Dr Francy Carranza-Franco

• PhD in Development Studies, SOAS, 2016
• Msc in Social Psychology, LSE, 2007
• BA in Psychology, National University of Colombia, 2003.

Francy Carranza-Franco is a Colombian researcher and practitioner. She has worked as consultant, manager and field-operations officer on projects for the national government, public and private universities and NGOs.

In her experience with public offices, she worked as expert adviser at the School of High Government within the Superior School of Public Administration (ESAP) to provide technical assistance to decision-makers and high raking civil servants working for the Colombian Government in peacebuilding and security. In that capacity, she advised the Ministry of Domestic Affairs; the National Unit for Leader Protection (UNP), the Ministry of Defence, the National Department of Planning (DNP) and the Administrative Department of Public Functionaries (DAFP). She also headed projects on citizenship and rural education by the Colombian Ministry of Education and the Bogota´s Institute for Research in Education and Pedagogy (IDEP)[1].

As researcher, she has wide experience with top Colombian Universities: she was responsible for the fieldwork of the project “Mapping mental health resources for young people living in a conflict context at the Colombian Pacific Coast” (link here), a four-year co-joint research between Los Andes University and the University of Birmingham.

She was also junior and senior researcher for different projects at the Institute of Political Studies and International Relations (IEPRI), taking part in co-authored publications on the topics of conflict, the victim’s law and the land reform in Colombia. Currently she is associated researcher at the Observatory of Restitution and Regulation of Agrarian Property Rights https://www.observatoriodetierras.org/about-us/?lang=en.

Throughout her career, Francy has accumulated vast experience on participatory research in complex and violent environments in Colombia. She has created long-term relationships, working alliances and collaborative products with offices of the national government and local bureaucracies, as well as with community leaders, citizenship movements, schoolteachers and grass-root organizations.

[1] All acronyms are in spanish

*My relationship with the University of Birmingham does not include teaching roles, I list below my lectures for other Universities.

• Online and in-person courses on Total Peace and peacebuilding – civil servants (ESAP).
• Course “Stakeholders on War and Peace” – Msc on Peacebuilding (Los Andes University)
• Research Methods, and dissertation supervision – Undergrad (Javeriana University, Faculty of International Relations and Political Science)

Francy´s current research is on female combatants and their role in the military, aiming to understand how women have participated in wars and how they have also been excluded from post-conflict power structures and recognizance as veterans. She analyzes the cycles of inclusion and exclusion of women from warfare, by female participation in combat roles throughout History.

She has also studied the topic of security, focusing on the vulnerable communities that face violence, force displacement and the destruction of their environment. Her research has addressed the threats against social leaders and rural communities and how this phenomenon affects participation and democracy. 

She has also extensive research and publications on the relationship between DDR, state-building and citizenship. In her PhD thesis, she analyzed ex-combatant reintegration, exploring the difficulties, challenges and security dilemmas that combatants may face in integrating into a post-conflict society and switching to a citizen identity after laying down their weapons.