Political Science

Débora is a fifth-year PhD Candidate in Political Science at Brown University and a Research at the Civil Conflict and Democratic Erosion Lab at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Her primary field is Comparative Politics, with a regional focus on Latin America—particularly Brazil, where she comes from. She is broadly interested in the politics of land, collective action and access to welfare in rural areas. Her dissertation investigates the intersection of land titling policies and the erosion of grassroots rural organization in agricultural frontier regions. She examines how incumbents can strategically deploy land titling initiatives not to empower marginalized communities, but to dismantle them—especially in areas where land is highly contested. She focuses on the case of land reform settlements in the Brazilian Amazon, employing a mixed-methods approach that combines quasi-experimental strategies, original survey data and in-depth interviews.

In parallel, she is also engaged in a collaborative project that explores the roots and consequences of violence against environmental defenders also in the Brazilian Amazon. As part of this project, she personally coordinated the implementation of a survey among 195 rural communities in the state of Pará, Brazil.

Before beginning her doctoral studies, she worked as a political journalist for local news outlets in Brazil and as a communication manager at the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology. She holds a BA in Journalism and Political Science from the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE), Brazil, and a MA in Political Science from Brown University.