Joséphine Lechartre, Winner of the Prestigious Gabriel A. Almond Research Award

My work focuses on the long-term legacies of wars on political participation in post-conflict societies. During civil wars, it is not uncommon to see the emergence of alternative forms of social orders at the local level, under the control of armed actors such as paramilitaries, rebel groups, state counterinsurgent forces, and others.

These actors often impose new norms of civilian behaviour, organisation, and seek to instil new political ideologies in the populations under their control. Although we now understand well how these orders emerge and function across the globe, we still lack an understanding of how they reshape the organisation and political subjectivities of civilians. These new social relations and political subjectivities regularly endure well beyond the end of the conflict, with important implications for state-society relations, peacebuilding, and political representation post-conflict. 

Through a rigorous comparison of Mayan indigenous communities who survived the civil war (1960-1996) and the Mayan genocide (1980-1983) in Northern Guatemala along the Mexican border, I compare how the control of state forces, rebel actors, and humanitarian actors in refugee camps in Mexico ushered in the emergence of alternative forms of social orders during the war. Using in-depth interviews with survivors, extensive archive evidence, and an original household survey embedded in nine months of ethnographic fieldwork, I show that these social orders durably shaped the forms of organisation and the political thinking of local civilian populations.

I find that, after the war, these legacies endured to shape patterns of indigenous engagement in protests and electoral politics, but also their capacity to resist the encroachment of organised crime and dispossession by agribusiness. These differences have fundamental implications for survivor access to representation, public goods and services, and the continuity of indigenous self-determination in Norther Guatemala. 

While I focused on Guatemala, these findings have important implications for other war-ridden countries, and my book project will include a comparative study of Colombia's internal conflict, while future projects will incorporate cases from other world regions. 

My time at Sciences Po was shaped by research trajectory in many ways.

Pursuing education on the Euro-Latin American campus of Poitiers was my first experience studying Latin American politics and sparked my interest in the region.

As a Master's student at PSIA, I spent my internship semester working as an intern in a Colombian NGO, the Colombian Commission of Jurists, which was involved in the 2016 Peace Process negotiations and provided support to victims of the Colombian armed conflict. This experience doing background research on peace processes to support talks within Colombia's civil society and contact with internally displaced victims of the conflict motivated me to pursue PhD studies on conflict and peacebuilding after the Master's. 

This conviction was strengthened after I returned to Paris to finish my degree through three additional experiences at Sciences Po:

• First, I had the opportunity to work as a research assistant for Olivier Dabène at the Center for International Studies (CERI) at the Latin American and Caribbean Observatory (OPALC). This first experience further convinced me to pursue doctoral studies and allowed me to acquire important research skills;
• Concomitantly, I took Sandrine Lefranc's fascinating seminar on Transitional Justice at PSIA, which provided me with the theoretical framework to start thinking about my research project;
• Finally, during a year, I conducted additional fieldwork in Colombia, completed coursework in comparative politics, and wrote a thesis on civil society’s role in the Colombian peace process, co-supervised by Sandrine Lefranc and Sandrine Revet.

This rigorous academic training and field experience prepared me to apply successfully to several U.S. doctoral programmes. I was ultimately admitted as the top applicant to the joint PhD in Peace Studies and Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, where I received the prestigious Richard and Peggy Notebaert Premier Fellowship, funding my doctoral studies in full.

There is no single or linear path to a PhD or an academic career, but Sciences Po provides an excellent foundation for students interested in pursuing comparative politics. My own journey began there, and I can say that the intellectual values I absorbed—curiosity, openness, and critical engagement—continue to guide me today.

• First, embrace interdisciplinary training. One of the greatest strengths of Sciences Po is its openness to multiple academic traditions and perspectives. In my case, this foundation allowed me to pursue a joint PhD in Peace Studies and Political Science, combining normative, historical, and empirical approaches to the study of conflict and political change. Comparative politics is at its best when it draws from history, sociology, anthropology, and area studies to understand how politics unfolds in specific contexts.
• Second, don’t underestimate the importance of language learning and cultural (or other kinds of) immersion. The ability to conduct research in local languages opens doors to richer, more grounded fieldwork and to perspectives that might otherwise remain inaccessible. Seek out opportunities—whether through internships, fieldwork, or study abroad—that expose you to unfamiliar contexts. Being in an uncomfortable or unknown place often sharpens your observational skills and fosters the kind of humility and curiosity that strong research requires. Let your research be shaped by the world, not just by what you read.
• Mentorship is another key pillar. I benefited greatly from the support and intellectual guidance of faculty at Sciences Po—through research positions, seminars, and thesis supervision. Do reach out to professors, join research centres, and take part in exciting projects. These relationships can provide not only academic training, but also insight into how a research career actually unfolds.
• Finally, be open to serendipity. I didn’t begin Sciences Po with the goal of becoming an academic. It was through internships, NGO work, conversations with peers and professors, and exposure to real-world political struggles—especially in Latin America—that my research interests took shape. Let your path be shaped by experience as much as by theory. Let curiosity lead you, even if the destination isn’t immediately clear.