Renata Segura

Renata Segura is the Program Officer for the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum, a program of the Social Science Research Council, where she leads the work in Latin America and the Caribbean. CPPF seeks to strengthen the knowledge base and analytical capacity of the United Nations system in the fields of conflict prevention and management, peacemaking and peace-building by providing UN staff with a systematic channel in which outside experts can further their national, regional, or thematic analysis in the area of conflict.   Segura received her Ph.D. from the political science department in the New School for Social Research. Her dissertation focuses on constitution-making as a mechanism for inclusion and contains a comparative analysis of the conflict resolution process in Colombia and Ecuador in order to examine how effective constitution making is as a mechanism for promoting the institutionalization of inclusion. At the New School, Segura was a Louis Fischer Fellow, an Inter-American Foundation Fellow, and a Colfuturo grant recipient. She holds an M.A. in comparative politics from the New School for Social Research and a B.A. in political science from the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá. Renata has been an instructor at Parsons School of Design, and served as Program Officer for the Janey Program in Latin American Studies at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research for several years. Prior to coming to the United States, she worked for the NGO and research center CINEP in Bogotá, where she was a researcher on several projects related to civil society, and conflict and political crisis. In addition to her academic background, Renata worked for several years as a reporter for a nationally televised news program and a widely-read news magazine. She is currently working on a book manuscript comparing constitution-making processes in Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru.

The interview was conducted in April 2009 in Cape Town about her views and experiences with constitution building.