Jenny Pearce

Jenny Pearce is Research Professor in the Latin American and Caribbean Centre at the LSE. She was Professor of Latin American Politics in the Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford 1992-2016. She is a political scientist with area expertise in Latin America. She works with anthropological and participatory research methodologies on social change, violence, security, power and participation in the region. She considers herself a peace scholar, committed to theoretical development of the field of peace, power and violence as well as empirical study. She has conducted fieldwork since the 1980s in Colombia, Central America (incuding a protracted ethnography of peace building in Huehuetenango, Guatemala), Mexico, Chile, Brazil and Venezuela.

She was Visiting Professor at the University of Monterey (2014), Mexico, and the Bolivariana University, Medellin, Colombia . In July 2015 she was awarded an honour as ‘Outstanding Latin Americanist’ by the International Conference of Americanists (ICA) at their conference in El Salvador, and in 2023 she was awarded the Martin Diskin prize for Scholarship and Activism by the Latin American Studies Association (LASA). Since 2016, she has been Research Professor at the LACC, LSE (Honorary since 2019). She was Principal Investigator on the Newton/ESRC/Conacyt funded research project: Co-Constructing Security Provision in Mexico: A Methodology and Action Plan from Communities to the State 2016-18. 2022-2023 she was Co-I on the University of Aberdeen/ Colegio de Michoacan AHRC funded project, on Participatory Research for Effective Collaboration in Response to Non-War Violences. Her most recent monograph: ‘Politics without Violence? Towards a Post Weberian Enlightenment’, London: Palgrave Macmillan, was published in 2020. She is currently working on issues of violence, security and peace in Latin America, and the role of elites in Colombia and Latin America.