Verónica Zubillaga

Verónica Zubillaga is a Venezuelan sociologist. She holds a Doctorate in Sociology from the Catholic University of Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium (2003)and is currently a Professor at the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas.  For the past 20 years, she has devoted herself to studying urban violence in Latin America, youth gang violence in Caracas, gender, public policy, and qualitative methods. In recent years Zubillaga has combined academia with public impact on social and armed violence, advocating for arms control and disarmament public policy in her country. Currently, she is actively promoting discussions about the search for justice vis-a-vis police violence in Venezuela.

 Her publications include the books The Paradox of Violence in Venezuela (University of Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming) with David Smilde and Rebecca Hanson; and La muerte nuestra de cada día. Violencia armada, y políticas de seguridad ciudadana en Venezuela (2021, Editorial de la Universidad del Rosario, Bogotá) with Manuel Llorens and Francisco Sánchez. She has received research grants from Fulbright Scholarship, The Open Society Foundations, and CAF-Banco de Desarrollo de América Latina, among others. She has been Craig Cogut Visiting Professor of Latin American Studies at Brown University in 2014 and 2015; Santander Visiting Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University in 2016; Visiting Fellow at The Kellogg Institute for International Studies, Notre Dame University (2018-2019).  In 2016, with colleagues in Caracas, she founded the Red de Activismo e Investigación por la Convivencia, REACIN, an association devoted to research on urban violence and activism on human rights and public policy for pacific coexistence. She is currently a Visiting Fellow at Collegium de Lyon, Lyon, France.