Josefina Echavarría Álvarez

Josefina Echavarría Álvarez is professor of the practice and the director of the Peace Accords Matrix (PAM) program at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, part of the Keough School of Global Affairs. Josefina is also a faculty fellow of the Pulte Institute for Global Development.

As the director of PAM, she leads PAM’s researchers, faculty and staff in the South Bend campus, as well as PAM’s field units that carry out official monitoring of the implementation of peace accords in real time. In Colombia, PAM’s Barometer Initiative carries out official monitoring of the entire 2016 Final Peace Agreement between the Colombian government and the former FARC-EP guerrillas. In the Philippines, in partnership with Catholic Relief Services (CRS) Philippines, PAM-Mindanao provides monitoring methodology and technical assistance to measure the progress of the Normalization Annex of the 2014 agreement between the Government of the Philippines and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).

Josefina also directs the Legacy Project for “Preserving and Engaging the Digital Archive of the Colombian Truth Commission", which guarantees continued access to more than 200,000 files including audiovisual, non-textual knowledge and digitized documents compiled by the Colombian Truth Commission. By focusing on developing new teaching materials, harnessing the lessons and best practices for policy impact and supporting innovative academic research and peacebuilding practice, Josefina works towards advancing transitional justice, human rights and the centrality of victims in peace processes.

She was previously co-director of the Research Center for Peace and Conflict at the University of Innsbruck and a Fellow at the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom) and Trinity College (Ireland). She has been a guest lecturer at numerous universities around the world on peacebuilding, peace education, gender, conflict analysis, and research methods. She has also managed diverse international cooperation projects in the fields of gender, citizenship, and curricular development for peace and conflict studies.

Josefina earned her Ph.D. in Peace, Conflict, and Democracy from the Jaume I University (Spain), an M.A. in Peace, Development, Security and International Conflict Transformation from the University of Innsbruck (Austria), and a B.A. in Government and International Relations from the University Externado (Colombia).