Maryhen Jiménez Morales
I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Latin American Centre at the University of Oxford. My research interests span the fields of comparative democratization, authoritarianism, political parties, contentious politics, and civil resistance, with a particular emphasis on opposition groups. At the Latin American Centre, I plan to start a new research agenda that builds on my dissertation to consider the rise of new oppositions in non-democracies. This research project seeks to understand domestic forms of external threats to non-democratic rulers, meaning partisan and non-partisan oppositions. How do oppositions form? Which conditions favour the emergence of new oppositions in non-democratic regimes? By using a mixed-methods approach and evidence from Latin America my postdoctoral project will address these questions.
Why do some opposition parties coordinate with one another, while others do not? In my doctoral dissertation (DPIR, University of Oxford, 2020), I studied uneven patterns of opposition coordination in autocracies, using empirical evidence from Latin America, including over 200 original interviews conducted with leading politicians, journalists, activists and experts. In contrast to existing accounts that mostly focus on the behaviour and choices of the autocrat, my research pays attention to the individual and collective dilemmas, decision-making processes and agency of opposition parties. I have found that coordination is only possible under two conditions: When repression is both moderate (i.e., not too light as to be merely inconvenient but not too extreme as to be effectively crushing or paralyzing) and indiscriminate. When repression is either low or high levels and/or targeted towards specific parties, coordination is less likely to occur.
At Oxford, I have taught Introduction to Politics as a Lecturer in Politics at Lincoln College at the University of Oxford (2019) and Latin American Politics as a tutor for several colleges. During my doctoral studies, I was a visiting researcher at Princeton University and CIDE (Mexico) and have also worked for the German development cooperation in Peru, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Costa Rica and the Americas Division of Human Rights Watch in Washington DC.
I hold an MPhil in Latin American Studies from the Latin American Centre at the University Oxford and a BA in Political Science from the Goethe University Frankfurt.
