Jan Boesten is a postdoctoral research fellow in the From Conflict Actors to Architects of Peace: Promoting Human Security in Colombia and Internationally project. He earned his PhD at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver with a dissertation on the Colombian Constitutional Court and its decision to curtail constitutional reform.  His interest is situated at the intersection between political theory – legal theory and theories of social trust – and comparative politics. He has worked on the effects of violence and the privatization of security on political institutions – both from an empirical and theoretical point of view. His work has appeared in Colombian journals such as Revista Colombia Internacional and Precedente: Revista Jurídica, as well as LARR and LASA Forum. He is currently working on a book project on the transformative power of courts in Colombia, conceiving of the institutional context through the lens of discursive institutionalism, as well as the validity of understanding Latin American regime trajectories as forms of competitive authoritarianism rather than defective democracies.

Annette Idler is the Director of Studies at the Changing Character of War Cente, and Senior Research Fellow at Pembroke College and the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford. She also directs the From Conflict Actors to Architects of Peace (CONPEACE) project. Dr Idler’s work focuses on the interface of conflict, security, transnational organized crime and peacebuilding.  She is particularly interested in the role that diverse types of violent non-state groups play in changing security landscapes. Drawing on ethnographic methods in her research, over the past decade, she has conducted extensive fieldwork in and on the war-torn and crisis-affected borderlands of Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela, including more than 600 interviews with local stakeholders. Her book Borderland Battles: Violence, Crime, and Governance at the Edges of Colombia’s War is forthcoming with Oxford University Press; her work also appeared in journals such as Stability: International Journal of Security and Development and Perspectives on Terrorism.