Maya Collombon

2026-2027

Lucienne Domergue

Sciences po lyon

Governing through Fear: Toward an Analysis of Latin American Authoritarian Configurations (Nicaragua, Argentina, Mexico)

Maya Collombon is a senior lecturer and researcher at Sciences Po Lyon/Triangle. She served as director of the CEMCA, the French Centre for Mexican and Central American Studies (UMIFRE 16-UAR 3337) in Mexico City, from 2021 to 2025. Her research initially focused on the transformation of development policies in Mexico and Central America at the turn of the millennium, and on the transnational mobilizations that resulted from them, particularly among indigenous actors. This line of inquiry led her to examine Zapatista activism from the perspective of activist trajectories and politicization in rural indigenous areas. Interested in questions of method and approach to difficult fieldwork in situations of violence, she published the special issue "Ethnographier les gangs en Amérique latine" ["Ethnographing Gangs in Latin America"] for the journal Cultures & conflits in 2018. She is currently working on authoritarian dynamics in Latin America, political violence and Nicaraguan political exile in Spain. Together with L. Mathieu, she edited the volume Dinámicas de los giros autoritarios (Colegio de México/CEMCA, 2026) and co-coordinated a collective research project, CALOT, on forced loyalty under authoritarian regimes, funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR). Within CEMCA's publishing program, she launched the Nuevas Escrituras collection, aimed at fostering dialogue between artists/photographers and researchers.

The project “Goberning through Fear” aims to examine the relationship between political emotions, particularly fear, and Latin American authoritarianism. To this end, it follows in the footsteps of other work that has reconsidered the analysis of emotions by sociologizing their study (Traïni, 2009). The relationship between emotions and politics has thus been explored by political science, particularly in order to examine the “emotional registers” of militant commitments and mobilizations (Traïni, 2017) or those of militant (dis)engagements (Larzillière et al., 2021). These same emotional registers have been less studied in relation to authoritarian political processes characterized by abuse of power and violence. We hypothesize that at the heart of these processes of autocratization (Cassani, Tomini, 2018) are emotional mechanisms specific to violent situations, in which fear plays a central role. These mechanisms act on those who suffer under authoritarian rule, modifying their behavior, and also transform their relationship with organized groups and institutions, thereby reinforcing the authoritarian configuration. It is a comparative project that will analyze historical (Argentina under its last military regime) and contemporary (Nicaragua under the Ortega-Murillo regime) configurations, in this last case through the lens of Nicaraguan political refugees in Spain.

With Lilian Mathieu (eds.), Dinámicas de los giros autoritarios, expanded Spanish-language edition, El Colegio de México & CEMCA, Mexico City, 2026.

"Writing Under Constraint in Nicaragua," in S. Melenotte, N. Puig (eds.), Anthropologie(s) des violences contemporaines. Regards croisés Amérique latine / Proche-Orient, Paris, IRD-URMIS, 2026.

CEMCA. 65 años. Historia(s) de una institución francesa en México y Centroamérica, CEMCA editions, Mexico City, 2025.

"Gangs, maras, pandillas y otros outsiders: Hacia una etnografía de los gangs latinoamericanos" ["Gangs, Maras, Pandillas, and Other Outsiders: Toward an Ethnography of Latin American Gangs"], Revista Cultura y Representaciones Sociales, Mexico, 15, no. 30, 2021.

"The Sandinista Order: Changes in Voting Procedures and Authoritarianism in Nicaragua," in O. Dabène (ed.), Latin America's Pendular Politics. Electoral Cycles and Alternations, Americas series, London, Palgrave MacMillan, 2023.

"Living, Controlling, Disciplining the Neighborhood: Citizen Power Committees at the Heart of Sandinista Authoritarianism," in M. Collombon, L. Mathieu (eds.), Dynamiques des tournants autoritaires, éditions du croquant, 2021.