Verónica Zubillaga

Verónica Zubillaga is the Richard E. Greenleaf Scholar-in-Residence at the Stone Center for Latin American Studies at Tulane University. She is a Venezuelan sociologist and was a professor at the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas until 2024. For more than two decades, her ethnographic research has examined the social dynamics of urban violence in Caracas with a particular focus on inequality, structural violence, youth subjectivities, gender practices, state violence, parastate armed actors, and strategies deployed by residents of poor and working-class neighborhoods in Caracas, especially mothers, to navigate the presence of guns and armed actors in their everyday life. 

For the past decade, Zubillaga has combined academia with public engagement on social and armed violence, advocating for public policies on arms control and disarmament in her country. She has documented human rights violations and promoted discussions about the search for justice vis-à-vis police violence in Venezuela.  Her publications include the co-edited books: The Paradox of Violence in Venezuela (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022), with David Smilde and Rebecca Hanson, and La muerte nuestra de cada día. Violencia armada y políticas de seguridad ciudadana en Venezuela (Editorial de la Universidad del Rosario, 2021, Bogotá) con Manuel Llorens y Francisco Sánchez. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright Program; Open Society Foundations; Ford Foundation; and CAF-Banco de Desarrollo de América Latina, among others. Her work has been published in journals such as Latin American Research Review, Violence: An International Journal,  Political Geography and Crime, Law and Social Change. She has been a Visiting Professor at Brown University; a Visiting Scholar at  Harvard University; a Visiting Fellow at The University of Notre Dame; a Tinker Visiting Professor at Columbia University (2024) and a Mellon Visiting Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago (2024-2026). During her stay at the Stone Center for Latin American Studies, and drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic research conducted in Caracas under the authoritarian government of Nicolás Maduro, she aims to develop and deepen theoretical reflection on armed territorial orders and criminal governance in authoritarian contexts in Latin America through the understudied case of Venezuela.