Event Highlights: Politics, Narco-Strategies, and Violence in Central America | Latin American Studies

Event Highlights: Politics, Narco-Strategies, and Violence in Central America

This talk on “The Art of Traficking” by Laura Blume, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Nevada, Reno, took place at BU’s Pardee School of Global Studies on Wednesday, May 4, 2022. She lays out her current book project, which uses ethnography to examine the ways in which political context impacts drug-trafficking violence in Central America.

Laura Blume received her PhD in political science from Boston University in 2020. Her work focuses on issues of human security, with a regional focus in Latin America. Her teaching and research interests include the war on drugs, violence, illicit economies, immigration and democratization throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Her work has been published in Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Politics in Latin America, NACLA Report on the Americas, and World Development. She won a 2022 Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation Distinguished Scholar Award for her project, “Cataloguing Murder: Tracking Violence Against Public Figures in Central America.”

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