Research interests
Peacebuilding, polarisation, bridgebuilding, dialogue, the social contract, politics, Colombia, Britain, maternities, gender, political identities
Gwen Burnyeat
Gwen Burnyeat is a political anthropologist studying conflict, politics and peacebuilding in Colombia and Britain. She is Principal Investigator of ERC-selected/UKRI-funded project ‘Stories of Divided Politics: Polarisation and Bridgebuilding in Colombia and Britain’, an ethnographic study of the people and organisations who build bridges across political divides, which is developing a theory of bridgebuilding as a relational infrastructure that sustains coexistence amid disagreement and friction.
Gwen has worked in Colombia for over sixteen years as both a scholar and peacebuilding practitioner. Her first book, Chocolate, Politics and Peacebuilding: An Ethnography of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, Colombia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, Spanish translation Editorial del Rosario, 2022) examines grassroots community peacebuilding in the midst of war, and is accompanied by award-winning ethnographic documentary, Chocolate of Peace (2016).
Her second book, The Face of Peace: Government Pedagogy amid Disinformation in Colombia and Spanish translation (University of Chicago Press, 2022; Spanish translation Editorial del Rosario 2024), won the 2023 Public Anthropologist Award. This ethnography of the government officials involved in negotiating and communicating the 2016 peace agreement to society offers insights into government-society relations in peace processes, and liberal responses to disinformation.
Her practitioner experience includes human rights, dialogue facilitation and transitional justice. She has worked with the International Centre for Transitional Justice and Peace Brigades International, and is a member of Rodeemos el Diálogo (Embrace Dialogue). She writes for media and policy outlets including the London Review of Books and Inter-American Dialogue. Before joining ODID she was Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.
She also writes literary fiction. Her short stories have been published in The Dublin Review, Critical Muslim and Otherwise Magazine, and she believes in storytelling as a political intervention.
Gwen is on research leave for academic year 2026-27.
Gwen is on research leave for academic year 2026-27 and will begin teaching on the MPhil in Development Studies in MT 2027.
She has previously taught anthropology at the University of Oxford and the Universidad Nacional de Colombia.
Gwen welcomes DPhil proposals that take ethnographic approaches to political life, including state-society relations, conflict and peacebuilding, polarisation and bridgebuilding, gendered political identities, the family as a site of the political, and storytelling. She is particularly interested in projects based in Colombia or Britain, but is also open to projects elsewhere, especially in Latin America.