The 2026 Colombian general elections

This multidisciplinary panel of experts will provide an assessment of the upcoming Colombian general elections, to be held on 31 May 2026. The panel will consider the main contenders and their chances of electoral success as well as the broader factors, both current and historical, that are driving the electoral process, from the socio-spatial dynamics that shape urban political life to security matters.

Speakers:

Néstor Castañeda is an Associate Professor of Latin American Political Economy and Director of the UCL Institute of the Americas. His research focuses on the politics of inequality and redistribution in developing economies, with a particular emphasis on improving taxation systems to make them more efficient and equitable. He also investigates the factors contributing to the persistence of inequality in Latin America. Dr. Castañeda earned his PhD and MA in Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh, an MA in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin, and a BA in Economics from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia.

Catalina Ortiz is a Professor of Critical Urban Pedagogy at the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment at the University College London. She is a Colombian urbanist and educator passionate about spatial justice. She is committed to an ethics of care and an engaged scholarship to trigger radical spatial imagination for a negotiated co-production of space. She uses decolonial and critical urban theory through creative methodologies to study the politics of space production to foster more just cities and the recognition of multiple urban knowledges. She is the Director of the UCL Urban Lab and joined the Urban Studies journal as an editor in 2024.

Ana María Otero-Cleves, (D. Phil Oxford in Modern History) is a Lecturer in the History of Latin America at the University of York. She joined York in 2023, having previously held the position of Associate Professor at Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia). Otero-Cleves specialises in the history of nineteenth-century Colombia, with a particular interest in the history of consumption, popular politics, and legal culture. She is the author of Plebeian Consumers: Global Connections, Local Trade and Foreign Goods in Nineteenth-Century Colombia, winner of the Toynbee First Book Manuscript Workshop Competition (2022), (CUP, 2025). Otero-Cleves is also an enthusiastic public historian and co-founder of the public history initiative Historias para lo que Viene (Histories for what’s to come).  

Jennifer Scotland is a Research Analyst in the Organised Crime and Policing team at RUSI, where she focuses on issues of criminal governance, illicit economies and associated financial flows, and security policy reform, in Latin America and beyond. Prior to joining RUSI, Jennifer worked on the Americas country intelligence desk at Janes, where she monitored Colombia’s ‘Total Peace’ process and other security developments in Latin America, including regional organised crime trends. She holds an MSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a BA (Hons) in History from the University of Bristol.