian Land Restitution Program" won the REPAL 2024 Best Paper Award. The honor was bestowed at the organization's annual meeting, held at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, on July 12 and 13 this year.
The award is given by Red para el Estudio de la Economía Política de América Latina (REPAL) annually for the best paper on Latin American political economy in the previous year. Güiza-Gómez received a Kellogg Institute grant to travel to the conference to present the paper.
The project examines the conditions under which victims' movements successfully influence local lower courts to transfer property rights from economic elites back to peasants dispossessed during the Colombian civil war. Conflicts over property rights are especially acute in war-affected areas, where dispossession has been a pervasive form of violence against civilians. Dispossession can take place through illegal actions led by combatants seeking territorial control or legal exploitation by elites benefiting from the uncertainty that war brings. In such contexts, reparation programs are designed to redress these injustices by restoring property rights and returning homes and land to victims, as seen in programs in Bosnia and Herzegovina, South Africa, and Colombia.
A doctoral student affiliate of the Kellogg Institute, Güiza-Gómez is a PhD Candidate in political science and peace studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. Her research examines the conditions under which marginalized actors can forge development and democracy in unequal, violent contexts, with a focus on Latin America. At Kellogg, she is a research with both the Eliminating Violence against Women Lab and the Violence and Transitional Justice Lab.
García Montoya was a visiting fellow at the Kellogg Institute in the fall of 2021, where she worked on her book project on the politics of redistribution in Latin America. She is an assistant professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto. She studies the political economy of inequality and political violence in Latin America.