Verónica Zubillaga

Veronica Zubillaga (PhD, Catholic University of Louvain), a former Kellogg Institute Visiting Fellow,  is a Venezuelan Sociologist. She holds a Doctorate in Sociology from the Catholic University of Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium (2003). Since 2007 she has been Professor at the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas.  For the past twenty years, she has devoted herself to studying urban violence in Latin America; youth gang violence in Caracas; gender, public policy, and qualitative methods. In recent years Zubillaga has combined academia with public impact on social and armed violence, advocating for arms control and disarmament public policy in her country. In 2016, with her colleagues in Caracas, she founded the Red de Activismo e Investigación por la Convivencia, REACIN, an association devoted to research on urban violence and activism on human rights and public policy for pacific coexistence. Currently, she is actively promoting discussions about the search for justice vis-a-vis police violence in Venezuela. 

Her publications include the co-authored books: The Paradox of Violence in Venezuela (2022, the University of Pittsburgh Press)  with David Smilde and Rebecca Hanson; and La muerte nuestra de cada día. Violencia armada, y políticas de seguridad ciudadana en Venezuela (2021, Editorial de la Universidad del Rosario, Bogotá) with Manuel Llorens and Francisco Sánchez. Research grants include Fulbright Scholarship; The Open Society Foundations, Ford Foundation; and CAF-Banco de Desarrollo de América Latina, among others. She has been Craig Cogut Visiting Professor of Latin American Studies at Brown University in 2014 and 2015; Santander Visiting Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University in 2016; Visiting Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame (2018-2019); Visiting Fellow at Collegium de Lyon - Institut d’études avancées de l’Université de Lyon (2022-2023) and Tinker Visiting Professor at Columbia University (Spring 2024). At UIC, she is conducting research that aims to develop and deepen the theoretical reflection on armed territorial orders and criminal governance in Latin America through the understudied case of Venezuela.is a sociologist who specializes in the study of urban violence in Latin America. Her research focuses on youth gang violence in Caracas, gender, and public policy.

During her time at Kellogg, Zubillaga worked on her Women’s Responses to Urban Violence and Militarization in Caracas Narrative Memory Project. This project is part of a comparative ethnographic research focused on the intersection of gender, the proliferation of firearms, and the militarization of citizen security in popular urban sectors in Caracas, Venezuela. It seeks to forge a narrative memory of women’s suffering under militarized security initiatives, but also their capacity to resist.