Nicolás Zuluaga Afanador

I am a Colombian student interested in improving living conditions in Latin America and Colombia. Particularly, my professional career has been focused on the peace-making process in my country. After studying a bachelor’s in law at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Bogotá) and volunteering for some years in peripheric communities in Colombia, I served as a clerk in the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (SJP), a transitional justice institution that investigates, judges and sanctions the crimes committed during the internal armed conflict. From November 2020 to the first semester of 2021, I worked as a Research Assistant Officer for the Essex Transitional Justice Network analysing the legal ways to process individual’s accountability before the SJP. Then I was a Senior Researcher at the SJP, studying how the FARC guerrilla was related to war crimes and serious human rights violations in the north-western part of Colombia.

My current research interest is to analyse how the operation of the SJP could affect its own legitimacy. I will try to approach this subject from an interdisciplinary perspective of social sciences, considering culture, history and politics in Colombia and its relation with Latin America. Beyond my academic studies, I like to travel, meditate, run, and read literature.