Danny Hirschel-Burns is an Associate Lecturer in the University of St Andrews' School of International Relations in Scotland. He was previously a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Princeton's Program in Latin American Studies, a PhD candidate in comparative politics and international relations in the Yale Department of Political Science and a United States Institute of Peace (USIP) Peace Scholar. He studies violence, ideology, rebel governance, and socialization with a focus on qualitative methods.

His first book project, entitled the "The Political Projects of Rebels: The FARC and campesinos’ political ideas" examines the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia's (FARC) socialization of civilians up until the group's 2016 peace accord with the government. Drawing on literature on rebel governance, ideological domination, and the legacies of war, he asks under what conditions this socialization changed civilians' political ideas. The book draws on months of ethnographic work in former FARC areas, interviews with experts and ex-combatants, and surveys of Colombian civilians to identify variation in FARC governance practices and their subsequent effects on civilian political ideas. The theory identifies the conditions under which socialization is most likely to succeed, focusing on the type of violence deployed and the type of civilian governance. 

He has one solo-authored published paper, which compares India's Naxalites and Peru's Shining Path, asking under what conditions armed groups are likely to socialize civilians. The article appears in Civil Wars. A second paper, co-authored with Andrés Aponte and Andres Uribe, constructs a novel dataset of armed group territorial control in Colombia from 2000-2016, and inductively examines the relationship between territorial control and violence against civilians. It was published online at the Journal of Conflict Resolution in 2023.

He holds a B.A. from Swarthmore College in Peace and Conflict Studies and received his PhD from Yale Political Science in December 2023. He has previously been a visiting researcher at the Centro de Investigación y Educación Popular/Programa por la Paz (CINEP-PPP) in Bogotá, Colombia.

You can see his personal website here.