Shauna N. Gillooly, Ph.D.

shaunagillooly@gmail.com


Assistant Professor

Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile

Year of PhD: 2021

Country: Chile

About Me:

Shauna Gillooly received her PhD in Political Science at the University of California, Irvine in September 2021. Shauna received her B.S. (with honors) in International Affairs & Spanish Language from Florida State University in 2016, and her M.A. in Political Science from the University of California, Irvine in 2018.Her dissertation research was focused on the relationships between the international, national, and local levels during processes of peacebuilding and transitional justice amidst continued political violence. Her primary case study is Colombia, where she has conducted extensive fieldwork for the past four years. Her work has been supported by the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) Fellowship, which provided funding for her fieldwork in the Pacific Coast of Colombia (Cauca, Nariño, and Valle del Cauca). Continued work on this project serves as the foundation for her in progress book manuscript.Her past work has focused on social movement transitions to political parties in Latin America, as well as the impact of political violence legacies on voter behavior. Her previous work has been published in academic journals such as Comparative Politics, Latin America Research Review, PS: Political Science and Politics, Politics, Groups, and Identities, The Journal of Peacebuilding and Development, and PLOS ONE. It has appeared in media outlets such as The Washington Post and The Conversation, and policy-focused platforms such as E-International Relations.She is currently an Assistant Professor in International Relations at the Institute of Political Science at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago, Chile, a visiting researcher with Instituto PENSAR at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia, and an Expert with the UNESCO Inclusive Policy Lab.

Research Interests

Political Violence

Conflict Processes & War

Peacekeeping

Gender and Politics

Latin American And Caribbean Politics

Transitional Justice

Informal Institutions

Civil Conflict Negotiations

Peacebuilding

Social Movements

Countries of Interest

Colombia

Venezuela

Chile

Publications:

Journal Articles:

(2022) Legacies of Political Violence and Voter Behavior in Colombia., The Journal of Peacebuilding and Development

Do legacies of politically motivated violence influence future or current electoral behaviour? How so? This article considers the question of the impact of violence on voter behaviour, specifically on elections that centred on issues of peace in contexts of long-running civil conflict. This study theorises the ways in which decades of violence, and continued contexts of unevenly distributed violence during elections, impacts current electoral behaviour. This article explores whether continued exposure to violence makes voters more or less conciliatory in their political preferences as expressed through electoral institutions. To do this, the article utilises the second round of voting in the 2014 and 2018 Colombian presidential elections and the 2016 plebiscite vote on the peace accords with the leftist guerrilla group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, along with a data set that records politically motivated violent events perpetrated by insurgents, counterinsurgents, and the state forces at a municipal level from 1991 to 2012.

(2021) Who’s an Expert? Leveraging Trauma as Expertise in Peacebuilding Movements, St Antonys International Review

This article examines the ways in which underlying conceptions about the 'local' and the 'global' impact processes of peace negotiations and peace movements. I use evidence from the 2016 peace negotiations, and the subsequent implementation of the accords between the Colombian government and the left-wing guerrilla group, The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). In this article, I analyse the impact that an international, top down, elite, and formalised peace agreement has had on local, informal, and contextually specific agreements that communities in some of the most conflict-afflicted parts of the national territory already had in place with a variety of armed actors. Firstly, I interrogate the assumptions and the construction of perceptions of the 'local' versus the global and informal versus formal. I discuss how communities and movements utilise transnational solidarity networks to achieve their …

(2021) Assessing Racial/Ethnic and Gender Gaps in Political Science PhD Students’ Methodological Self-Efficacy, PS Political Science and Politics

Most research on diversity within political methodology focuses on gender while overlooking racial and ethnic gaps. Our study investigates how race/ethnicity and gender relate to political science PhD students’ methodological self-efficacy, as well as their general academic self-efficacy. By analyzing a survey of 300 students from the top 50 US-based political science PhD programs, we find that race and ethnicity correlate with quantitative self-efficacy: students identifying as Black/African American and as Middle Eastern/North African express lower confidence in their abilities than white students. These gaps persist after accounting for heterogeneity among PhD programs, professional and socioeconomic status, and preferred methodological approach. However, small bivariate gender gaps disappear in multivariate analysis. Furthermore, gaps in quantitative self-efficacy may explain racial/ethnic disparities in students’ broader academic self-efficacy. We argue that the documented patterns likely lead to continued underrepresentation of marginalized groups in the political methodology student body and professoriate.

(2021) Having female role models correlates with PhD students’ attitudes toward their own academic success, PLOS ONE

Research indicates that increasing diversity in doctoral programs can positively affect students’ academic success. However, little research examines students’ responses to female scholars’ representation. The two studies presented here examine how students’ exposure to female academic role models shapes students’ attitudes toward their own academic success (i.e. self-efficacy). Such attitudes are critical because they predict student retention rates. In our first study, we randomly exposed 297 Ph.D. students in one academic discipline to either a gender-diverse (i.e. 30% female authors) or non-diverse syllabus in research methods (i.e. 10% female authors). We examined the effect of the intervention on students’ perceived likelihood of succeeding in the hypothetical course. Contrary to expectations derived from the literature, we found that increasing women’s representation in syllabi did not affect female students’ self-efficacy. Rather, male students expressed lower self-efficacy when evaluating the more gender-diverse syllabus. We also found that students’ attitudes toward diversity in academia predicted their reactions more strongly than did their own gender: gender-diverse syllabi reduced self-efficacy among those students unsupportive of diversity. In our second study, we analyzed non-interventional survey questions to examine the relationship between female role models and long-term academic self-efficacy. Analysis was observational and thus did not assess causality. We found that students with more role models have higher academic self-efficacy, irrespective of student and role model gender. Nonetheless, results also suggested that some students actively seek female role models: namely, female students, and particularly those valuing diversity. Our results ultimately suggest that exposure to female role models relates in surprising ways to Ph.D. students’ self-efficacy. Having more female role models correlates with greater expectations of academic success among certain groups of students, but with diminished expectations of academic success among other groups.

(2019) Indigenous social movements and political institutionalization: a comparative case study, Politics Groups and Identities

Why do some indigenous social movements integrate into political institutions, i.e., political parties, and some do not? This study compares the impact that indigenous social movements have had on existing political institutions in Peru and Guatemala, theorizing about the effects that framing and experiential commensurability can have on the success of a social movement of a marginalized group transitioning into a political party. That is to say, in the case of Indigenous social movements which have expressly signaled their interest in participating in mainstream political institutions, what factors contribute to making gains in representation or legislative change? Indigenous social movements in both Guatemala and Peru have faced significant opposition from existing political institutions and dealt with additional issues such as a lack of physical infrastructure and a deficit of centralized organization within the movements themselves. This study compares the process of Guatemala’s indigenous social movement in its transition to a nationally and municipally representative political party in contrast with a continued lack of mobilization and representation of indigenous interests in the national political institutions of Peru.

(2018) A Media Framing Analysis: The Coverage of Rape in Indian and Western News Sources, The Journal of South Asian Studies

The media is an integral segment of public knowledge sources and can wield powerful influence, particularly in the dissemination of political and legislative information. The purpose of this study is to acknowledge the essential nature of the media, and to provide awareness that all media information contains subjective judgments, some of these judgments arising from media framing techniques, or the context and rationale provided by news sources that account for and help explain the purpose for the event that is being reported or commented upon. This investigation analyzes a selection of news sources from within India as well as correlating western sources (United Kingdom, United States) from December 2012 (starting with the original reporting of the New Delhi rape case) to February 2014, for the purpose of identifying the media framing techniques that were developed during and after the New Delhi case. This paper also asks how those techniques have contributed to progressive legislative reform in India; continued pressure that media has been placing on the Indian government in regard to violence against women; and political protections and reforms that have been deemed necessary.

Book Reviews:

(2021) The Problem of Difference: Using Dynamic Praxis to Reimagine International Relations, International Studies Review

In Intersectional Decoloniality: Reimagining International Relations and the Problem of Difference, Marcos S. Scauso analyzes four distinct discourses that deal with the problem of difference: colonial, anticolonial, poststructuralist, and intersectional decoloniality. He places these disparate—and often directly opposed—discourses in conversation with one another to answer his primary theoretical question: how is it possible to respect differences, while also resisting the differences that cause oppression or perpetrate violence? Scauso grounds that question in the research on “othering”(Said 1978; Todorov 1982) and, in the end, supplies an answer that some may find answer empirically dissatisfying: the problem of difference cannot be solved. Instead, he suggests a way to stay within the dilemma by using the work of Rivera Cusicanqui and the discourses of Indianismo—to construct the field of international relations …

Media Appearances:

Newspaper Quotes:

(2020) Al Jazeera

‘The fight continues’: Colombia protests persist despite pandemic Anti-government protest organisers say the movement continues to evolve amid the coronavirus outbreak.

(2020) The New Humanitarian

In August 2016, negotiators announced a landmark peace deal billed as bringing an end to the longest-running conflict in the western hemisphere – between Colombian government forces and the left-wing Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrilla group. Four years on, this two-part series explores new government policies, renewed violence and conflict displacement, and other emerging trends against the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic and the exodus of millions of Venezuelans into the region.

(2020) The New Humanitarian

Even against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, a war is being waged along the vast and porous Venezuela-Colombia border, across which people, narcotics, black market gasoline, food, and medicine are smuggled, and where criminals and guerrillas find refuge.

Blog Posts:

(2022) The Washington Post

After a volatile four years that included increasing assassinations of human rights and environmental rights leaders as well as massive protests, Colombia is in the midst of a historic election cycle. Voters in the May 29 first-round elections will contend with a number of crucial issues. Colombia’s inflation and economic crisis are a concern. And the country’s historic peace agreement is on the rocks, while Colombia faces large-scale immigration from Venezuelan refugees along with immigration from continued internal displacement as a result of violence from armed groups. At the forefront for many Colombian voters is the fate of the 2016 peace agreement between the Colombian government and the leftist guerrilla group The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The historic accord represented a potential end to the longest-running conflict in the Western Hemisphere — but the implementation appears in trouble.

(2022) La Silla Vacía

Después de cuatro intensos años, que incluyeron el aumento de asesinatos de líderes sociales y ambientales y una serie de movilizaciones y protestas inéditas, Colombia está comenzando sus ciclos de elecciones para la Presidencia. Estas elecciones son cruciales para todos los problemas que el país está enfrentando actualmente: un acuerdo de paz histórico en peligro, una crisis económica profunda, altísimos niveles de migración desde Venezuela y una agudización en el número de desplazados forzados al interior del país. El actual presidente, Iván Duque, ganó la Presidencia con la promesa de deshacer los Acuerdos en 2018. Pero mis investigaciones muestran que esta no sería la mejor estrategia para los actuales candidatos en este este ciclo electoral.

(2021) The Conversation US

Chaotic and deadly protests have for weeks rocked the Colombian port city of Buenaventura. In mid-May some demonstrators stormed the airport, and riot police responded with force, killing three. Buenaventura’s demonstrations are a part of the massive, violent national wave of protests over increasing poverty and incessant violence in Colombia. But they actually began well before Colombia’s broader upheaval. Since early 2021, people in this majority-Black coastal city have been rising up peacefully but insistently against rampant drug trafficking, political violence and cartel infiltration. Organized crime and illicit economies are both national problems in Colombia. But in Buenaventura, a history of state neglect has allowed both to flourish unchecked, according to my academic research in the city. For many Colombian and international observers, the government’s apparent lack of interest in saving Buenaventura has a clear source: structural racism resulting from state policies that have long marginalized Black Colombians.

(2020) Duck of Minerva

This is a guest post by Shauna N. Gillooly is a PhD Candidate at the University of California, Irvine and a visiting researcher at Pontifica Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia. Her research focuses on peacebuilding and transitional justice in contexts of continued political violence. In 2015, Venezuela’s already-in decline economy took yet another turn for the worse. Then-historically low oil prices, along with internal mismanagement of infrastructure by Maduro’s administration, led to millions of Venezuelans leaving the country in search of a more stable life. For many of them, the obvious first stop was neighboring country Colombia. The following year, after the signing of a historic peace agreement between the Colombian government and leftist guerrilla group The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), saw the lowest levels of violence in the country in a generation. Colombia’s peace economy was on an upswing, and as the situation got more complex in Venezuela, Colombia relaxed documentation requirements for Venezuelans entering the country—no passport required.

(2020) The Conversation US

Colombia’s 2016 peace accord was meant to end a half century of conflict with the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. Yet some areas previously dominated by the FARC guerrillas are seeing unintended consequences of that agreement, including a turf war between other armed groups. Colombian paramilitaries, drug traffickers and rebel groups are now fighting for control over what was once FARC territory. One result of renewed violence in Colombia is that humanitarian aid groups are less able to reach conflict-affected communities that have long depended on their services, according to my research on the Colombian peace process. Such international assistance is more critical than ever as coronavirus spreads across the South American country.

(2019) The Monkey Cage at the Washington Post

Just over two years ago, the Colombian government and the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) signed a celebrated peace agreement, ending 50 years of bloody armed conflict. And yet 439 human rights workers have been killed in that country since then — by reemerging right-wing militias and left-wing guerrillas that fought during the civil war. What is behind these alarming developments?

Other:

(2022) El Nuevo Dia

A raíz de los múltiples casos de corrupción que han salido a la luz pública, varios expertos y grupos de la sociedad civil se unieron para fortalecer el “Código Anticorrupción para el Nuevo Puerto Rico” (Ley Núm. 2-2018) con el fin de expandir y fortalecer los controles y el uso de los recursos públicos disponibles para luchar contra la corrupción en Puerto Rico.

(2020) E-International Relations

On November 7, 2019, news broke that 8 children aged 12-17 were killed in a military raid conducted by the Colombian military in late September. This newest violation of human rights added fuel to the mounting discontent against Colombia’s President Iván Duque and his cabinet members. This revelation came in the midst of an ongoing campaign for a historic paro nacional (national strike) scheduled for November 21, 2019, whose grievances include a host of issues: Duque’s proposed labor and pension reforms, privatization of electric and gas companies, instances of government corruption, including the Odebrecht scandal, cuts to education, a lack of progress on the historic 2016 peace accords, and a call for the government to do a better job at protecting social leaders who have been systematically threatened and assassinated for their work on social and economic justice initiatives since the signing of those same accords.

(2020) Colombia Calling Podcast

Every now and again, it's important to revisit some of the pressing issues in Colombia and on Ep334 of the Colombia Calling podcast, US academic, Shauna Gillooly gives us a blow by blow account of the tragedies taking place on Colombia's pacific coast, most importantly, in the cities of Buenaventura and Tumaco.