Guillermo Trejo

Biography

Guillermo Trejo is Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame and Director of the Violence and Transitional Justice Lab (V TJ Lab) at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. Trejo’s research focuses on political and criminal violence, social movements, human rights, and transitional justice in Mexico and Latin America. He is the co-author of Accountability Shock: Why Transitional Justice Prevents Criminal Wars in New Democracies (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) and of Votes, Drugs, and Violence: The Political Logic of Criminal Wars in Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and the author of Popular Movements in Autocracies: Religion, Repression, and Indigenous Collective Action in Mexico (Cambridge University Press 2012). His research has appeared in the American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Peace Research, Latin American Research Review, Perspectives on Politics, and Política y Gobierno, among other outlets. 

An award-winning author, for his research on indigenous movements Trejo received five international awards, including the Gabriel Almond, Mancur Olson, and Jack Walker Awards from the American Political Science Association (APSA), and the Charles Tilly Award from the American Sociological Association (ASA). For his research on criminal violence he received five awards, including the 2018 Best Article Award from the Editorial Board of Comparative Political Studies and the Autocracy and Democracy and the William Riker best book awards from APSA and the Donna Lee Van Cott Best Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association (LASA).

Trejo is currently pursuing three research agendas: 1) A study on indigenous resistance to criminal governance and narco rule in Mexico; 2) a study of ecosystems of local violence, focusing on selective violence and the assassination of local political, social, and economic leaders in Mexico’s criminal wars; and 3) an in-depth study of internationalized prosecution as a strategy to dismantle criminal structures by means of law and not war based on the Guatemalan collaboration with the United Nations.

For his policy and practice activities, Trejo serves as external adviser to various human rights and peacebuilding NGOs in Mexico and to collectives of families of victims of forced disappearance.