Victória Motta Lamare França’s dissertation, defended at IRI in 2023, under the supervision of Professor Maíra Siman, and co-supervised by Professor Roberto Yamato, won the Best Dissertation award at the 12th ABRI National Competition for University Dissertations and Theses in International Relations, “Professor Marcos Costa Lima Award”.

The dissertation entitled Mediating Protection? The UN Community Liaison Assistants and the Politics of Translation was published in English in 2024 by Palgrave, in the collection Global Political Sociology:

The award-winning paper analyzes how the United Nations (UN) attempts to stabilize and justify an ambivalent meaning of protection and its socio-political roles in the Protection of Civilians (PoC) agenda. The research takes Community Liaison Assistants (CLAs) as an analytical prism to reflect on the instrumentalization of language and culture in UN peace operations.

From a post-structuralist and post-colonial approach, the research promotes dialogues with Translation and Interpretation Studies by exploring the political character of translation for International Relations while delving into an actor generally neglected in UN doctrine and Peace Operations Studies.