Luciana Fortuna

I completed my undergraduate education at Columbia University in the City of New York where I majored in Comparative Literature and Society with a concentration in Political Science. During my last year at Columbia, I worked as a legal and policy intern for the Human Rights Foundation (HRF), conducting extensive research on authoritarian regimes and their human rights violations in Latin America. In this role, I translated reports on human trafficking in Cuban medical missions for publication in the Spanish language and helped draft legal petitions to the UNWGAD on behalf of political prisoners, country reports for the Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review, and reports for HRF’s internal regime classification project.

Currently, I’m an MPhil student at Exeter College, Oxford, where I hope to explore the multifaceted interactions between democracies and authoritarian regimes within the Latin American region while investigating the political, economic, and social dynamics that govern these relationships. Delving into the strategies democracies employ to navigate relationships with authoritarian counterparts, I’m looking to understand the underlying principles and outcomes of such engagements, considering aspects like diplomatic ties, economic sanctions, and support for democratic movements within authoritarian states.