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Daniela Quinche Pachón

Department, Institution: Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS
UBEL Pathway: Politics and International Relations
Supervisor: Professor Phil Clark
Contact details: 733746@soas.ac.uk
About Me

I’m a Colombian researcher and practitioner with a background in transitional justice and armed conflict analysis.

I hold a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and a Master’s degree in Conflict, Security and Development from the University of Sussex, where my disseration was awarded with the Lisa Smirl Prize.

My previous experience includes working on the Colombian Peace Dialogues, and in the implementation of its judicial system through the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP, by its initials in Spanish). There, I applied social science methodologies to support international crimes prosecution and trace patterns of violence.

My interests focus on combining empirical depth with theoretical insight in examining civil wars, insurgencies, political violence, and the political orders that arise in areas of contested statehood.

Specifically, I am interested in how protracted civil wars persist and transform, generating new local orders and civilians-armed group relations that challenge conventional policy frameworks.

My Research

Civil wars and insurgencies reshape societies far beyond the battlefield, producing long-term patterns of governance and civilian interaction that challenge how peace transitions are conceived. Existing frameworks (DDR and transitional justice, for example) assume that rebels are separated from their communities and must return to civilian life.

Yet in many conflicts, rebels and civilians remain socially, politically, and economically embedded in one another’s worlds. This blurring challenges the conventional distinction between combatants and non-combatants, raising questions about reintegration in settings where armed actors are part of, rather than apart from civilian life.

Focusing on Colombia’s northeast borderlands, particularly the Sarare region in the Arauca department, I explore how civilians perceive these dynamics and how they conceive a transition in their context of embeddedness. The project combines interviews and ethnographic observation with quantitative analysis of violence and movilisation data.

Impact of My Research

This research bridges theoretical and empirical gaps by redefining reintegration in contexts of embedded civil-rebel relations and providing an evidence-based framework for understanding these dynamics. Its mixed-methods design offers deeper insight into the interplay between violence, governance, and civilian agency, while also establishing a framework that can be replicated in other cases.

Beyond academia, the findings have direct implications for policymakers, international organisations, governments, and community activists seeking more adaptive and context-sensitive strategies for peacebuilding interventions.