I’m a social anthropologist from Bogotá, Colombia. My ethnographic research focuses on the afterlives of war and humanitarianism and multispecies relations of aid and repair.
I’m also an assistant professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at George Washington University, and a former fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute (2023-2024).
Bridging the anthropology of violence, peace and the environment, science and technology studies, and critical humanitarian scholarship, my research explores how landscapes, people, and animals become entangled in efforts to inhabit and reclaim war-shaped territories. In that sense, I’m also concerned with processes of demilitarization and ecological remediation.
My first book, “Fields of Suspicion: Landmines and the Making of Peace in Rural Colombia,” is an ethnography about a “peace laboratory:” The Pilot Project of Humanitarian Demining. It follows Army soldiers, FARC-EP guerrillas, humanitarian workers, and campesinos (small farmers) in their efforts to dismantle the lingering ecologies produced by landmines as a way to probe the possibilities of environmental and political reconciliation. The book is coming out in March 2027 with Duke University Press.
My second book project is tentatively titled “Noses Without Borders: Mine Detection Dogs and the Breeding of a Global Humanitarian World,” and is a multi-sited ethnographic and archival project on the “working life” of mine detection dogs. These animals are produced as biotechnologies whose bodies, senses, dispositions, and reproductive lives are shaped for detection work, then circulated across national borders of mine-contaminated countries as part of increasingly standardized and cost-efficient systems of care in war and in its aftermath.
Diana Pardo Pedraza 