Team Members
Principal Investigator
Leigh A. Payne
Professor of Political Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison
(lapayne@facstaff.wisc.edu)Her main teaching and research interests are in Latin American politics. She is particularly interested in the study of democratization, and the challenges posed to democracy from groups currently or previously associated with political violence. Her research directly concerns the role that the legacy of authoritarian rule plays in institutional and extra-institutional processes in new democracies. For that research she has received support from Fulbright, Social Science Research Council, and the MacArthur Foundation among other granting institutions.
Among many publications, she is co-editor of The Art of Truth-Telling about Authoritarian Rule (2005, University of Wisconsin Press) and the author of Uncivil Movements: The Armed Right-Wing and Democracy in Latin America (2000, Johns Hopkins University Press) as well as numerous articles and chapters devoted to truth telling, the confessions of torturers and collaborators, and memory politics in new democracies. Her most recent book, Unsettling Accounts: Neither Truth Nor Reconciliation in Confessions of State Violence (2008, Duke University Press) examines how democratic institutions and societies deal with past authoritarian state violence. Unlike many transitional justice scholars, her research poses a more skeptical view of the relationship of these processes to “settling accounts with the past,” hence the title of her book Unsettling Accounts.
Senior Researchers
Tricia Olsen
Ph.D. Student in Political Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison
(tdolsen@wisc.edu)She is trained as a comparativist and methodologist, and is broadly interested in the political economy of Latin America. Her dissertation will assess the extent to which the regulatory environment affects microfinance success throughout Latin America. Her primary role in the Transitional Justice Data Base Project is to undertake the data compilation and statistical analyses. Her current work focuses on whether the economic health of a country influences its decisions to employ specific transitional justice mechanisms. Her most recent paper, "At What Cost? The Political Economy of Transitional Justice," concludes that states often forego expensive mechanisms such as trials and truth commissions when they are not well-off economically.
Andrew G. Reiter
Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison
(areiter@wisc.edu)He focuses broadly on comparative politics and international relations, with a regional focus on Latin American and specific substantive interests in the topics of transitional justice, democratization, violence, and civil war. In particular he is interested in the challenges societies face as they make the difficult transition from periods of war and violence to periods of peace. His dissertation, The Politics of Spoilers after Civil War, aims to analyze cross-nationally the rise of spoilers in the aftermath of peace agreements following internal armed conflict. The findings of this dissertation project have the potential to illuminate the causes behind spoiler activity, aid in prediction of where and when spoilers will arise, and prescript more effective policy to manage them. He has been named a World Politics and Statecraft Fellow by the Smith Richardson Foundation to support his research.
Affiliated Researchers
Sara Dahill-Brown
Courtney Hillebrecht
Research Assistants
Eileen Herden
Kara Kabelis
Megan McGuire
Suzanne R. Nielsen
Nicole Wegner
Jeff Wright
Matt Zelle
Project Consultants
David Canon
Mark Copelovitch
Charles Franklin
Scott Gehlbach
Heinz Klug
Herbert Kritzer
Jon Pevehouse
Scott Straus
David Weimer
We also thank Drew Stathus for his technical support.
We always enjoy hearing from others working on transitional justice or related areas, so please feel free to contact us with comments or questions about our project or its website. We can be reached at: tjdb@polisci.wisc.edu