Directory of Research and Expertise

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Research Summary and Profile

Research interests:

Globalization & Development, Human rights, Politics, Social Sciences

Research keywords:

The anthropology of violence and conflict, the anthropology of democracy, the ethnography of the state, legal anthropology, human rights, transitional justice and memory, environmental humanities

Summary of research interests and expertise:

I am Director of the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS), currently on research leave.

My research expertise spans the fields of political and legal anthropology, geography, and political ecology, with a focus on Latin America. 

My current research examines the competing ontologies, moralities, and epistemologies that various actors bring to disputes over territory and the environment. This research aims to understand what forms of evidence, knowledge and imagery are mobilised and legitimised within legal circuits and mechanisms, as well as how law thereby emerges as a particular means of world-making. To conduct this research, I have employed collaborative ethnographic methods with a constellation of actors linked through legal, quasi-legal and legal-like disputes and based in different latitudes of Latin America, the USA and Europe. It has been funded with an ESRC Future Research Leaders Fellowship (2016-2018) and a British Academy Sustainable Development Programme/GCRF award (2018-2021).

I will soon be starting a new research project on cross-border enactments of environmental care in transboundary watersheds of the Americas and Southern Europe (specifically Central America, the Amazon, the Southern Cone, and the Iberian Peninsula). This project is funded by the Spanish Research Agency (with European Union co-funding), and the Spanish National Research Council.

A second strand of my research has ethnographically explored how people who have experienced a protracted and violent war make sense of a violent peace, and how their experiences of wartime and contemporary violence shape their participation in politics and their envisioning of democracy. I have published this research in the form of a book-length monograph entitled The Violence of Democracy: Political Life in Post-War El Salvador (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). I am mentor of a British Academy-funded Newton International Fellowship (2022-2024) held by Gabriel Bayarri which is related to this research.

I welcome enquiries from prospective PhD and postdoctoral applicants in any of the aforementioned areas.

Together with partners from El Salvador, Jamaica, Colombia, and Peru, I am developing a British Academy-funded programme of training for early career researchers in Latin America and the Caribbean entitled ‘Building a Transnational Community of Practice: Writing and Researcher Development in Latin America and the Caribbean’.

I am a co-editor of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies book series published by University of London Press and sit on the editorial board of the anthropology journal Disparidades: Revista de Antropología. Between 2018 and 2024 I was co-editors of the Bulletin of Latin American Research, the journal of the Society for Latin American Studies,

I am also a co-convenor of the Latin American Anthropology Seminar and the environmental humanities series GERMINATIONS.

Since 2015 I have acted as an expert witness in asylum appeal cases in the UK involving Salvadorans. I have also conducted consultancy research for the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration at the UK Home Office and in the field of environmental policy making (funded by the Basque Cooperation Agency).

Languages:

	Spoken	Written
French	Intermediate	Intermediate
Spanish	Fluent	Fluent
Portuguese	Intermediate	Intermediate

Publication Details

Related publications/articles:

Date	Details
14-Oct-2024	Troubling environmental governance: citizen legal experiments with transboundary commons Oxford Development Studies. 52(4): 396–412.
07-Oct-2024	Citizens as lawmakers: legal innovation and the competing moralities of environmental juridification Articles The International Journal of Human Rights.
01-Jan-2023	Post-extractive juridification: Undoing the legal foundations of mining in El Salvador Journal articles Geoforum 138.
01-Jan-2022	Juridificación multiescalar frente a la industria minera: experiencias de Centroamérica y México Journal articles ÍCONOS Revista de Ciencias Sociales XXVI(72): 57-78. With Rachel Sieder and Yacotzin Bravo-Espinosa.
09-Dec-2021	Extractivismo minero en América Latina: la juridificación de los conflictos socioambientales Journal articles ÍCONOS Revista de Ciencias Sociales XXVI(72): 7-12. With Rachel Sieder and Yacotzin Bravo-Espinosa.
01-Sep-2021	Arbitrary Justice: The Fate of Environmental Defenders in Honduras Articles NACLA Report on the Americas, September 1, 2021. With Rupert Knox.
15-Aug-2021	Lo transfronterizo como futuro común. Hacia la co-gobernanza de las cuencas hidrográficas compartidas en Centroamérica Chapters In Yacotzin Bravo Espinosa, ed. El derecho y los derechos ante la defensa de los territorios, las formas de vida colectiva y los bienes comunes. Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires: CLACSO, pp. 28-37. ISBN 978-987-722-996-7
29-Mar-2021	On Care for Our Common Home: Ecological Materiality and Sovereignty over the Lempa Transboundary Watershed Journal articles Journal of Latin American Studies 53(2): 297-322.
01-Jul-2020	Resource Engagements: Experiencing Extraction in Latin America Journal articles Bulletin of Latin American Research 39(3): 285–418. With Amy Penfield.
01-Jan-2020	The Legal Cultures of the Subsoil Database Research aids Ainhoa Montoya, Rachel Sieder, Yacotzin Bravo Espinosa, Rupert Knox and María C. Pauchulo. 2020. The Legal Cultures of the Subsoil Database. https://doi.org/10.14296/SLWU8713
30-May-2018	The Violence of Democracy: Political Life in Postwar El Salvador Monographs Montoya, Ainhoa. The Violence of Democracy: Political Life in Postwar El Salvador. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
31-Mar-2018	La reedición del conflicto: la política electoral en El Salvador de la posguerra Journal articles ECA – Revista de Estudios Centroamericanos 73(752): 45–63.
01-Dec-2015	The Turn of the Offended: Clientelism in the Wake of El Salvador’s 2009 Elections Journal articles Social Analysis (Affective States: Entanglements, Suspensions, Suspicions) 59(4): 101–118.
01-Aug-2015	The Value of Open Access in Anthropology and Beyond Journal articles  Anthropology in Action, 22(2): 42–48.  With Grégory Dallemagne, Víctor del Arco and Marta Pérez.
01-Oct-2014	FAQs about Open Access: The Political Economy of Knowledge in Anthropology and Beyond Conference papers Edited with Marta Pérez, Grégory Dallemagne and Víctor del Arco.
01-Jan-2014	Introduction: Ethnographies of the Opportunities and Risks of Neoliberalisation Journal articles Anthropology Matters, 15(1), pp. 1–15.
01-Jan-2013	The Violence of Cold War Polarities and the Fostering of Hope: The 2009 Elections in Post-War El Salvador Chapters In Jennifer L. Burrel and Ellen Moodie, eds. Central America in the New Millennium: Living Transition and Reimagining Democracy. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 49–63.
01-Jan-2011	Review: El Salvador in the Aftermath of Peace: Crime, Uncertainty and the Transition to Democracy, by Ellen Moodie Review The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 16(2), pp. 458–460.

Publications available on SAS-space:

Date	Details
Dec-2015	The Turn of the Offended: Clientelism in the Wake of El Salvador’s 2009 Elections PeerReviewed Drawing on fieldwork in a Salvadoran municipio during and after the 2009 presidential elections, this article explores how the affective dynamics involved in elections and routine politics might inform us about the conditions of possibility for specific political imaginaries. Passions ran high among ordinary Salvadorans on both the left and right, as allusions to wartime unsettled political divisions and offences. For many disaffected Salvadorans, the victory of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front—a former guerrilla organization—opened up a political horizon previously foreclosed during the post-war era. I show how ordinary Salvadorans’ post-election engagement with state officials and FMLN party leaders through clientelist practices evidenced their desire for qualitative state transformation, as well as the extent to which they conceive of themselves as citizens through the state.
Jan-2013	The Violence of Cold War Polarities and the Fostering of Hope: The 2009 Elections in Post-War El Salvador PeerReviewed
Apr-2015	The Value of Open Access in Anthropology and Beyond PeerReviewed This commentary seeks to engage the issue of ‘impact’ in social anthropology by scrutinising the topic of open access. Drawing on the discussions that took place at the interna- tional conference ‘FAQs about Open Access: The Political Economy of Knowledge in Anthro- pology and Beyond’, held in October 2014 in Madrid, we suggest that addressing the topic of open access allows a two-fold goal. On one hand, it elucidates that public debates about open access rely on a rather minimalist notion of openness that does not yield an adequate under- standing of what is at stake in those debates. On the other, we argue that expanding the notion of openness does not only allow us to revisit the debate concerning what we do as academics, how we do it and what its value is, but also to do so going beyond current notions of ‘impact’ and ‘public value’ underpinned by the principle of economic efficiency in a context of increas- ingly reduced research funds.
Oct-2014	FAQs about Open Access: The Political Economy of Knowledge in Anthropology and Beyond NonPeerReviewed This publication is prior to the conference/workshop FAQs About Open Access – The Political Economy of Publishing in Anthropology and Beyond, held at Medialab-Prado (Madrid) on the 16th and 17th of October 2014. We, as conference conveners and members of the Research Group on Anthropology with a Public Orientation (GIAOP), are interested in the current debates about open access and it is out of that shared interest that this conference emerges. It has been more than a decade since the first declarations for open and free access to publicly-funded scientific knowledge were issued (the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2002 and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access one year after). Even though the debate has proliferated with strength in the Anglo-American academia in the last few years, we think that the way in which it has done so is extremely narrow, limited to putting forth proposals for how to make academic publications available online —and generally not questioning the business models and the very academic practices that have led to “capture/enclose” knowledge in the first place.
Jun-2014	Ethnographies of the Opportunities and Risks of Neoliberalisation NonPeerReviewed
Dec-2018	The Legal Cultures of the Subsoil: The Judicialization of Environmental Politics in Central America NonPeerReviewed The Legal Cultures of the Subsoil: The Judicialization of Environmental Politics in Central America is an ESRC-funded anthropological project that explores legal and quasi-legal actions in the context of natural resource governance. Controversies over the fate of non-renewable natural resources have increasingly taken the shape of the jural. This project pursues research on the legal repertoires at work in disputes over subsoil resources (specifically minerals), seeking to achieve an understanding of the different moralities that pervade these repertoires. The project focuses on four Central American countries (El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua) that have been understudied when it comes to non-renewable resources and that share ecological conditions as well as a similar political history, including relatively recent processes of democratization. It also includes research at global sites (Washington, DC, Geneva and London) where key actors involved in legal actions relating to environmental politics are based.
Mar-2018	La reedición del conflicto: la política electoral en El Salvador de la posguerra PeerReviewed Este artículo argumenta que, en El Salvador de la posguerra, amplios sectores de la población han incorporado distintas formas de violencia en sus imaginarios de la democracia, así como en su subjetividad y practices políticas. A partir de la investigación etnográfica realizada en el contexto de las elecciones presidenciales de 2009 y 2014 en el departamento de La Paz, el artículo demuestra que las disputas electorales de la posguerra entre los principales partidos políticos de El Salvador constituyen en cierto modo una reedición de conflictos aún no resueltos que tienen su origen en la guerra de la década de los ochenta. Con la victoria del FMLN en 2009 y el acceso de este partido al gobierno, el enfrentamiento entre los partidos continuó, pero concentrándose en el orden simbólico y discursivo y requiriendo una actualización acorde a las nuevas circunstancias.
Mar-2021	On Care for Our Common Home: Ecological Materiality and Sovereignty over the Lempa Transboundary Watershed PeerReviewed For over a decade, Salvadorean grassroots movements and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) pursued legal innovations with the aim of protecting their water sources from potentially polluting industrial activities such as mining. They initially drafted bans on mining that would preclude the extractive-based development path embraced by neighbouring countries. Eventually, they scaled up their approach and devised a draft proposal for a transboundary waters treaty that addressed the challenges that the ecological materiality of international watercourses poses to national de jure sovereignty. In so doing, the transboundary watershed has become a useful heuristic, a spatial trope to which Salvadoreans have turned to substantiate their claims to sovereignty over the Lempa River waters that El Salvador shares with pro-mining Guatemala and Honduras – claims imbued with an ethics of care rooted in wartime politics and Catholic morality.
Jan-2022	Juridificación multiescalar frente a la industria minera: experiencias de Centroamérica y México PeerReviewed La multiescalaridad es una característica central de la gobernanza neoliberal de los modelos extractivistas que se construyen entretejiendo múltiples niveles y jurisdicciones del derecho público y privado. En este artículo exponemos las complejas relaciones entre el panorama multiescalar de pluralismo legal global que estructura los conflictos socioambientales sobre la minería, los procesos de juridificación y las variadas formas de violencia que motivan las búsquedas de justicia. Señalamos, de manera breve, las dimensiones legales de la minería industrial y exploramos conceptualmente las especificidades de la juridificación multiescalar en relación con esta actividad. A partir de un análisis etnográfico y documental con distintas organizaciones de defensa legal y de base, examinamos tres casos de conflictos socioambientales en Honduras, Guatemala y México. Ello nos permite mostrar cómo la multiescalaridad fragmentada implica que los derechos reconocidos en una jurisdicción se puedan tornar invisibles en otra y acompañarse de un uso represivo del derecho o lawfare. Concluimos que aun en campos de poder marcados por desigualdades abismales y ecologías de violencias múltiples, las luchas juridificadas abren nuevas posibilidades para la movilización social y política. Asimismo, argumentamos que tales luchas facilitan las conexiones entre jurisdicciones, sujetos y lugares, y generan nuevas gramáticas políticas.
	Lo transfronterizo como futuro común. Hacia la co-gobernanza de las cuencas hidrográficas compartidas en Centroamérica NonPeerReviewed
Jan-2022	Presentación del dossier. Extractivismo minero en América Latina: la juridificación de los conflictos socioambientales NonPeerReviewed
Dec-2019	Forum: On Politics and Precarity in Academia PeerReviewed In this Forum, we ask our contributors to reflect on the entanglements between economy and politics and how they contribute to the ongoing precaritisation in academia, how they shape individual researchers’ biographies and how they influence academic research. But more importantly, beyond analysis, this Forum also invites its contributors to reflect on concrete interventions from their respective positions.
Dec-2022	Post-extractive juridification: Undoing the legal foundations of mining in El Salvador PeerReviewed In 2017 El Salvador passed the world’s first and only blanket ban on metal mining. This article explores this unique exception to the neoextractive path followed by much of Latin America since the early 2000s—an exception brought about by citizen-led lawmaking processes. Drawing from fieldwork research in El Salvador, I suggest that the ban was enabled not so much by a negative assessment of extraction-led development as by multiple other factors, including short-term electoral expediencies; the shared genealogy and history of grassroots opposed to mining and left-wing governments; the ongoing convergence of nationwide anti-mining movements supported by the Catholic Church; and a lack of vested interests in the mining industry on the part of local elites. Indeed, a few years on from the ban, successive governments have not fulfilled their obligation to eradicate mining, with many activists fearing an eventual repeal. Crucially, citizen-led lawmaking aimed at undoing the neoliberal ethos of the legal architecture that has facilitated mining throughout much of Latin America has failed to address the colonial legacies of this architecture. Overall, the article argues that mining-free futures require comprehensive lawmaking endeavours that include both legislative challenges to neoliberal statecraft and a comprehensive overhaul and decolonization of the legal foundations of mining.
Jan-2018	The Unsustainability of the Neoliberal Public University: Towards an Ethnography of Precarity in Academia PeerReviewed Spurred by our concern for the university institution and its increasing dependence on unstable employment contracts, we present possible approaches for future analyses of precarity in the academic world. We emphasise the most invisible aspects of precarity that materialise in the neoliberal practices to which we adhere in our daily lives. Such practices render us—and academia—vulnerable, while transforming academic work into an individual and competitive endeavour. Our goal is to seek other imaginaries for both academia and the university institution, reclaiming its public quality as a common project and questioning its nature.

Research Projects & Supervisions

Research projects:

Details
The Legal Cultures of the Subsoil: The Judicialisation of Environmental Politics in Central America Institute of Latin American Studies Project period: 01-Oct-2016 - 30-Sep-2018 Research interests: Civil Rights, Human rights, International Law
Building a Transnational Community of Practice: Writing and Researcher Development in Latin America and the Caribbean British Academy International Writing Workshops 2022
Technologies of Democracy in Post-Conflict Settings British Academy Seed Funding: UK-India Early Career Collaboration
The Juridification of Resource Conflicts: Legal Cultures, Moralities and Environmental Politics in Central America British Academy Sustainable Development Programme 2018 (Global Challenges Research Fund)
The Legal Cultures of the Subsoil: The Judicialisation of Environmental Politics in Central America  ESRC Future Research Leaders Fellowship

Current PhD topics supervised:

Dates	Details
From: 01-Oct-2022 Until:	Indigenous Voices in International Environmental Politics: The Translation of Worlds between the Amazon and the Conference Room Sarah Capes (funded by a LAHP AHRC grant).
From: 01-Oct-2021 Until:	Embroidery as Protest: Women's Creative Activism in the Movement for Peace in Mexico Pippa Cooper
From: 01-Oct-2016 Until:	Life after Insurgency: The Reintegration of Ex-Combatants in Colombia Tatiana Suárez (funded by a LAHP AHRC grant).

Past PhD topics supervised:

Dates	Details
From: 01-Oct-2015 Until: 11-Dec-2019	Autodefensas and the Construction of Citizenship and State-Society Relations in Mexico Alexander Curry (funded by a LAHP AHRC grant).
From: 01-May-2015 Until: 29-Feb-2020	The Micropolitics of a Dignified Burial: Contemporary Exhumations of Francoism's Victims and Transnational Cultures of Memory in the Tietar Valley María Laura Martín Chiappe (funded by an FPU grant). Co-supervised with Prof. Francisco Ferrándiz.

Available for doctoral supervision: Yes

Relevant Events

Related events:

Date	Details
10-Dec-2024	Social Media Communication and Right-Wing Populisms in Latin America and Beyond Funded by a British Academy Newton International Fellowship.
17-Nov-2018	Stories from El Salvador Funded by the SAS Public Engagement Fund: https://beinghumanfestival.org/event/stories-from-el-salvador/ https://ilas.sas.ac.uk/about-us/news/historias-de-el-salvador-stories-el-salvador-being-human-festival-latin-village-seven
20-May-2016	Resource Entanglements: Disparate Narratives on Natural Resource Extraction in Latin America Funded by the Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London.
16-Oct-2014	FAQs about Open Access: The Political Economy of Knowledge in Anthropology and Beyond Funded mainly by The Wenner-Gren Foundation: http://www.wennergren.org/grantees/montoya-bermejo-ainhoa Funded also by Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Medialab-Prado, Consorcio Madroño and Madrid Institute of Anthropology.
04-Jun-2013	The Right to Truth, Justice and Reparation in Latin America Funded by the Human Rights Consortium and the Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London.

Other editing/publishing activities:

Date	Details
	Anthropology Matters - Former editor
	El Faro Académico - Former member of the editorial board
	Bulletin of Latin American Research - Former Co-editor (2018-2024)
	CLACS University of London Press Books - Co-Editor (2021-to date)
	Disparidades. Revista de Antropología - Editorial Board Member (2023-to date)

Knowledge transfer activities:

Details
Radio Victoria - Radio Ambulante Podcast This Radio Ambulante story is the result of a collaboration between Isabel Cadenas Cañón and Ainhoa Montoya (Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London) funded by the Economic and Social Research Council of the United Kingdom (ESRC ES/N017870/1). Radio Ambulante is distributed by NPR.
Inspection of Country of Origin Information Report on El Salvador Inspection of Country of Origin Information Report on El Salvador. Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration. UK Home Office. (With David Cantor).
The Legal Cultures of the Subsoil Database The Legal Cultures of the Subsoil Database is an open-access digital and bilingual (English/Spanish) research resource which maps out relevant legal and legal-like actions employed by a range of actors who have sought to assert fundamental rights in the context of socio-environmental conflicts over industrial mining. The database contains information on a selection of eight paradigmatic mining projects in Central America and Mexico: El Dorado (El Salvador), Cerro Blanco, Escobal and Marlin (Guatemala), San Martín and ASP & ASP2 (Honduras), La Libertad (Nicaragua), and Reducción Norte & Corazón de Tinieblas (Mexico).

Consultancy & Media

Available for consultancy:

Yes

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