Giovanny Alvarez

Why violence persists and changes shape rather than ending when civil wars do.

I am a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, International Studies, and Modern Languages at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. I completed my Ph.D. in Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2026.

My dissertation, The Price of Elite Peace, develops a dual-arena theory of post-conflict violence. I argue that peace interventions designed to solve elite-level commitment problems — amnesties, negotiated settlements, and consent-based counternarcotics programs — systematically displace risk onto the communities where the wars were actually fought. The project has been supported by a Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the International Studies Association and a Saperstein Research Fellowship at Wayne State University.

I also build data others can use. The U.S. Aid to Security Sector Actors (USASSA) dataset converts unclassified U.S. security assistance records from 2000 onward into analytical typologies, making it possible to evaluate how different forms of security aid affect conflict and human rights outcomes.

I bring an unusual vantage point to these questions. Before graduate school I spent more than fifteen years implementing the policies I now evaluate — coordinating violence prevention for a USAID/Chemonics program in Colombia, working on transitional justice at UNDP, and conducting human rights research at Colombia's Defensoría del Pueblo. I have taught at the undergraduate and graduate levels in both the United States and Colombia, and I teach in English and Spanish.