Laura Acosta

I am an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego, where I study the causes and consequences of civil war and the barriers to social change in societies experiencing prolonged conflicts. As a cultural and political sociologist with expertise in Latin America, I am driven by a fascination with the contradictions between what people believe about the social world and the actual conditions in which they live. I combine historical, quantitative, and ethnographic methods to examine issues such as how false discourse by political leaders can become a self-fulfilling prophecy and reshape a country’s internal divisions. I ask questions such as why ordinary citizens obstruct social change in societies marked by sustained discrimination, inequalities, and violence. I received my Ph.D. in sociology from Northwestern University. Before joining UC San Diego, I was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University and a Teaching Fellow in Sociology at Trinity College Dublin.

In my book project, The Enemy Foretold: National Deception, Self-Fulfilling Prophecies, and Civil War in Colombia and Mexico, I show that the objective cleavages and conflicts that underpin perpetual civil wars have their origins in imaginary enemies and contrived threats manufactured by politicians and government leaders. If researchers were to focus only on combatants' material capacities and rational motivations, they would miss the hidden political and cultural processes of enemy fabrication that create and sustain perpetual civil wars.

My research has been published in Theory and Society, Social Forces, and Quality & Quantity, and has received awards and honors from the American Sociological Association.