Luis van Isschot

Luis van Isschot is a historian of modern Latin America, specializing in the study of social movements, political violence, and human rights.  He is the current Associate Chair for Latin American Studies at the University of Toronto. His first book "The Social Origins of Human Rights: Protesting Political Violence in Colombia’s Oil Capital, 1919-2010", was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2015 as part of their Critical Human Rights series.  It has been published in Spanish in Colombia by the Editorial Universidad del Rosario.

Luis van Isschot’s current research, which received support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, concerns civil society organized popular tribunals, including the Bertrand Russell Tribunal and the Permanent Peoples Tribunal, as well as numerous grassroots initiatives.  He is also working on a history of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

Luis van Isschot is a member of the Observatoire Violences, criminalisation et démocratie en Amérique latine research team led by Marie-Christine Doran at the University of Ottawa, focused on the criminalization of protest in Latin America.

For more than two decades Luis van Isschot has been professionally concerned with human rights, conducting research and advocacy work.  He has worked with Colombia's Truth and Reconciliation Commission since 2019, conducting interviews with exiles living in Canada.  He has also written legal opinions on issues of human rights violations and crimes against humanity in Colombia.

Prior to his appointment to the University of Toronto, Luis van Isschot worked at the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University in Montreal, was a postdoctoral fellow at the City University of New York, and Assistant Professor of History and Human Rights at the University of Connecticut.