Wilin Buitrago Arias

I am a Junior Research Fellow in Politics at Campion Hall, University of Oxford. I completed my MPhil in Comparative Government and my DPhil in Politics at the Department of Politics and International Relations (DPIR), University of Oxford.

My research sits at the intersection of comparative politics and the study of Latin America, with a focus on political parties, institutional development in post-conflict settings, collective political violence, and electoral behaviour.

This work has involved extensive and systematic fieldwork and interviewing with a wide spectrum of key actors, including former guerrilla commanders and ex-combatants, military and government officials, sitting congressmen, international peace negotiators, farmers, and leaders of civil society organisations. By engaging with these individuals both during and after critical peace processes, I have gathered rich, nuanced data that provides a ground-level understanding of the transition from armed conflict to political competition.

My doctoral dissertation, Party-building after Civil Conflict: Insurgent Successor Parties in Latin America, explains the divergent trajectories of parties that emerge from former guerrilla movements. The research develops a novel theoretical framework and is built on rich empirical evidence, from my experiences with ex-combatants and political elites, archival work, and survey data. It offers a systematic analysis of how these crucial actors navigate the transition from armed insurgency to democratic politics, with direct implications for the sustainability of peace agreements and democratisation processes, as well as calling into question what we know about the meso and microvariables of party politics.

Beyond this core project, I am involved in several collaborative research initiatives. I am currently co-editing a volume that investigates partisan realignment and political identities among Hispanic and Latino populations in the United States and beyond. This project brings together scholars from various disciplines and universities to systematically test the hypothesis of a conservative shift within these communities. Furthermore, with the same network of colleagues from European and North American universities, I am helping to lead efforts to globalise Latinx Studies. We are actively creating spaces for dialogue to examine the field's institutional challenges, academic legitimacy, and political headwinds outside the Americas—particularly in Europe and the Middle East. This work focuses on building strong international research networks to strengthen Latinx Studies as a critical, diverse, and global field of inquiry.

I have extensive teaching experience across the Oxford collegiate system, covering Comparative Government, Latin American Politics, Political Sociology, and Research Methods.

Research Interests:

• Political Parties, Party-Building and Institutional Development
• Peace Accords and Post-Conflict Democratisation
• Qualitative Research Methods (especially in violent contexts)
• Comparative Political Violence
• Latino/Latinx Politics and Partisanship