Alejandra Ortiz-Ayala, PhD

Research Area

Conflict Studies and Management 

Short Biography

Alejandra Ortiz-Ayala, PhD, Research Associate and Head of conflict and conflict management specialization at the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy, University of Erfurt. Before coming to the Willy Brandt School, she was a Research Assistant Fellow on a participatory action research project with refugee-background young people in southern New Zealand at the School of Education of the University of Otago. 

Alejandra Ortiz-Ayala is a political scientist from Colombia, her country of origin.  Before her PhD, she spent several years as a lecturer, researcher and consultant for national and international organizations in Colombia. Her current academic research interest incorporates four research areas, with the overall goal of preventing violence. First, she has studied the role of the security sector in war to peace transitions mainly in Latin America. She has particular expertise in studying the security sector's role in peace processes, including transitional justice, state-building, and post-war violence. Second, she analysed the influence of ideology on people, political behaviour, violence mobilization, radicalism and armed groups' behaviour in the context of civil war and beyond. Her PhD dissertation, War Mentality and Post-Peace Accord Violence: A Field Experiment of Political-ideological Bias among Colombian Soldiers, combines insights from political science and the political and social psychology of intergroup conflicts to develop and test a theory of individual and institutional bias. Third, her research explores mechanisms for reconciliation between victims and perpetrators, particularly between state armed actors and civilians in post-peace agreement contexts. Finally, her recent research studies social cohesion in the context of civilian displacement and resettlement during and post-civil wars in the context of Colombia and New Zealand.

Methodologically, she is a mixed methods researcher, she has experience designing and analysing public opinion surveys– including lab-in-the-field experiments, survey experiments, and semi-structural and in-depth interviews.

Curriculum Vitae