Thesis title
'The politics of police militarisation in Chile' [provisional title]
Supervisors
Professor Peter Ramsay and Dr Richard Martin
Research interests
Policing; Sociolegal Studies; Public Law; Criminology; Human Rights; Legal and Political Theory; Migration Law
Pascual is a student at the MPhil/PhD programme. He holds an LLB from University of Chile and an LLM from the LSE.
Prior to joining the LSE, Pascual practiced as a lawyer in public law and human rights. He also worked as an advisor to the Undersecretariat for Human Rights of the Chilean Ministry of Justice (2017-2018) and, for more than ten years, has provided legal assistance to victims of police violence in a neighbourhood on the urban margins of Santiago.
His research focuses on police institutions and how, and to what degree, they reflect the overlap between police and military state power. Using Chile as a case study, it tries to explore what historical factors, political dynamics and main narratives are implicated in recent discussions on police militarisation and demilitarisation. The project seeks to connect these empirical questions with a set of normative concerns, showing how the debate around the military character of the police involves competing ideas about its nature and role, its capacity to represent the state, and its relationship to the law, among others.