Oscar Guardiola-Rivera

Monday, June 6, 2016

Topic: U.S. Foreign Policy in Latin America: What We Have Learned from the Overthrow of Allende

Guardiola-RiveraDr. Oscar Guardiola-Rivera joined the University of London’s Birkbeck School of Law in 2005. He is now Assistant Dean of the School of Law, and collaborates with the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. He is the writer of the award-winning What If Latin America Ruled the World? (Bloomsbury, 2010), chosen as one the best non-fiction books that year by The Financial Times and reviewed in The Washington PostThe Sunday TimesThe Guardian, BBC Radio 4 Start the Week, with Andrew Marr, Al-Jazeera’s The Riz Khan ShowFolha de Sao Paulo, and other major newspapers and media around the world. He has published in Granta, is a weekly columnist of El Espectador (COL), and a frequent contributor to the BBC World Service Nightwaves, The StreamMonocle Radio 24, NTN 24, and Al-Jazeera, among others. He has been invited to take part in the Hay Festivals (Wales, Colombia, Lebanon and Mexico), and contributed as a curator and a speaker with the Serpentine Gallery, Southbank Centre, Intelligence Squared, Tate Modern, Pen International, and Colombiage.

LatinAmericaRulesBorn in Colombia, he was educated in that country and in Great Britain. He graduated as a lawyer in Bogotá (Universidad Javeriana, 1993) after leading the Student Movement that initiated the 1990’s wave of constitutional reform throughout Latin America, and obtained his LLM with Distinction at University College London, and his PhD in Philosophy at the King’s College of the University of Aberdeen.

He is on the editorial boards of Naked Punch: An Engaged Review of Arts & TheoryInternational Law. Colombian Journal of International LawUniversitas. Xavier University Law Review, (COL); and Open Law Journal and is on the advisory board of the Law, Social Justice & Global Development Journal, and is recognised as one of the most representative voices of contemporary Latin American philosophy and literature.

Upcoming Speakers

  • June 2, 2025
    Ambassador Jeffrey Feltman
    Topic: Adrift: The UN, multilateralism, and US disengagement
  • June 23, 2025
    Kenneth Frankel
    Topic: Latin America in the New Geopolitical Environment
  • July 15, 2025
    Sherri Goodman
    Topic: Arctic Security in a Changing Environment
  • August 11, 2025
    Farah Pandith
    Topic: How We Win: The Threat from Hate and the Power of Compassion

Past Speakers