Dr. Diego Andrés Lugo-Vivas joined CET Academic Programs in Valle del Cauca in 2019 as an adjunct professor in environmental conflicts. Prior to taking up this position, he was a PhD candidate at the University of Miami.
He holds a double graduate major: a PhD in International and Comparative Studies and a Graduate Diploma in Geographic Information Science and Systems, both from the University of Miami. His dissertation “Frontier Territories and the Weight of Violent Inequality: Land Concentration and Land Grabbing in the Colombian Frontier, 2000-2015” was awarded the Barrett Prize as Best Dissertation on Latin America awarded by the Institute of Advanced Studies for the Americas and selected as finalist for the J. Warren Nystrom Award - Best Dissertation in Geography by the American Association of Geographers (AAG).
Along with his duties at CET, he works as an adjunct researcher for the Social Conflict, Territories, and Gender research group at Universidad Santo Tomás (Bogotá, Colombia).
Dr. Lugo-Vivas’ interests, who also has a master’s degree in Sociology, lie at the intersection between political ecology, environmental sociology, Latinx geographies, critical and gendered comparative geographies, and the politics of space.
His research covers the following topics: agrarian studies, land concentration and resource grabbing in Latin America, everyday forms of dispossession, coca crops and illegal mining, Land Use Land Cover (LULC) change, militarily-oriented environmental conservation, portfolios of illicit income, slow environmental violence and toxic dispossession in Colombia, land restitution and reparation policies for victims of armed conflicts, displacement and dispossession against LGBTI+ groups, monocrop-based sustainable development, corporate greening, and spatial data analysis.
Part of his work has been published in the following journals: Journal of Land Use Science (JLUS), the Journal of International Affairs (JIA) - Oxford Academic Press, World Development, the Journal of Political Ecology (as a guest editor of special sections in 2022 and 2023), the Journal of Latin American Geography (JLAG), Revista de Estudios Colombianos (REC), CS Universidad Icesi, Sociedad y Economía – Universidad del Valle and Universidad Santo Tomás University Press. His book on land and resource grabbing & ecological militarism in post-conflict frontiers is currently under review. As part of his commitment to the academy, during the last years, Dr. Lugo has presented around 40 conferences in the following circles: the American Association of Geography (AAG), the Southern Political Science Association (SPSA), the American Political Science Association (APSA), the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), the Congress of Latin American Geographers (CLAG), The Maria Sibylla Merian Center for Advanced Latin American Studies (CALAS) at Guadalajara, the Queen Mary University of London, the Constellations conference at HRI, Fulbright Alumni, the Regional Studies Association (RSA), the Doctorado Inter-Institucional en Ciencias Ambientales at Universidad del Valle, the Asociación Colombiana de Geografiìa (ACOGE), the Asociacioìn Colombiana de Ciencia Poliìtica (ACCPOL), and the Congreso Colombiano de Geografía.
