Dr Alejandro Milcíades Peña
Senior Lecturer

Profile

Biography

Alejandro’s work sits at the intersection of international relations, (political) sociology, comparative politics, and international political economy (with a non-exclusive focus on Latin America). The common interest bridging these fields is political contention and social change, and the multiple and often messy ways in which states, groups and individuals struggle and bargain with each other to destabilise and reconfigure institutions of political order, be these domestic, regional, or international (in the broader meaning of the term).

Alejandro received a PhD in International Politics from City University of London, a MA in Human Resources and Knowledge Management from Lancaster University, a master’s degree in Sociology and Political Science from FLACSO Argentina, and an Industrial Engineering degree from the Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires (ITBA). Before landing in the UK, Alejandro worked several years in a large industrial holding in Argentina. He likes academia more but learnt a lot in the private sector.

Alejandro joined the Department of Politics and International Relations in September 2014. Previously he held a Lectureship in the Department of Politics and History at Brunel University and was an Assistant Lecturer in the Department of International Politics at City University of London.

Research

Overview

While Alejandro’s early research focused on exploring how states, businesses, and civil society actors came together to construe international norms and governance schemes, his interest in international ordering gravitated gradually towards its opposite side: a general research interest on how contentious and social mobilisation processes connect and interact with social, political, and international institutions to produce change effects over groups, states, and international arrangements.

One of the things Alejandro discovered when studying contention and conflict is that it can assume very different forms, involving different constellations of actors, connecting with diverse social, political, and economic processes, to produce multiple outcomes and political trajectories (intended and unintended), at different levels and with different temporalities. Moreover, neither these dynamics nor their effects could be neatly matched with the concerns and frameworks prevailing in specific disciplines and fields. This diversity and openness suited Alejandro well, while curiosity, a weak disciplinary identity, and the fortuitous encounter with interesting people did the rest. Over time, this resulted in a research agenda spanning across international relations, sociology, comparative politics, and international political economy, and covering issues such as the role of social movements in international change and the organisation of global social fields, the impact of mass protests in electoral and democratic politics, the changing strategies of right-wing movements in Latin America, the interaction between digital activism and party politics, the implications of socio-economic struggles for the stability of development agendas, and the impact of contention on the mental wellbeing of human rights activists.  

At the moment Alejandro is prioritising two major collaborative projects examining contentious dynamics and effects from almost contrasting perspectives:

• Long Movements and International Change

Connecting international relations, sociology, and history, this project adopts a macro-relational perspective to trace specific processes of contention that shaped major transformations of the international order over the last four centuries. Differing from the conventional short-term and domestic treatment of social movements, the project argues that certain “long” transnational movements, such as the Protestant Reformation, humanist and socialist movements, the anti-colonial movement and others, generated complex dynamics of conflict and change that destabilised states, shared beliefs, and social and political identities and led to the re-thinking and re-negotiation of the normative complexes and authoritative institutions organising international order. In particular, this project aims to study:

• What is the relationship between types of international order and the trajectory of long movements of contention?
• In which ways social contention interact with international political institutions and hierarchies and how these became destabilised?
• How did long movements subside and what institutional changes and arrangements enabled this?
• How contemporary transnational movements, such as environmentalism, feminism, and nationalist populism, are located in the contemporary international order, and what implications does this location have for their political relevance?

• Political Activism and the Experience of Adversity

This project departs from the individual experience of political activists facing risk, threat, and deprivation as part of their daily work and lives. Drawing from interview data with hundreds of human rights activists at risk, the project adopts a relational-experiential perspective that considers political activism and contentious mobilisation not as strategic and episodic activities done by groups and movements but as a continuous, routinary, and embodied form of social action, done by people in concrete locations while engaged in many other mundane yet fundamental tasks. As such, this project challenges the state- and conflict-centric manner in which sociology and political science have approached contentious mobilisation, aiming to provide a more nuanced, grounded yet more systemic understanding of how political activism takes place in practice. In particular, this project explores questions such as:

• How do different types of political activists experience adversity and risk?
• What institutional, social, strategic, and biographical factors shape these adversity experiences? How do these factors intersect?
• What are the bodily and psychological effects of protracted exposure to adversity and risk?
• How do different types of activists cope with adversity?
• What trajectories of mobilisation and demobilisation do different patterns of adversity (and coping) shape?

Teaching

Undergraduate

• Global Hierarchies and Global Orders (Convenor)

Postgraduate

• Themes and Theories and International Relations (Convenor)

Other teaching

Current Students

• Camila Cavalcanti Teixeira, ‘Struggle and Law: Human Rights and Social Movements for Racial Equality and Indigenous Rights’
• George Sheperd, ‘Green Extractivism in Latin America: The Political Economy of Lithium Extraction in Bolivia and Chile’
• Tallulah Lines, ‘Art and Security in Feminicidal Cultures: how women artists and activists prefigure feminist security in Oaxaca and Quintana Roo, Mexico’
• Rodrigo Duque Estrada Campos, ‘The New Christian Militarism: Evangelical Base-Building with the Police Forces in Brazil’
• Omran Al-Abri, ‘The Process and Limits of Small State Neutrality:The Case of Oman between 1980 and 2022’

Past Students

• Hafiza Nur Adeen Nor Ahmad, ‘The Rise of Malaysian Islamic Militancy (1980-2015)’.
• Soraya Hamdaoui, ‘Democratisation from the Margins: Cultural policy as alternative governance in Post-Authoritarian Chile’.
• Matthew Barlow, ‘Tax regimes and development in Latin America: Structuralism, Neostructuralism and Development Debates in Argentina’.