Jo-Marie Burt

Jo-Marie Burt is associate professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. She is a senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), a leading human rights research and advocacy organization. She was President of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) from 2023 to 2024 and is presently serving as Past President. As 2024-2025 Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, she is completing a book manuscript entitled, In Pursuit of Justice in Post-Genocide Guatemala.

Burt has published widely on political violence, state-society relations, human rights and transitional justice in Latin America. Her early research focused on state and insurgent violence in Peru, and civil society responses to violence and violent actors. Her 2007 book, Silencing Civil Society: Political Violence and the Authoritarian State in Peru (Palgrave), received an honorable mention for the WOLA-Duke Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America, and is in its third Spanish edition (Violencia y Autoritarismo en el Perú: Bajo la sombra de Sendero y la dictadura de Fujimori, Planeta 2022). Dr. Burt has been a visiting professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP) as a Fulbright Scholar (2006), as the Alberto Flores Galindo Chair (2010), and as a guest speaker of the Interdisciplinary Research Group on Memory and Democracy (2022). In recent years, Dr. Burt’s research has focused on the ways post-conflict societies confront demands for justice and accountability after atrocity. She has written extensively about high-profile human rights prosecutions that she has observed and monitored directly, including the 2007-2009 trial of former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori and the 2013 genocide trial of former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt. She is author of Transitional Justice in the Aftermath of Civil Conflict: Lessons from Peru, Guatemala and El Salvador (DPLF, 2018) and is working on a new book, entitled Post-Conflict Justice: Reckoning with the Legacies of Violence in Peru, Guatemala and El Salvador. Dr. Burt’s scholarship has been supported by the Fulbright Foundation, Open Society Foundations, Ford Foundation, the United States Institute of Peace, the Aspen Institute, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Inter-American Foundation, the Latin American Studies Association Otros Saberes Initiative, the Tinker Foundation, the Institute for the Study of World Politics, and the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, among others.

Dr. Burt has a distinguished record of public engagement. Between 2002 and 2003, she was a member of the regional studies research team of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and her report on Villa El Salvador was published in the Commission’s Final Report. She has organized and collaborated in trial monitoring projects with international human rights organizations and with victims’ groups and has been a tireless advocate for the rights of victims to access justice. She has served as an expert witness in several cases of human rights violations before the National Criminal Court of Peru, before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and in immigration courts in the United States involving both asylum cases and cases of suspected war criminals who face extradition or deportation proceedings from the United States. She is a member of the Board of Directors of Friends of the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala (FAFG) and the Inter-American Institute for Human Rights, based in San José Costa Rica. Between 1995 and 2000, Burt was editor of NACLA Report on the America, the largest English-language publication on Latin America. In 2011, the Government of Peru recognized her with the Award in Merit, in the Grade of Grand Official, for Distinguished Service in Defense of Democracy, Rule of Law, and Human Rights in Peru.

Dr. Burt has commented frequently on Latin American politics for various national and international news media, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Associated Press, Reuters, The Guardian, BBC World, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, Forbes, Time, Newsweek, Bloomberg, CNN, Christian Science Monitor, El Nuevo Herald, Vice, McClatchy Report, Deutsche Welle, Al Jazeera,  PRI’s The World, PRI’s The Takeaway, NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered, McClatchey, Pacifica Radio. El País (Spain), Proceso (Mexico), El Universal (Mexico), El Faro (Central America), ABC (Spain), El Mundo (Spain), among others. She has appeared as a guest commentator on CNN, The World-Public Radio International, The Takeaway-Public Radio International, Al Jazeera, Democracy Now, Huffington Post Live, NTN24 (Colombia), Canal N (Peru), Background Briefing with Ian McMaster, WBAI Radio and WKPF Radio. She has published articles in The Washington Post, The Nation, NACLA Report on the Americas, Progressive, Truth-Out, Foreign Policy in Focus, Plaza Pública (Guatemala), Agencia Ocote (Guatemala), and El Faro (Central America); and has written op-eds for NPR, Americas Quarterly, The Huffington Post, Open Democracy, Al Jazeera, Animal Político (Mexico), La República (Peru), El Comercio (Peru), and El País (Spain) among others.

At Mason, Dr. Burt has served as director of Latin American studies, co-director of the Center for Global Studies, and associate chair for undergraduate studies of the former Public and International Affairs Program. She is an affiliate faculty at the Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution and the Program on Women and Gender Studies. She received her PhD in political science from Columbia University in 1999.

Areas of Research

• Comparative Politics
• Conflict Studies
• Democracy and Authoritarianism
• Gender
• Genocide Studies
• Latin America
• Historical Memory
• Human Rights
• Qualitative Methods
• Political Violence
• State-Society Relations
• Transitional Justice