About

Consuelo Amat is the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute Assistant Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. From 2019 to 2025, she held an affiliation with the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) as a Senior Research Scholar. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Stanford University's Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (PACS). Her research interests include state repression, armed and unarmed resistance, political violence, and the development of civil society in authoritarian regimes, with a focus on Latin America. She also studies and teaches quantitative and qualitative methods. Her research has been supported by the United States Institute of Peace, the John F. Enders Foundation, the Tinker Foundation, and Yale University’s MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science with distinction from Yale University and holds an M.A. in Conflict Resolution from Georgetown University. During the 2017-2018 academic year, she was a United States Institute of Peace Jennings Randolph Peace Scholar. Before starting graduate school, she worked at the Brookings Institution, the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, Peace Action West, and Human Rights Watch.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Political economy
• Philosophy
• Law
• Physics

Selected publications

• Who Gains from Nonviolent Action? Unpacking the Logics of Civil Resistance

  Comparative Politics · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  Research in conflict studies comparing nonviolent and violent collective action has gained widespread attention due to the counterintuitive finding that nonviolent movements succeed more often than armed movements. However, rising repression and authoritarianism worldwide, alongside declining success rates for protest movements, highlight the need to further theorize and test the conditions under which nonviolent action succeeds. This article distills the different logics by which excluded minorities are advantaged or disadvantaged in nonviolent action. It also reviews three new books that advance the field of movement effectiveness in the short and long runs, and that demonstrate that success is context-dependent, with few characteristics universally conferring advantage or disadvantage. We conclude by outlining areas for future research, including the role of digital technologies.

  PublisherDOI

• Replication Data for: State Repression and Opposition Survival in Pinochet's Chile

  Harvard Dataverse · 2023-01-27 · 1 citations

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Why do some groups survive government repression while others get eliminated? This paper offers a corrective to the widely held theory that locally embedded opposition organizations with large and interconnected networks of civilian supporters are better adapted to survive. It argues that extreme and selective violent repression from a capable state requires strict compartmentalization and social detachment. These measures slow the speed and reach of repression. I test these propositions by examining the top targets of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Cross-checking individuals on the Pinochet's target lists against the victims lists, the article shows that the Revolutionary Leftist Movement (MIR) had a significantly lower rate of victimization than the other top targets. Archival and interview data demonstrate that MIR's higher survival rate is due to the mechanisms proposed. This study renders intended repression observable and offers implications for the survival of a wide range of actors.

  PublisherDOI

• State Repression and Opposition Survival in Pinochet’s Chile

  Comparative Political Studies · 2023 · 9 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political economy

  Why do some groups survive government repression while others get eliminated? This paper offers a corrective to the widely held theory that locally embedded opposition organizations with large and interconnected networks of civilian supporters are better adapted to survive. It argues that extreme and selective violent repression from a capable state requires strict compartmentalization and social detachment. These measures slow the speed and reach of repression. I test these propositions by examining the top targets of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Cross-checking individuals on the Pinochet’s target lists against the victims lists, the article shows that the Revolutionary Leftist Movement (MIR) had a significantly lower rate of victimization than the other top targets. Archival and interview data demonstrate that MIR’s higher survival rate is due to the mechanisms proposed. This study renders intended repression observable and offers implications for the survival of a wide range of actors.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Claire Trilling

  1 shared