Giovanny Alvarez is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, International Studies, and Modern Languages at the University of St. Thomas, where he teaches International Politics, International Political Economy, and Latin American Economic Development. Dr. Alvarez came to the academy after more than seventeen years inside the institutions that negotiate, fund, and implement peace. From 2016 to 2019, he served as Prevention Component Coordinator for a USAID program implemented by Chemonics International in Colombia. For seven years before that, he was a Specialist in Transitional Justice with the United Nations Development Program, and earlier held research and coordination posts at Colombia’s Ombudsman office (Defensoría del Pueblo), the Office of the President of the Republic of Colombia, and NGOs. He has also worked with RTI International’s international conflict and transition practice. That record — transitional justice, violence prevention, security assistance, counternarcotics — is what his scholarship now interrogates. His research examines why violence persists and changes form rather than ending when civil wars conclude, as well as the unintended consequences of policies that can place vulnerable populations at greater risk. His dissertation, The Price of Elite Peace, develops a dual-arena theory showing that peace interventions frequently redistribute violence between political and societal domains rather than reducing it. His work appears in Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Conflict, Security & Development, and he is the author of the U.S. Aid to Security Sector Actors (USASSA) dataset, which tracks unclassified U.S. security assistance from 2000 to the present. Dr. Alvarez holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy and an M.A. in Global Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a Rotary Peace Fellow, and an M.A. and B.A. in Political Science from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia.