Political Science

Nicolás is a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate in comparative politics. His research is on civil wars, political regimes, and the state of the sub-discipline, with a focus on Latin America. It has been published in the Journal of Latin American Studies, Desarrollo Económico, Revista Uruguaya de Ciencia Política, and Miríada: Investigación en Ciencias Sociales.

Nicolás instructed graduate and undergraduate level courses at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella and Brown University, where he furthered his teaching training at the Sheridan Center. Last spring, he received the P. Terrence Hopmann Award for Excellence in Teaching from Brown's Department of Political Science.

He holds an M.A. and a B.A. in Political Science from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (2018) and Universidad de San Andrés (2014), both in Argentina. Outside of academia, he plays soccer and is a River Plate fan.

Job Market Paper Title

Militia Origins and Post-Conflict Demise in Former Insurgent Strongholds: Insights from Rural Peru

Job Market Paper Abstract

Militias are crucial for civil war dynamics, termination, and legacies. Still, we know little about their varied origins, mobilization, and long-term trajectories. Drawing from nine months of field research in rural Peru, this paper advances a novel theory of the evolving roles played by militias, connecting wartime state-society relationships during their formation and mobilization phases to their post-conflict trajectories. The paper focuses on militias’ paths in former insurgent strongholds, one of several types of territories in civil wars. In these subnational areas, grassroots militias are suppressed by insurgents; instead, state-orchestrated militias (SOMs) are created by the Armed Forces as part of a military strategy to re-establish territorial control. However, because the Armed Forces especially distrust civilians in these territories, including militia members, it provides militias with scarce resources, keeps them under harsh control, and commands them to repress the local population. In the post-conflict period, the state quickly disbands the militias because it fears militia members would turn against it. Moreover, civilians in former insurgent strongholds do not aim to repurpose SOMs because of the repressive role they played during the conflict. Site-intensive methods, including interviews, archival sources, and participant observation, substantiate my within-case analysis of Los Morochucos district, an insurgent stronghold during the Peruvian civil war. These findings have implications for delivering public goods where state presence is minimal, particularly regarding security provision and local governance in post-conflict societies.