Dr Ana Lucía Pelaez Echeverría

Ana Lucía Pelaez Echeverría is a Teaching Fellow at the Latin American Centre, University of Oxford, where she convenes the Issues of Political Economy in Latin America course and co-convenes the Qualitative Research Methods course for the MSc and MPhil in Latin American Studies. She is an interdisciplinary political scientist working on peace, conflict, and development in Central America, and holds a PhD in Latin American Studies from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar.

Her research asks why the promises of peace and development go unfulfilled in post-war societies that never return to war. She develops the concept of “contractual peace”: a peace that is legally binding and institutionally recognised, but structurally inconsequential and developmentally thin. Having built the concept from post-war Guatemala, she is now extending it comparatively to El Salvador and Nicaragua. That work examines how post-war states capture, defund, and dismantle the institutions their peace accords created.