Andrea Oñate-Madrazo

Assistant Professor

Fields

  • Modern Latin America
  • Cold War History
  • Transnational 20th Century History
  • Social Movements and Revolutions
  • Human Rights

Contact Information

Education

  • Princeton University, Ph.D.
  • Princeton University, MA
  • New York University, BA in History and Political Science

Courses Taught

  • History 216: Comparative Social Movements
  • History 223: World History 1800-present
  • History 338: Modern Latin America
  • History 442: Subversion in Latin America
  • History 510: Grad Seminar: History of Human Rights

Publications

  • "Bringing the War to Mexico." Review of Halbert Jones' The War Has Has Brought Peace to Mexico.  Revista.  Harvard Review of Latin America.  Winter 2015. Published January 2015
  • "Review of Piero Gleijeses' La Esperanza Desgarrada." H-Diplo Roundtable.  21 April, 2014
  • "The Red Affair: FMLN-Cuban Relations during the Salvadoran Civil War, 1981-92." Cold War History, 11:2, May 2011
  • El FMLN: de la guerilla al poder." Revista Nexos, 379, July 2009

Research and Teaching Interests

I am an historian of modern Latin America, with a focus on Central America, political violence, social movements, conflict resolution and human rights. As a scholar and professor, I seek to highlight Latin America’s vanguard role in shaping global processes. With this objective in mind, my research and teaching take transnational approaches that emphasize the interaction between national, regional and global phenomena in an increasingly interdependent and “globalized” world. Particularly, I am interested in how political crises and violent conflicts unfold in conditions of marked socioeconomic inequality and weak institutions, and the role that international state and non-state actors may play in either perpetuating or appeasing these hostilities. My recently defended dissertation, Insurgent Diplomacy: the internationalized revolution of El Salvador and the transition to a post-Cold War order, 1979-1992 (Princeton University, 2016), offers an international history of the civil war in El Salvador in the last decades of the global Cold War. Insurgent Diplomacy uncovers the fraught history of this Central American country from 1970-1992, as it made the passage from an authoritarian “peace” order, to revolutionary upheaval and civil war, to an eventual civic peace process that opened the way for multiparty elections. During this time, a leftist revolutionary organization, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), fought the country’s government and army in a brutal civil war that ultimately left over 70,000 dead and more than one million displaced in a country of then only 5 million people. Torture, extrajudicial executions, the “disappearance” of alleged dissenters, arbitrary arrests and forced migration were everyday occurrences for Salvadorans in the 1980s. Based on multi-archival research, including a vast never-before seen private archive of the FMLN, and over fifty interviews with former Salvadoran revolutionaries and government officials, as well as international diplomats, public servants and activists, my dissertation offered the first global history of the Salvadoran Civil War. During this period, international actors fought out their ideological battles in Central America. In turn, Salvadoran factions capitalized on foreign involvement to further their own bids for political power. My primary concern is to explain the ties between the history of the Salvadoran Civil War and transformations in the regional and international order as the Cold War was coming to an end, specifically as they relate to the multiplicity of interactions between state and non-state actors from both the global North and the global South.

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