
Alana S. Ackerman
Alana S. Ackerman’s dissertation engages the question: How do refugees experience violence and displacement in spaces and at times that are commonly considered “peaceful”? This project documents the widespread persecution that Colombian refugees experience in both Colombia and Ecuador in the wake of the 2016 Peace Accords. Based on 16 months of ethnographic research including participant observation and interviews, this project demonstrates how the “Colombian armed conflict” manifests across borders through intimate encounters between perpetrators and their victims in spaces of supposed refuge and in “post-war” times. This dissertation contributes to a feminist peace and security studies by challenging binary understandings of armed conflict and its resolution.
Biography
Alana S. Ackerman is a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research examines armed conflict, violence, and displacement across borders in the global South. Her dissertation project ethnographically documents Colombian refugees’ experiences of ongoing persecution and displacement in Ecuador, a place of supposed peace and refuge. Ackerman's research has been supported by the Fulbright-Hays Program and the Social Science Research Council, among others. She holds an M.A. in Anthropology from the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO), Ecuador, and a B.A. in Spanish from Tufts University.
USIP Peace Scholar Fellow
- Ph.D. Candidate
- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- “Refugees Without Refuge: Persecution and Displacement Across Borders in South America.”