Marie-Christine Doran received the Academic Gold Medal of the Governor General of Canada for her PhD studies. She is Full Professor of Comparative Politics at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, and Researcher at the International Panel on Exiting Violence (IPEV) and other international research platforms in Europe and Latin America. She has been a fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University, where she taught religion, human rights and politics, and at the École des Hautes études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and Université Lyon 2 Lumière, where she taught on political violence. Her published work include numerous peer-reviewed articles in 4 languages and focus on political violence, democratic theory and democratization, post-conflict, criminalization of human rights defenders HRDs, struggles for justice and memory, politico-sexual violence againstHRDs and WHRDs, and human rights from below, as well as religion and politics and also include 3 recent books which are : Le réveil démocratique du Chili. Une histoire politique de l’exigence de justice 1990-2016, (foreword by Alain Touraine),Paris : Karthala 2016; as well as Human Rights as Battlefields: Changing Practices and Contestations » (Palgrave Macmillan, London & New York, 2018) and « Criminalizing Democracy : the Hidden Face of Violence in Latin America », under contract to be published at Routledge (London) in 2020. Her work is based on numerous field trips and she holds a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant on “Violence and Democracy: the Criminalization of Struggles for rights in Latin America (2018-2025), for which she is Main researcher of a team of 6 specialists. Her work focuses of methodologies based on Discourse Analysis and Political Imaginaries and social representations, which she shares with the multidisciplinary Research Group on Political Imaginaries in Latin America (www.gripal.ca) that she has co-founded. She is regularly invited to comment on Latin American politics and violence in Canadian and international media and supervises numerous PhD and MA thesis on related subjects.