Sonja Wolf holds a Ph.D. in International Politics (University of Aberystwyth, United Kingdom) and is a full-time professor and researcher at the School of Government and Economics at the Universidad Panamericana, Mexico City.
Before joining the National Institute of Public Health ( Universidad Panamericana), she served as a researcher for Mexico (CONAHCYT) assigned to the Drug Policy Program at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching (CIDE).
Previously, she served as a researcher at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico (ITAM), the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and the Institute for Security and Democracy (INSYDE). She has also worked as a human rights officer at the United Nations.
His research interests focus on issues related to gangs, security, and migration, as well as democratic backsliding and the rise of autocracy, particularly in Central America.
She is the author of *Mano Dura: The Politics of Gang Control in El Salvador* (University of Texas Press, 2017). Her work has been published in the *Journal of Latin American Studies*, *Latin American Politics and Society*, the *Bulletin of Latin American Research*, *Geopolitics*, the *Revista de Ciencia Política*, and the *International Handbook of Critical Gang Studies*.
She is also the director of *The Vertical Border* (Mexico, 2022), a feature-length documentary that examines forced migration from Central America to the United States, and of *Colateral* (Mexico, 2024), a short fiction film about the mental health of military personnel in the context of Mexico’s war on drugs.
She has also produced the podcasts *Voces Migrantes* and *Common Ground With Sonja Wolf*, both available on Spotify and YouTube. She is a member of the SNII (Level 2).
Research Areas
- Gangs
- Security
- Immigration
- Setbacks for democracy
- Autocratization
- Central America