Research interests
- Democratization
- Human rights
- Violence in Latin America
Marie-Christine Doran is a Full Professor of comparative politics at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, specializing in democratization, human rights, and violence in Latin America. She is also a consultant on Latin American issues for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Canada (Global Affairs Canada) since 2015.
She holds a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada-SSHRCC grant on Violence and Democracy: the Criminalization of Struggles for rights in Latin America (2018-2025), for which she is main researcher of a team of 7 specialists and Director of the Observatory on Violence, Criminalization and Democracy. Her SSHRC funded research analyzes the legal/criminal/discursive criminalization of rights defenders (HRDs and WHRDs) in 6 Latin American countries, and the resulting violations, notably torture and sexual violence (politico-sexual violence - PSV) against protesters and WHRDs. As Director of the OVCD, Marie-Christine Doran’s work focuses on the persistence of State and non-State violence in democracy, several decades after democratic transitions/consolidations, making Latin America the world's most dangerous continent for human rights defenders (UN, 2021) and touches on different aspects of rights and freedoms in comparative perspective, with regard to variables such as the nature of political regimes, the weight of authoritarian political and legal legacies, or the impact of social movements for rights, justice and memory, as well as the impact of violence by state and non-state actors on women, LGBTQ+, indigenous and Afro-descendant defenders, in order to find solutions, notably through recourse to international law. Until now, her research grants totalize over 1 700 000 $ (CAN).
On December 13, 2023, she was invited to present her most recent research results in front of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission under the title of Social Sciences’ Contribution to the Defense of Human Rights in the Americas. She was also an international expert adviser for the Mesa de reparación integral de violaciones a los derechos humanos durante el estallido social de 2019-2020 (Ministry of Justice, Government of Chile, 2022) and co-author of the Report from the Canadian and Québec Mission for the Observation of Human Rights in Chile (2020) Social and Political Crisis in Chile 2019-2020 Systematic and Widespread Human Rights Violations.
Marie-Christine Doran holds her Ph.D. from Université du Québec à Montréal and her doctoral thesis on the struggles for justice and against impunity in Chile was awarded the Academic Gold Medal by the Governor General of Canada in 2006, as well as other academic distinctions. She is a researcher at the International Panel on Exiting Violence (IPEV), and other international research platforms in Europe and Latin America, including the Brazilian CAPES International Research Network on Conflict Management in Plural Public Spaces (Instituto de Estudos Comparados em Administraçâo de Conflictos), for which she is international consultant. She has been a fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University, where she taught religion, human rights and politics, and at the École des Hautes études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and Université Lyon 2 Lumière, where she taught on political violence.
Her published work include numerous peer-reviewed articles in four languages and focus on political violence, democratic theory and democratization, post-conflict, criminalization of human rights defenders HRDs, struggles for justice and memory, politico-sexual violence against HRDs and WHRDs, and human rights from below, as well as religion and politics and also include 3 books which are : Le réveil démocratique du Chili. Une histoire politique de l’exigence de justice, (foreword by Alain Touraine,: Karthala 2016); as well as Human Rights as Battlefields. Changing Practices and Contestations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and Criminalizing Democracy: The Hidden Face of Violence in Latin America, to be published at Routledge in 2024. Some of her peer-reviewed publications are available at Academia and Researchgate. She is regularly invited to comment on Latin American politics and violence in Canadian and international media, most recently in The Conversation and La Presse on the dangers of exporting “Bukelism” and the new mano dura security model to other countries such as Ecuador. She supervises numerous Ph.D. and MA thesis on subjects related to Latin America.