Personal profile
Ana is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the JUSTICE project at De Montfort University, where she investigates coercive and abusive investigative interviewing practices. She holds a PhD in Security and Crime Science and an MSc in Countering Organised Crime and Terrorism from University College London, an MA in Political Studies from the National University of Colombia, and a BA in Sociology from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Colombia.
Her research examines coercion and violence as mechanisms of governance, with a particular interest in why coercive strategies produce unintended consequences and the conditions under which policing becomes criminogenic. Her work spans state and non-state forms of coercion. Her earlier research explored violence and governance by armed and criminal groups in conflict-affected societies. More recently, she has focused on state violence, law enforcement militarisation, and their implications for human rights, legitimacy and democratic governance. Her doctoral research examined the determinants and consequences of law enforcement militarisation through cross-national comparative analysis.
Ana has an interdisciplinary background in sociology, political science and crime science. Her research primarily employs quantitative methods, including longitudinal and cross-national analysis, structural equation modelling and causal inference approaches. She has a particular interest in measurement, data construction and the challenges of producing valid and comparable evidence across countries, alongside experience with qualitative and computational methods.