The Political Violence and its Legacies Workshop presents
Joséphine Lechartre, postdoctoral research fellow, Center for Interamerican Policy and Research, Tulane University:
“How different wartime social orders influenced the formation of political cultures in indigenous communities in Guatemala.”
Joséphine Lechartre’s research examines how violence and extralegal governance shape political culture by affecting the everyday lives of citizens and the functioning of democratic institutions. She is also interested in evaluating how public policies can address these legacies and foster sustainable democratic practices. Her dissertation received the Gabriel A. Almond Award for Best Dissertation in Comparative Politics from the American Political Science Association in 2025. Her research is published at the Journal of Peace Research, and has received invitations to revise and resubmit at Comparative Political Studies and Civil Wars.
Lechartre’s book project explores how different wartime social orders influenced the formation of political cultures in indigenous communities in Guatemala. Drawing on a natural experiment, archival research, interviews, and an original survey, she shows how these political cultures continue to shape patterns of civic engagement and claim-making in the postwar period. She analyzes how survivor communities mobilize today to defend their territories against extractivism, organized crime, and corruption.
In additional projects, she studies 1) how refugee hosting policies affect refugees’ political behavior ; 2) how rebel governance is shaped by territorial control and local social norms; 3) how labor informality and skewed regulations of commodity booms fuel the rise of organized crime in legal markets; 4) how community demands for governance may lead to rebel remobilization after demobilization, and 5) how criminality and low levels of accountability shape perceptions of human rights in violent societies.
She received my PhD in Peace Studies and Political Science from the University of Notre Dame in 2024. Previously, She was a predoctoral fellow at the Montreal Center for International Studies (CÉRIUM) at the Université de Montréal and a Civil War Paths Fellow at the University of York. She also holds an MA in International Security cum laude from Sciences Po Paris.